Please Load Paper
The sun was shining as I drove into work this morning. My wife and I (we drive in a similar direction for 80% of our respective journeys to our different workplaces, so try to keep up with each other as much as possible on our morning commute) had decided to take a route which passed by some beautiful blossom trees. A nice start to the day even if I did almost witness a hideous crash at a mini-roundabout along the way (luckily a quick swerve from idiot #1 spared the life of idiot #2 who was doing an ill-judged U-turn across the roundabout). The blossom was lovely and the roads were moving smoothly. I was smiling and in a good mood as I neared the school. Sure - I had a morning duty to do up on the courts and a few jobs to complete before teaching started - but what lovely weather to stand around in ensuring the different year group bubbles stayed separated as they kicked their footballs around the playground.
And then I saw the buses. Four or five of them, all backed up along the small single road that leads up to the school gates and the dead-end of parkland beyond. The road parents have been explicitly told since September not to use to drop off their children because of congestion and the lack of a throughway. The road that also contains the staff carpark at one of its three dead ends. The road which every morning is a battle of wills between the buses which need to traverse it, the teachers who require access to their carpark, and the parents who foolishly decide a quick drop-off and three-point turn won’t cause any harm…not to mention the residents who park either side of the already narrow street and have their own lives to get on with independent of the comings and goings of our school.
This morning it was bad. Fifteen minutes of waiting in the subsequent traffic jam bad. By the time I pulled into the car park my smile was long-gone. Instead of getting in early to do all my pre-class jobs, I was already late for duty on the playground.
This is not the first time such a thing has happened. Nor will it be the last.
No problem, I reasoned. My form-room where I would be spending the first hour of the day is right next to the photocopier I would need if, as I feared, the booklets I had needed printed off for today weren’t ready. Which, of course, they weren’t, despite them being put in for copying the week before we broke up for Easter. Stupid of me to trust in the system supposedly put in place to ease our stress and workload - admin tasks like photocopying done by dedicated administrative staff so we teachers can focus on the task of actually teaching - but which, instead of easing stress, only contribute to it by being so completely unreliable. (Not because, I should mention, of any particular failing of the administrative staff but more because the hours they are paid to work do not necessarily correspond to the hours actually required to do the job!)
Also not the first time this has happened (and likely not the last); something so consistently unreliable becomes reliable in its own way, so I had anticipated the lack of resources necessary for my period two lesson and didn’t hesitate in popping the document I needed into the machine - a massive 75 page course booklet - and setting it up to make thirty copies while I went to register my class. The sun was still shining and I had enjoyed the bright warmth on the playground as I waited for the bell to ring and relieve me from ensuring students didn’t injure themselves or kill each other while kicking around their footballs. The resources would be ready when I needed them and I was looking forward to doing some PSHE with my Year 12 students deconstructing whatever the school told them was important to take into account when sitting for an important interview.
“Always wear a suit” said the presentation I had been asked to show them, and I made sure to tell them about a recently successful Cambridge applicant who I had explicitly told not to wear a suit for the interview which gained them a place. “Shake hands and make eye contact” it continued - demonstrating interviews inherited biases towards the neurotypical.
My advice to my students said one thing, the presentation said another, and a few other videos from different sources gave further, conflicting, advice.
“Essentially,” I summed it up for them, “it is a waste of time to base your interview preparation on trying to meet the imagined expectations of your interviewer because, as you have seen, different people are looking for completely different things when they interview a candidate.”
I told them the story of the Headteacher who had told me once that I had interviewed well but wouldn’t be getting the job because I had referred to “kids” at one point instead of “learners” or “children”, and how, at a later interview at another school, the Headteacher there who interviewed me used the word “kids” within the first thirty seconds of our chat and I was hired that same afternoon.
“The only thing you can count on,” I concluded, “is being yourself. If you are yourself, and present the best version of yourself, then if they want you, great, and if they don’t, great too - because it obviously wasn’t a good fit.”
As they watched the first video I went to check my photocopying only to find there was no paper in the photocopier and nothing had actually been printed yet. No problem - I had paper in my classroom as it also functions as our department stock cupboard. I ran back and grabbed a new ream and loaded up the machine. Ten minutes later I went back only to find, once again, a problem. This time, however, it wasn’t mechanical. A colleague stood merrily copying their own resources where mine should be emerging.
“Are my booklets done?” I asked with curiosity, looking around and seeing half a booklet tossed aside, unfinished, and the original document which should have still been in the feeder sat beside it.
“I’m not sure?” they said, looking shifty. “Nothing was printing when I came in. But I’ll be done soon.”
Great.
I came back a few minutes later, re-loaded my document and re-programmed the machine to do the job it should already be well on the way to completing. This time I stayed to make sure it was actually working and was relieved to see the first booklet make its way out of the copier’s mouth. After a bit more discussion about interviews and another video stuck on for my class - this time UCAS propaganda about how best to interview for university - I returned to get my work only to find a second colleague now using my department’s paper to copy their own resources.
I was furious. Can’t this simple task just be done without the constant obstacles?
The anger obviously showed on my face because the colleague assured me they had only paused, not cancelled, my job. I took a breath. OK. No problem. Forget about the paper - it’s all paid for by the same tax-payers anyway. It’s not the first time it’s happened and it won’t be the last - but at least the interruption was brief. The disruption was over swiftly enough and, with the colleague’s printing finished, my delayed copying was finally back underway. By the end of the PSHE lesson I had a complete set of booklets for my period 2 class.
Because of the nomadic rooming that has come about due to keeping COVID bubbles separate and moving each teacher from room-to-room instead of the students it meant lugging those 2,250 pages of booklets alongside the 30 other booklets I needed for a Year 8 class I was teaching later that morning and my heavy laptop. Between September and November I had injured my neck doing something similar but necessary in those first weeks back after lockdown. January’s second school closure had spared me the injury for the Spring Term yet I expect by the end of this week it’ll be back again. Still…the lesson which required the heavy resources went well. As did the Year 8 lesson later.
But these little annoyances all add up. Instead of giving my all to that Year 12 PSHE class this morning, half of me was worrying about getting the resources done in time and having to do battle with colleagues to keep the job on track. As I taught that lovely lesson Period 2, a message popped up from a student self-isolating at home reminding me I hadn’t added that lesson’s work to our online platform for them (a job I was meant to do before school, when I was stuck in traffic waiting for the busses and cars to disentangle themselves; another gift of pandemic-era teaching). Likewise, later I was informed of several students meant to be sitting one of our Year 11 assessment tasks who would now be self-isolating and for whom I had to set up a digital version of the exam paper for tomorrow morning; not to mention the reminder that the actual physical Year 11 assessment tomorrow requires me to copy and distribute four sets of test papers between all the rooms and invigilating colleagues overseeing things in the morning. Because this is the thing with teaching - there is always some nagging irritation or extra job to do which adds a low-level stressor to even the simplest of tasks. Multi-tasking; job juggling - this is the norm. Setting students off to do something so that an email can be sent or resource completed; tweaking the lesson for the students in front of you into an online variation for those learning from home; realising that if you want to mark the work you’re setting right now it will mean staying up all night because tomorrow something more important is coming in…even going to the toilet becomes an exercise in forward-planning and strategic organisation: if I don’t go now I won’t be free again until three thirty…
This is the point where you’re supposed to go…but I love it! Increasingly though, for me, the little annoyances and nagging irritations are becoming just that: annoying and irritating. And the smile gets lost a lot more easily, no matter how sunny the weather might be.
When the annoyances and irritations are baked in to the system - when they are a feature and not a bug - you have to start asking yourself at what point knowingly putting yourself through these daily frustrations month after month, year after year, becomes a form of self-harm?
At what point does self-care dictate that it has to stop?