Everything should be in favour of me attending this event. It’s a reunion of my year in my old Oxford College: I loved my College, I loved Oxford in general, I thought the world of the people I knew at university and it’s a bank holiday weekend in Northern Ireland. The stars seem aligned. As the kids I teach would say: what’s not to like? It’s not just that I don’t accept that I’ve been away from university long enough to be invited to ‘significant’ anniversary events…
Part of it is how I usually spend my weekends. It can be exhausting, but I actually want to make my usual 120 mile round trip to Belfast to see my Dad – spending time chatting as well as undertaking what I’ve started to call ‘Dadmin’ – laundry, shopping, cleaning, organising medicines, organising life. I’m sure we’ll watch some rugby and I know we’ll set the world to rights, with tea for him and coffee for me. I’ll look up the football results on my phone as they unfold – always hoping for a surprise result, just for the pleasure of his astonishment.
Part of it is work. Yes, I could certainly take enough time away from weekend work catch-up sessions to go to the reunion – but could I escape how tired I am, how preoccupied I am, how overwhelmed I feel? Probably not. Today, at the annual ASCL Conference, the Education Secretary, Damian Hinds, has announced the creation of a working group to consider School Teacher and Leader Wellbeing. It certainly can’t be contested that teachers are under an awful lot of pressure. I could write and write and write about this, but nobody really wants to hear it. People say they’re sick of teachers moaning. Don’t we get great holidays and reasonable pay? Sure we’re out the door at half past three – what are we complaining about? Don’t even start me about the evenings spent on marking or planning or admin, the lunchtimes and breaktimes when you don’t make it to the Staff Room, the colleagues you haven’t seen for weeks because it’s the very same for them, the sleepless nights (will this lesson go well, will that syllabus ever get covered, what about that student who’s so anxious?), the cancelled plans, the fact that you haven’t been to the cinema for 5 years…
But I’m not getting this right. I’m making it sound as if I hate my job, and that’s certainly not the truth. I enjoy work. I might not bounce out of bed at the sound of Alexa turning the radio on at 6:23am each day, but that’s much to do with temperamental health and growing older. There’s still so much more that I love about school than that I hate. I still enjoy being in the classroom: I feel at home there. I enjoy working with my colleagues, and the people in my school are like a huge extended family to me – with all the mix of discord and concord that this implies. Because I wasn’t able to have children myself, and don’t have any nephews or nieces either, the young people I teach (and have taught over twenty years or more) are my link to the younger generations. They keep me young. They make me laugh, they teach me new slang and about new ideas, and not many days go past when I’m not incredibly glad I’ve got to know them. I’m making it sound too good: naturally I get cross, naturally I dish out bad notes, detentions, tellings-off, ripostes. Naturally I get exasperated on the days when I feel I can barely even take a few seconds in the ladies’ toilets without someone buttonholing me from an adjacent cubicle to raise an issue for discussion after school, or tell me something I ought to do. There are the people who assume that because email operates 24/7/365, so do teachers. So often, I feel so certain that I’m incapable of getting anything right at all. But every day isn’t like that, and most days I feel I’ve accomplished something, for someone, somehow. But it’s exhausting. Not attending my reunion doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate what university did for me: it made me love learning so much that I realized I simply had to teach. But the very thought of heading off to a reunion far away, no matter how much I know I would enjoy it, on a long-awaited long weekend, just feels impossible.
And anyway. My year contained so many people who’ve achieved so many more dramatic and obviously prestigious things. I’m happy with what I’ve achieved in my career: learning and teaching were what I wanted to do when I left university, and I’ve done little else. I just know I’d feel inferior to the RP voices talking about being Chief Executives and Correspondents and Spokespersons and the rest. I suspect it could be like my first few days at Oxford all over again, when I felt I must either be a quota (Northern Irish Catholic female) or some kind of administrative mistake, somehow in Oxford alongside all these terribly eloquent and confident people who appeared to eat dictionaries for breakfast. It took a few weeks for me to realize that I was meant to be there too: that I enjoyed and, what’s more, actually thrived on the academic work, that I’d quickly make friends, that before too many days had passed, I’d enjoy myself. I’m sure the Reunion Lunch would be the same; my Northern Irish vowels would make me feel inferior for a while, but I’d soon relax and remember that I fitted in.
Just before I went to Oxford for interview, I saw Dorothy L Sayers’ Gaudy Night adapted for TV. I didn’t believe at the time that I’d end up at the College where the author had studied, and on which she’d probably based the story. This weekend, I’m afraid I simply can’t attend my Gaudy Afternoon. I will go back to Oxford one day – but not just now. I hope the people attending the Reunion will post lots of photos on social media, to feed the nostalgia of those of us who can’t be there. I’ve said I’ll be there in spirit, and I’ll certainly be thinking of my old friends, classmates, tutors, lecturers. I hope they remember me as someone who was part of things – yes, perhaps sometimes a little bit peripheral, a little bit quiet, a little bit too studious – and I hope they think I’ve made something of what I learned so many years ago. I’m still learning. I’ll always be learning. It’s a long time since I left university; I hope it’s even longer before I stop learning.
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