It’s this weekend’s trend on Twitter. Post two photos, a decent interval apart, portrait, next to one another. Above them, put the caption: ‘How it started… how it’s going…’
It could be a statement of achievement. Ironic bathos. Self-deprecation or self-aggrandisement. Choose your photos, post, apply the hashtag.
All I can think about is school.
This year, I’ve taken on a new role: I’m working with our newest teachers, at the start of their careers. It’s a role I’m keen to get right and which I think I’m going to love. As always, of course, I’m anxious that I’ll get it wrong. I’ve done my first training webinar to help me understand what I have to do. And it all makes me so nostalgic about how my own teaching career began.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget my first day. Late August sunshine: just a hint of chill in the air. Walking to school, as nervous as a first former on her first day of ‘big school’. This was it: it wasn’t teaching practice any more. They were planning to pay me, so I had to get it right. I remember walking up the school drive, feeling my heart racing with a mixture of emotions: nerves, terror, excitement, pride, anticipation, challenge… meeting my new colleagues on the inset day, meeting my first students a couple of days later… and eventually, all those feelings all over again when I moved 100 miles north east to live, and work, where I do now.
How it started? Complete idealism. The dream of transmitting my love for my subject. The fantasy of winning hearts and minds. The hope of getting it right. The aspiration for good results. The plan of keeping on top of the demands. The wish for lifelong friends.
How it’s going? Complete exhaustion. The nightmares about students or colleagues taking ill. The haunting visions about ‘covid rules’ being broken. The fear of getting it wrong. The terror of everyone failing. The best laid plans going oft aglay. Seeing my teacher-friends so seldom that we’re texting each other from opposite ends of the school, having on-screen meetings at 4pm from home, going entire days without proper adult conversations.
I’ve never been so tired: and yet I’m writing this late at night, as I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep because my mind is completely overstimulated, I’m wondering if everyone’s ok, if anyone is ‘experiencing symptoms’ during the weekend and if we’re about to have a Monday morning crisis when the new week begins.
I’ve never been so anxious. I’m writing this at 1:36am, and I’ve been up since early yesterday. The planned Saturday lie-in was cut short by my racing mind. I’m preoccupied by R rates and Northern Ireland’s quickening fibrillation of positive Covid tests. Our neighbouring area has the worst figures in the UK, the worst figures in Ireland too. I have friends there. Colleagues there. Students there. What’s not to think about, in the darkest hours of night?
I’ve never been so happy as when I’m in school, these days. Even though I have to wear a mask or visor in the corridors, something my asthma makes almost unbearable. Even though, when I go down among my students, deep into the classroom, out of my taped-off zone, I feel my heartrate quicken and know I’m putting myself and my elderly relatives at risk. How can I teach my students without getting even slightly close to them? I have to hand out pages; I have to look at their work; I have to talk to them. The best moment of Friday was that conversation in a quiet part of our labyrinthine corridors… encountering four members of my third-year class. They called me over. Miss, who was the tallest of the four, and who the shortest? Let’s see. I made my judgement. They asked me what height I was, so they could work out their own heights. We looked at relative shoe-heel height. We discussed the fact that one of them was wearing DM shoes and how those had been my very favourite shoes, growing up, to the extent that my university friends were certain that I’d get married in DMs. Behind all our masks, we were all laughing. It was Friday morning breaktime and things felt normal, just for those ten precious minutes, as we joked and bonded and set the world to rights…
How it’s going?
There’s talk of a circuit breaker lockdown for two or three weeks around half term: that’s how bad things have got, covid-wise, in Northern Ireland. We could be back to online school, even if just for a few weeks. My fifth years were hysterical on Friday: on that brink between helpless giggling and tears. Would we get the course finished? Would they have to do all the exams, all the assessments? If it was predicted grades again, would I pass them all? I had an inkling, but couldn’t tell them, that they were to be tested on the whole course. My breathing felt irregular as I calmed them down, smiled at them, told them we’d sort it out, it would be fine, I’d make sure that things worked out. Beneath the mask of my own calmness, I was feeling shorter and shorter of breath… short of time to get it all done; short of patience with the ministers sitting in their offices, making demands; short of the reserves essential for this year of great resilience.
And what of how it all began, and making sense of things for my newest colleagues, starting off at the moment?
I’ve told them: arrive each morning. Get to breaktime. Get to lunchtime. Get through the afternoon and eventually, go home. Rest, recover, repeat. I measure out my life in coffee breaks, and have suggested they do likewise. I’m looking forward to learning about their subjects when I observe them, but we’re all learning together about how to survive this strange year. I’ve told them I will be learning until, and probably beyond, the last day of my career. I’ll learn from my youngest colleagues as much as I support them, just like I often learn things from my students.
That was how it started: with learning. This is how it’s going: learning, still. I would imagine, with some years to go, that that’ll be how it’ll end, one day. More things to learn.
But in the meantime, it’s after 2am, the rain is beating on the windows once again, and it’s time to try to rest. And if there’s anything I need to learn, just now, it’s resting. Switching off. Logging out. Agonising less about how it’s going, and being grateful things are keeping going at all. Remembering that it’s all right if I don’t know every answer.
This year, I think, that’s got to be ok.
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