This time last week things were looking grim but school closures were as yet small on the horizon and people were still largely going about their normal lives. Now, as I write, school has been closed for 3 days, the site is largely locked and silent, teachers are setting work online and only a handful of key workers’ children are attending. The streets are emptying, shops and businesses are closing their doors and life seems to be slowing to almost a halt. After probably the most pressurised few days of my professional life things now are moving in slow motion and in odd ways. As History clatters over the points who knows where we are headed next?
At home it’s odd too. The sun is shining from an azure sky free of vapour trails. When I wake in the morning I can hear the partridges in the fields and woodpeckers drumming instead of the swish of tyres on tarmac. We are all confined to barracks now, undoubtedly the right decision though the continuing pictures of crowded underground trains suggest that more drastic measures still will come. So be it. We will weather the storm both in education and (more importantly in health), but only hindsight will show whether judgement calls by HM Government are sound. I don’t envy them that job – it’s difficult enough running a school!
Alan Bennett fans will, I am sure, have spotted the allusion to his work at the end of the first paragraph. There is another highly relevant bit of the History Boys where Dorothy (an wonderfully indefatigable History Teacher) speculates on the ‘utter randomness of things’. I get that. We have job of sorting the consequences of choices that were made elsewhere, and the problems faced by schools like BWS are only a very small and insignificant part of what is going on.
Whatever your life is bringing to you at present, stay safe and go well.
SDS
