Never have I been so excited to go back to work. The chance to see real people! To teach in real life! I feel privileged to be a person who actually goes to work rather than sits at my laptop in my trackies and slippers.
Of course, it was different. There are sanitiser stations all over the school, one way systems and year groups are sequestered in their bubbles. My year-11 daughter commented that her year group would never get to know the year-7s as they dwell in their new ivory tower along the year-11 corridor. At the start of term there was both a sense of enthusiasm and trepidation.
Would the systems work? How long would we last in school? Unbelievably, it is November and we are still standing, singing “I will survive” in the staffroom. Yes, there are many students and staff who have had to isolate, indeed whole year groups have had to be sent home but overall we just keep going.
The constant refrain before students enter the corridors is: “Please put your mask on”, or, if time is short, “Mask!” Teaching behind the prison of the perspex screen is not what I set out to do nearly 30 years ago, nor is the fact that I cannot attend to individual students.
The line of the desk, like the Maginot Line, cannot be passed. It isn’t ideal but it does keep everyone safe.
All our PowerPoints now go on to Google Classroom so that students who are isolating can access the work. Homework is set and taken in online to avoid handling paper.
For students who are isolating, most teachers open up the Google Meet so they can virtually join the lesson.This led to a great Blankety Blank moment in my lesson where we had the faces of the absentees up on the whiteboard and could chat with those girls face to face.
Staff have all been provided with headsets, cameras and a very glamorous-looking tablet thing, which we can use to annotate as if we are writing on a whiteboard. I’m opening the packaging this weekend and will try to get to grips with it. This is coming from a teacher who was very excited when the Google Meet worked in class and can just about share a screen.
Fortunately, we have amazing staff at Hasmonean who have made tutorial videos to teach us how to do this.
None of this is easy. This term has certainly been more draining and brutal for students and staff. The year-11 and 13 students are more anxious than in previous years, as they feel that every piece of work could count toward their grades; the upcoming mocks are being taken more seriously than ever before — and all of this with the uncertainty about whether there will actually be any exams to sit in June.
The current system of almost entirely exam-based GCSEs seems in current circumstances very unfair. They are tougher than the old exam-only O-levels and tougher than any other GCSE system we have had since.
To expect children to absorb the mountains of information they have to climb through; then learn to apply it and then face the pressure of everything riding on final exams after the broken studies of last summer; the disruption caused by some having to self-isolate, teachers having to self-isolate, doubt about whether there will actually be any exams and, if there won’t, how teacher assessment will work — we have the makings of a very difficult time for our students.
Let’s hope the Department for Education puts them first this year.
Despite the challenges we have all faced this term, where each day we get through is a miracle, I can honestly say that I am still excited to go to work and teach my students in both the real and virtual worlds.
Janine Ellerman teaches English at Hasmonean High School for Girls
