School Days

Sophia Waugh

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…

Too damned right it was. Year 9 is the only year not yet exiled because of COVID. Years 10 and 11 have been particularly hardhit – presumably because they were more likely to disobey rules and run around town rather than sit tightly at home.

Be that as it may, no sooner did the entire Year 11 return to school than we had another case and had to send half of them back home again. The same has just happened with Year 10. I don’t think the school has had its whole population back since the first week of term in September.

Teachers are being hit, too. Every department has had at least one – if not more – teacher on a 14-day COVIDrelated absence. So how is it for those of us who continue to show up and smile?

The answer is: it is hard. Very hard. No one is to blame; even the whiniest teachers accept that the Senior Management Team is doing its best at a very difficult job.

But alas I found myself in tears again this week. No children were present; only an assistant head, who remained calm.

Why was I in tears? Partly because the expectations of how we do our jobs seem to change almost daily. In the first March lockdown, we set work online, which was tested by quizzes set and marked online.

This was fine – up to a point. We used them to reinforce work we had already done. Only by the end were we beginning to set new content.

Then, when we came back, it changed. Now we were to set new work online. Fine.

It changed again; we had to send Powerpoints, with voice notes teaching the lesson, to the children. This was not hard, but very time-consuming.

Fine if you have a whole year group out, but difficult if half were in and half were out. You would teach the lesson to the ten in the class; and then go over it again, adding voice notes, adapting the lesson for the isolated ones, and send it out.

By now, the time taken over a lesson had almost doubled – plan, teach, replan, reteach. The strong were beginning to fade; the classroom lights burned much longer.

But this was as nothing to the last straw – which set me sobbing. We are expected to stream our lesson to those at home while teaching those in the classroom.

In theory, this should be easier – two for the price of one. But for an oldie (which I used to be only in spirit; now it seems I am in reality), the technology is painful.

It involves two screens, 30 people in different places and an awful lot of saying, ‘Can you hear me?’

If you’re teaching your glorious, top-set Year 11s, it is not too hard, in that the children log in, willing and able, albeit not very keen to contribute.

If you’re teaching your new Year 10s, you invite all of them to the ‘meeting’ and most ignore or, even more humorously, ‘decline’. Only one student joined in my so-called ‘live’ lesson on Friday.

So that is the worst of times – work to bring me to my knees.

But the best of times? With my tiny ‘nurture’ group, I was determined to read them a book, rather than kill them by worksheet. I chose James and the Giant Peach, and three of those children – three boys whose reputations are already shot to pieces – seized on the story. They could not wait for me to read. They asked to take the books home, and I had to refuse.

But I had something better up my sleeve. This was a moment to raid our Beloved Book Benefactor’s fund, and three hardback copies were duly bought. The look on those boys’ faces brought tears – happy tears, this time – to my eyes. The ‘Wow, Miss’, the shining eyes above the masks and the way, like any good bibliophile, they stroked the books before even opening them gave me back my faith.

So even if, on a bad day, I come over a bit Sydney Carton, on a good day, I do a far, far better thing than I have ever done.