In one of my favourite ever films, Mean Girls, a character states that seeing a teacher outside of school is like seeing a dog walk around on its hind legs. It is always a bit awkward when you see students outside of college, but living 15 miles from work it doesn’t happen to me that often. A student once excitedly approached me to say he’d seen me in the Co-Op where I live and that “I looked just like I do in college”, which was a relief.

My accent doesn’t match the one local to the college so I do get questions about where I’m from. I live in a normal former industrial town, but to see students' reactions you’d think I lived in downtown Rio de Janeiro just because I have a different-coloured wheelie bin. My front door is also bright purple so I have heard on more than one occasion “I walked past your house last night Kirsty”. Unnerving? Threatening? Endearing? Jury’s out. 

More: How much bother have you been in on Zoom?

Coronavirus: How different is teaching online from the classroom?

Opinion: After teaching online for 15 years, here's what I know

Buying property

Last June, I took the plunge and decided to buy the house I had been renting for seven years. I thought it would be done and dusted by the end of August but, of course, it was well into October by the time we completed. There were pros and cons to that. It was bad because I had to field calls at work from my mortgage broker asking me to fill in declaration 13J-7b in triplicate and post immediately. But it was good because I could use work’s printer for this task. Bad because one of the most stressful things you can do coincided with the most stressful times of the academic year; good because if I ever dropped the ball I could just crumble and say “I’m buying a house!” and everyone would feel sorry for me and give me a doughnut.

I was 10 minutes into a one-to-one with a student when, lo and behold, I received the momentous call saying I was the proud owner of a two-bed Victorian terrace. “Congratulations!” said my student. “You’ll never forget me now, will you?”

Since I started teaching from home, the students have also had a gander inside my house, and they haven’t been shy. I can see their eyes roaming around my screen, as I try to keep their attention.

 “Any questions?”

“Yes, is that a framed picture of One Direction behind you?”

“I think we’ve got those chairs, are they from IKEA?”

“Kirsty, did you know that your wallpaper was on one of the ‘before’ houses on Homes Under the Hammer?”

My house, being an ex-rental, has not been properly refurbished for a while, and my plan to do some proper decorating over Easter and the summer holidays was scuppered by a little thing called the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, so I’m a little bit embarrassed to share my interior right now.

Having cut down on the number of people invited into my home while I made it look nice, I was then subjected to, on one occasion, 75 people in a training session I was running looking into my dining room/home office while I tried to angle the screen away from the patch of wall where the paper had just fallen off, leaving a gap that was less "trendy exposed brick" and more "recently condemned squat".

Hopefully, I can now get back to remote teaching from my actual workplace. Either that or I display a link to a Go Fund Me page on MS Teams and hope for the best.

Kirsty Walker tweets @Kirstsclass