I didn’t reprimand a single child last week for talking at the wrong time.

I did not stand with my arms folded waiting for everyone to be ready. I spent no lunchbreaks dealing with playground spats and precisely zero minutes of breaktime berating children for wasting time.

I didn’t even use my teacher voice (if you don’t count what I said to Mr Brighouse the other day about the dishwasher). I have, in short, experienced a working week entirely free of behaviour management.

This should fill me with joy and professional fulfilment.

Over the years, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen my carefully planned lessons thwarted by behaviour issues. “I don’t want to be a lion tamer, I just want to teach,” is my most common refrain. “Teaching’s the bit I’m here for.”

Teaching is social

Only, it turns out that the two are indivisible. Take away the human interaction and just see what happens to the teaching.  

We are now in our fourth week of teaching remotely, which is basically just like a normal teaching day if it was carried out through a soundproof treacle-smeared one-way mirror with one hand tied behind my back.

It makes me feel less like a teacher and more some kind of inept administrator.

Overnight, I’ve gone from someone who instinctively adapts everything they do and say from moment to moment to some kind of faulty automaton who spends their days typing “Have you tried double-clicking on the green box?” Ad infinitum.

Then there are so many questions. Am I getting it right? Is the work enough? Too much? Why on earth did I ever suppose rotational symmetry could be taught remotely?

When setting work there’s also so much choice out there. So many wonderful people have made so many wonderful resources that I am simply overwhelmed.

And there’s the feedback. Marking the daily work constructively is an impossible task. Some of my most capable writers seem to have forgotten how to punctuate.

Children who were struggling to spell the simplest words have now turned into Dickens.

Positivity for all

I default to positivity. I shower everything with praise: praise for effort, for achievement, for simply showing up.

It’s good to keep in touch with the children and I love their messages but in teaching terms, it’s deeply unsatisfying.

Because, aside from trying to keep everyone safe and happy, I miss teaching them. I miss the maths games, the shared reading, the moment where I tell them something or show them something and a light flicks on and they can suddenly do it.

There’s no progress here, no sudden flicker of recognition. It’s Have I Got News For You minus the audience. The whole driving force of my job has been removed.

Well, maybe not removed so much as redirected. My own children are bearing the brunt. I’ve got a laptop, a pile of textbooks, a geometry set, an atlas, a whistle and a hula hoop and I’m not afraid to use them.

Keep on teachin’

It’s a tough gig though.

“Can you stop talking about full stops and leave me alone to write my story?” my son asked me this morning while my daughter’s standard response goes something along the lines of: “No I don’t want to do your exciting poetry lesson. I want to respond to my school’s online demands in under five minutes so I can get back to watching Malory Towers.”

I’m not giving up though. I’ll win them over yet. Tomorrow, I will inspire them to love Roger McGough armed only with a set square and a relief map of Europe.

It takes more than a global pandemic to stop a teacher teaching.

But I’ll be honest, the next time I get to reprimand a child for talking at the wrong time in the classroom, you may spot the slightest hint of a smile as I do so.