Six new teachers going through their first year of teacher training in Australian high schools will feature in a three-part documentary on SBS.
Former hydrogeologist Kitty admitted having that level of scrutiny while she was training at Melton Secondary College in Victoria wasn't always easy.
"I'm not going to sugar-coat that. I was very stressed and I might have been smiling on the outside but I was very stressed a lot of the time on the inside," she said.
This is Kitty's second career. Having ranked in the top 2 per cent of the country in her year 12 certificate, Kitty completed a double degree at Monash University and worked as a consultant hydrogeologist before getting a teacher training place with Teach For Australia.
She discovered her passion for education while working for an education start-up in New York called Library For All, building digital libraries for the developing world.
By allowing the crew into the classroom while she's training, Kitty hopes to contribute to the greater good.
"I hoped that it would be made transparent what happens in your first year of teaching. This is what I went through, this is how first year teachers fare and these are the kind of things they're doing," she said.
The time spent in the classroom is more intense than people might realise, Kitty explained.
"There might be some people out there who think maybe anyone can teach, or teachers get school holidays and they only work this many hours a day. They're looking superficially but what they don't see is the deep intensity of what it is to learn how to teach and to be a teacher," she said.
What people will see in the upcoming documentary, Kitty believes, is how much of themselves teachers dedicate to their job.
"Teachers put their hearts out there and they put their energy out there and I think that might surprise people," she said.
"I just hope that people will be able to sit with the complexity of teaching and the complexity of school education, and the complexity of the lives of our students that we teach.... It's complex but it's wonderful and I hope that's what people take away from it, that teaching is complex and wonderful."
* Testing Teachers airs on April 19 at 8.30pm (AEST) on SBS
