Disclaimer: these are practitioner reflections and are in no way intended to be compared to other working environments. Reader if you have little experience of a teachers life you probably won’t appreciate the nuance of my reflections. Maybe you will.
Thought for the day
Working under lockdown should be significantly less stressful than normal teaching. So why am I not feeling the love for it? Yes I’m able to gain an hour in the morning now that my daily commute lasts all of the few seconds it takes to descend the stairs. Yes I can be so much more relaxed about my appearance, who cares if I haven’t shaved and I’m sat in my pyjamas doing work emails? Yes I can go to the toilet when I please, take tea breaks when I please and have my lunch when I decide thankyouverymuch. Gone also is the struggle of educating teenagers many of whom are unwilling to be educated. Yet I can’t shake the unease.
On the plus side I like that the cumulative fatigue on my central nervous system is much reduced. This was the first thing I noticed after the first week under lockdown. I reached Friday and realised I had an energy, a brightness about me. I wasn’t burdened with a week of teacher burn that requires the standard Friday evening regimen to wind down. It made me think what it must be like to have a “normal” job.
But I hate it. I want lockdown over, I want normal school to be resumed.
One thing I realised early on in my career was the shock experienced on changing schools, especially when leaving a place where I had established myself. The first few weeks in a new job are often brutal in that a multiple pronged front has to be faced. There’s the re-establishing of a relationship with pupils that can leave one feeling like an NQT all over, and the re-familiarisation of the new environment from systems and policy, to physical infrastructure and the customs of the staffroom. Yet this is what one chooses to go through, and often with the foreknowledge of the struggle to come.
Working under lockdown without the preparation it required has left me bereft of all the anchors upon which I have come to rely as I navigate, often stumble through, my working week. The automaticity of my working day only really crystallises in my mind when I change schools and have to build, endure, a new pathway to automaticity. In that situation the journey of change could be considered to have begun the moment I made a decision to leave my current school and look elsewhere. Psychologically I guess the expectation of impending change begins to manifest the moment a job offer is accepted, and the summer recess between leaving one school and joining another is a time of expectation and planning for the coming storm of change.
However, the suddenness of lockdown took everything. On the Friday being told this is it, school’s out for an indeterminate amount of time. To the Monday sat in my living room with my laptop pondering on the new lockpocalypse, a lockdownageddon upon humanity. All the anchor points that I rely upon unconsciously are gone. It’s like walking home without warning via an unfamiliar route through a multitude of unrecognisable waypoints desperately seeking some familiarity. A familiarity with which I can embrace with embarrassing eagerness.
Gone is the comfort of knowing a process so well I can sit back and relax. Now I’m learning a new work life balance and I don’t like it. This isn’t what I chose.
You see I wasn’t prepared and in that sense the load is considerably greater than I might have expected. Now my work/life balance has merged like a yin yang symbol, neither sector without some part of its opposite present.
I’m a teacher. My anchor points are my pupils, my classes, my colleagues and my school. The bustle of the school day, the challenge of the classroom, the engagement that social interaction brings, and the elixir of life that is seeing young people develop. Now my anchor point is a portal to infinity that is my laptop screen, an infinity of contact yet detached, viewed through the solitude of isolation.
I’m a teacher, a good one. At the moment I’m not.
I want normal back.
Teaching at the chalkface 