By P M
I have no idea what I am doing. But does anyone right now? This seems an apt endeavour in the circumstances.
Since last week, a lifetime’s worth of changes have happened. We queue to enter the supermarket, we talk more than we ever have before, we watch the numbers and graphs as if it somehow pays to know. Statistics are no shield and yet we wrap ourselves in them. Clock in to see who’s up and who’s down. We know there is no end in sight, but we refresh, refresh, refresh. We could be wrong?
There are so many questions and never have there been fewer answers. One questions keeps floating out of the fog again and again, suggesting it might mean something?
What does this novel world mean for us teachers?
Time is doing strange things at the moment. There’s a paradox in the way an afternoon can stretch out of reasonable shape and yet enough changes for a calendar year can congregate in a week. We lost an hour in the night. Time is misbehaving.
Many things can seem profound while they are happening. They soon pass through the tenses: continuous, present perfect, past simple. Most slip further into nothingness beyond grammar. ‘This’, however, seems stubbornly to indicate itself a rarity, a moment which will stand grimly against forgetting. It will demand a before and after.
Before: how quickly will the mock data be ready to analyse? Where will it leave the revised KPIs? Have we balanced accuracy with aspiration in our predicted Summer grades? Who will be prepared to donate some of their valuable Easter holiday to drilling and rehearsal? Is x accessing Animal Farm? How much further down the road can we kick the can of sorting out departmental tracking? What if Ofsted came tomorrow?
It started slowly. We told them it would be fine. We quashed it. We planned lessons on veracity. We challenged Tick Tock and the memeosphere. We knew it would be WW3 with Iran again, until it wasn’t. We told them we wouldn’t close, until we did.
In the past week my job has changed more than I thought possible. How far can you bend and warp the notion of ‘teacher’ until it breaks?
My role description does not include fielding endless emailed questions on how to download a document without it becoming a jumbled mess of boxes and tables (I have felt like the animated paperclip from Word 1997 I always used to sympathise with – that isn’t a life). Nor does it include ringing families to encourage them to access food vouchers or driving to houses with bags of pasta and sanitary items. Was it ethical? As a teacher or as a human? Is there a difference? Which comes up trumps when the chips are down?
We always risk work creep in their profession, but when the dining room is the office, when does the day end? Where is the line between ‘me’ and ‘teacher’?
We never expected to volunteer to do our job. What is teacher when there is no school?
We are ‘key workers’ (government approved), but as childcare. Were we ever any different? The extent to which ‘this’ has changed anything is therefore debatable. Perhaps it has more so laid bare what was always true – the virus has just left no curtain for the man to hide behind.
It was impossible not to laugh at the education secretary declare that our role was to be one of care, not education. Were they ever different? Should they have been?
Some of us seemed relieved: the dead hand of progress removed from above so we could focus on our driver – improving the life chances of the young. Others seemed lost, adrift and frightened without the anchor of their pedagogy.
And what are we to make of the DfE now? Progress is all that matters, all we will judge you by, until it doesn’t and we won’t. We are the ‘blob’, entitled and feckless, until we are ‘key’, frontline so the rest of the frontline can. Exams are the only valid assessment, until teacher assessment is fine again.
Schools should stick to there role as conduits for knowledge transmission, until they are the sanctuary.
Oh brave new world…
We are very much in the present continuous of this, no shift in the grammar in sight. Yet I am drawn to the after.
How will society at large view us after we kept our doors open against our self-preservation? Will we remember who raised their hand and who found their pockets? Will our new found mastery(ish) of communication technology change how we operate as institutions and educators? Or do we sink back to the safety of before’s whiteboards and paperclips (the physical kind)? Once the teacher assessment bag is out of the bad, can the Goveians put it back in? The NEU think not. After seeing them fear for their world, feeding them, sending them colouring and mindfulness apps, will their ability to explain Steinbeck’s use of light and dark or why they should give a sh*t about Tennyson seem to matter a jot?
Perhaps the question should be, did it ever?
Oh brave new world.