Covid#31 - Never prouder to be a teacher

It’s the end of the half-term break from schools.  It was a break I went into thinking I might get halfway through and decide I’d just as well be at work and it has been a strange break, taking place during the third national lockdown, with the ‘stay at home’ rule in force, limiting the places to go, things to do and people to see.  February half-term can often be a bit like that, however; cold, dark, grey winter days are not very enticing and I often find myself enjoying this week for lazy, cosy indoors days, watching films, reading, writing a little, listening to music. 

Now it’s time to look forward to returning to school for the second half of the school year but in these times of uncertainty, we don’t really know what it is that we’re looking forward to.  Across the country, school has been closed to most children since Christmas and most of them have only seen one full term of ‘normal’ school since last spring.  There’s optimism that schools in England will re-open to more children in a couple of weeks’ time, but this lockdown has been marked by the Prime Minister’s caution too and knowledge that there won’t be a rush back to normality as there was after last year’s lockdowns.  There’s not yet any knowing how many students I will have in my classroom in the coming weeks.

I teach in a special school where I have a small class of five teenaged boys, all of whom have a diagnosis of autism.  Since Christmas, only one of my class has attended school; the other four have remained at home although they had the option to return – my school decided (rightly in my opinion) to re-open in January to as many families as wanted to send their children.  There was a view, I believe, that all children at our school are vulnerable because of their individual needs, and an acceptance that for many of them and their families, their emotional well-being was enhanced by their being at school rather than at home.

What I failed to acknowledge at the start of term was the capacity of my boys to make up their own minds, so I didn’t anticipate their own decision to stay at home.  They are all what we refer to as ‘high-functioning’ young men with a version of autism that is often referred to as Asperger’s, so they have the same capacity for learning as neurotypical young people and similar understanding of the world around them.  They themselves therefore have good understanding of what coronavirus is and its consequences; they follow the news; they know that students their age in other schools are staying at home and they have their own perceptions of the risks of returning to school, and some of them are fearful.  None of them attended school between the end of March and September last year so they have memories of that too – they coped with that lockdown and they and their families stayed safe.  Moreover, the costs of missing out on classroom learning, which are hard for them to grasp, were outweighed by the benefits to a young person with autism of staying at home without the pressures and anxieties of being at school with all its unpredictables, and of being able to indulge in their special interests as much as they liked.  I have complete respect for the decision they each took.

Like most classrooms, mine has been an odd place to be in the past couple of months but we’ve adapted well.  I spend two to three hours each morning delivering live lessons via Zoom – English or Maths each day and usually one other subject – Careers, PSHE, History, Science, French and Geography are delivered in this way, following our normal curriculum.  Some of these lessons are for everyone, with the one student in the classroom joining the others in their bedrooms via Zoom, whilst some are for smaller groups or one-to-one.  At first, I hated the prospect of teaching in this way, but I quickly got used to it and have even taken to it well.  The occasional technical glitch aside (and thankfully, they are rare), I’ve been surprised by how much we have achieved and by the levels of students’ engagement – attendance-rates are high and they participate well.

I e-mail follow-up work for those at home to complete together with work for the other subjects that we don’t do ‘live’.  I get some work e-mailed back to me – more from some students than others – but frustratingly, the quality of what they send me is nowhere near what they would achieve in the classroom.  They’ve certainly missed out on the support they’d get at school – the glance over their shoulder at the work they’re doing; the encouragement; the feedback, tips and advice; the expectation; and the praise.  I mark their work, scan it and send it back to them with my feedback; I’m not sure they read it and take it on board, but it’s the best I can do.

The student attending school has had a great time, probably valuing school more than ever.  A teaching assistant supports him so the one-to-one attention and support he is receiving is intensive and sensitive, and for him, the unpredictables that usually come with a fuller classroom have been removed.  His response has been phenomenal.  He is more relaxed and engaging so both my TA and I have been able to develop our relationship with him.  Most significantly, he has shown far more interest in his learning, spending much longer on activities than previously, producing far more work of a higher quality than ever before and making leaps and bounds in progress.  Him mum has commented that ironically, this has been the best year for him academically, and it’s been a real joy to share it with him.  Now we’re wondering what we can learn and take from it.  It’s important, I think, to recognise the positive outcomes of the circumstances in which we find ourselves, as well as the challenges.

For all the boys and their families, there are huge positives.  They’re probably not unlike most teenagers in relishing being able to set their own routine, including staying in bed for longer and spending more time gaming and watching YouTube, and I’m not so naïve as to think this wasn’t part of the motivation for their decision to stay at home!  They’ve also openly told me that they’re living their best life by being at home on their own and one or two parents have told me of how much more at ease their sons seem – that’s a reflection of their autism.  For all that though, I’m certain they appreciate the routine that live Zoom lessons and schoolwork provides – they show up and engage well, after all.

Of course, there have been challenges.  Parents can’t be superheroes, supporting all their children with their schoolwork, and some quickly became lost and frustrated and, as one put it, felt like they were going mad.  Some of my students had to share devices with their siblings, all trying to access their own lessons at different times.  It emerged that some were attempting Zoom-learning and completing their work on a small and even cracked smartphone screen, which must have been nigh-on impossible.  They (and more often their parents) don’t always have the technical confidence to access what they need online and parents often don’t have the knowledge or confidence to support their son’s learning.  We weren’t geared up for home-learning last year but now we’ve learnt a lot.  Last year, I only delivered one Zoom session each week, in contrast to at least two hours per day in these last two months.  Now, we’ve been able to provide students with a laptop if they didn’t have one.  We’ve realised how much more we could achieve, the consequences of failing and as our expectations have grown, our young people have risen to meet them.

For my part, I truly believe that work has kept me going through these dark times.  I live on my own so lockdown alone at home in the depths of winter would have been hard and I’m not great at working from home – I’ve realised how much motivation I derive from having other busy people around me – so that would have been challenging too.  I feel lucky that my daily routine has hardly changed since the start of this lockdown in January, to have had continuing human contact at school and the opportunity to work hard and be possibly busier than ever.  The days and weeks of this lockdown have flown by.

I’m very conscious that it’s been very different for many other teachers.  Returning to the workplace while infection rates were high could be frightening; colleagues have been anxious for themselves and about inadvertently taking the virus home with them to infect their families.  There’s been concern about children left at home because their own school is shut while mum or dad return to do their job.  I’ve relished the challenge of managing home-learning alongside classroom-based learning.  Despite my small class and the support of a teaching assistant, it comes with its own issues when your students all have special educational needs, but understandably, others have found it more challenging, with bigger classes, uncooperative learners, demanding parents, safeguarding concerns, too much pressure from above and not enough support.  While work has thankfully kept me going, it’s been really tough on some of my colleagues.  Covid has been good for empathy, I think.

I’m glad to be at work and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a swift and successful return to school for all children and young people in a couple of weeks.  There will be some who disagree with me and feel that it’s too soon to re-open schools, but children need to be in school – they’re missing out on far too much education and too many personal and social opportunities while they’re at home – and we teachers have an important job to do.  This emergency has given me more appreciation of the value of work for my own well-being and a greater sense of the purpose and worth that my work provides.  I like to imagine that some of the doctors, nurses and scientists who are our Covid heroes credit their own teachers with getting them where they are now and I like to think about the children sitting in front of their laptop for their Zoom lessons or in their Covid-secure classroom bubbles today who will go on to become the doctors, nurses and scientists of tomorrow, thanks in no small part to the efforts of their teachers. 

I’ve never been prouder to be a teacher. 

Covid#30 - We're all scientists now

 

Three days ago I had the first of my Covid vaccinations.  The next day was a total write-off as I suffered what I am assured was only a really strong immune response, which is a good thing, but didn’t feel that way with my head pounding and as waves of nausea enveloped me.  It only lasted twenty-four hours though, so I won’t dwell on that.

As the nurse removed the needle from my arm at the end of my brief appointment at a local pharmacy, I succumbed to that post-jab cliché of asking, ‘Is that it?!’  I actually meant it; it seemed so inconsequential.  It was, of course, nothing of the sort – not for me or for the now fifteen million people in the UK who have had the first of our two jabs.  When I returned to my car and posted on Facebook of my excitement and relief, it really did feel that something momentous had just happened.

Many months ago, I wrote about how ‘Covid19 will define our age as one of great scientific and technological discovery and endeavour’ (Covid#9).  Since then, we’ve all become scientists as we’ve understood the emergence of coronavirus and added zoonoses to our lexicon; grappled with how it spreads and how best to protect ourselves and each other; followed the race to develop treatments and vaccines; watched as the virus mutated and new variants took hold and now as we join hopefully in the mass-experiment that is this epic vaccination programme.  I, for one, have been fascinated by the science from the outset.

I am, in fact, in awe of coronavirus.  It’s effects are obviously dreadful, but it knows nothing about that.  It is simply doing what it’s meant to do – reproduce, thrive and survive – and what is literally awe-ful about it is just how well it does its job.  We’ve all become familiar with images of the virus, surrounded by its spike-proteins, designed to latch onto and unlock our own cells, but it’s both frightening and incredible that that spikey little ball is about one-hundredth the size of one of our cells and forever invisible to most of us who don’t own an electro-microscope.  Despite that, once it’s delivered its genetic material to our cells then instructed them to copy and reassemble it before self-destructing, it can have replicated itself billions of times in just a few days.

The mutations that resulted in the original zoonotic jump and the Kent, Brazil and South African variations of the virus that have caused so much concern since December may be more luck than judgement (from the virus’ perspective, that is) but it’s no less remarkable that by random chance, a copying error as it replicates can enable it to claim an unfortunate new host and enhance its effectiveness – or virulence.  How is it even possible that something so miniscule can contain enough material to mutate so significantly as to have such devastating consequences?  It’s wonderfully mind-boggling!

I’m equally impressed by our immune system.  A couple of years ago, I fell seriously ill.  As I lay in a hospital bed, wired up to machines with all sorts of tests being conducted, I was scared yet I had little cause to be because, as a doctor later explained to me, my incredible immune system had kicked in and was already doing a brilliant job of dealing with the infection in my liver.  For most people, the same is true of a coronavirus infection.  Despite having never experienced it before, somehow our body knows what to do and can fight it off before we suffer any more than mild symptoms.  Even when coronavirus infects our neutrophiles and t-cells, causing the overreaction known as a ‘cytokine storm’ and turning them against even healthy cells, in most of us, our immune system eventually wins out.  It fills me with wonder!

The scientists who discover and explain all this can not earn enough admiration and praise.  Thanks to them, I have learnt a lot about the basic science of the virus and our immune system, but it is beyond me how they managed to decode its genetic sequence in such short order after the outbreak began in China, use it to invent the tests that have become part of our everyday life and then track changes in that code over time, revealing those dastardly mutations.

That syringe bearing its crystal-clear vaccine seemed so insubstantial as it lay in its dull grey cardboard tray, awaiting my arm.  Truly however, it symbolised all that scientific endeavour about which I previously wrote.  I’ve watched Professor Teresa Lambe describe how the genetic code arrived in her e-mail inbox on a Saturday morning in January 2020 and how, clad in her pyjamas, she worked through the weekend to have a vaccine designed by the Monday.  By March, it had entered human trials.

I received the Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine.  It’s a vector-vaccine that uses a modified version of a chimpanzee adenovirus, to which the gene for the coronavirus spike protein has been added.  Once my cells were ‘infected’ with this false-virus, the spike-protein was read by my cells’ nuclei and copied into messenger RNA; the adenovirus itself, however, had been engineered to not be replicated so I didn’t fall ill as a result.  The MRNA was then read by my cell’s molecules, which began assembling those spike-proteins.  Some of those spikes then protruded through my cells’ surface, awakening my immune system.  When the ‘infected’ cell died, the debris – including those spike-proteins – was swept up by antigen-presenting cells to be recognised by helper T cells.  B-lymphocytes activated by those helper T cells then poured out antibodies that latch onto genuine coronavirus spikes, marking them for destruction and preventing them from infecting other cells.  Meanwhile, killer T cells (which sound like something out of a science fiction film) were also activated by the antigen-presenting cells to find and destroy any of my cells infected by coronavirus. 

All this remarkable process was playing out at a microscopic level inside my body whilst I lay on the sofa nursing my headache, and it’s all thanks to the incredible efforts of the scientists at Oxford University and Astrazeneca and their friends all around the world.  I was shaking my head in disbelief and awe as I wrote even the second sentence of that last paragraph; it’s so easy to write a few words about adding a gene to a chimp virus, yet they undoubtedly represent so much research, understanding and effort.

That insubstantial-looking syringe, filled with its miraculous elixir and the hopes of everyone for an end to this pandemic, deserved to be made from lead-crystal and to rest on a velvet cushion atop a gold and jewel-encrusted tray!  I feel a bit sad that it was destined only for one of those vivid-yellow sharps bins.  A bit of me wishes I could have kept it.