Teaching through Covid has been anxiety-inducing, but we have been the ballast in the deeply uncertain waters of the pandemic
If you haven’t been in one since the last time you were at one, you might not appreciate that a school can often feel like a bad theme park: way too exciting, over-stimulating, and liable to produce headaches. It’s what you get if you put hundreds of kids and dozens of caffeinated adults under one roof. It’s a hive of human activity and constant, emotional interaction – buzzing with movement, noise, rapid changes, ups, downs and, in many cases, actual bells to tell everyone when to stand up and go somewhere else.
For teachers, it’s a bit like hosting an eight-hour Zoom call with nobody on mute and your camera always switched on. That’s a comparison that wouldn’t have made sense a year ago, but the pandemic has ushered in a whole new reality that we’re all struggling to deal with. Not to sound too much like a football score, it’s starting to feel like Covid-19, everyone else – nil.
