To provide some light relief during the strange times of Covid-19, we asked Miss Tendler to outline what a ‘day in the life’ looks like for her, a Geography teacher, while teaching remotely. 

06:47 Wake up. Feel refreshed. This is much later than I sleep on a normal school day. Check time. Note that I have 13 minutes before my revised alarm goes off. Have a little snooze.

07:00 Alarm. Feel like I’m being dragged out of a deep well. No longer in any way refreshed. Stumble towards the coffee percolator.

07:45 Arrive at ‘the office’. Co-worker greets me. He has made me a cup of tea but he looks a little guilty. I suspect he has been stealing my biscuits. I decide not to confront him about it. It is important to get on with people at the moment.

 

NB. This is not actually my cat. If anyone knows this cat, he’s at my house. A lot.

08:00 Decide on a registration tune and a meme for my tutor group and send it in along with notices for the day from the Head of Year, and Head of Section. Luckily I’ve been collecting memes for months now. Finally a chance to share them!

08:10 Read with interest a note from fellow Year 9 tutor Mr Hipperson recommending Joe Wicks’ daily on line PE lesson

08:11 Do not join in Joe Wicks’ daily on line PE lesson

08:25 Send registration email – shout out to 9RET, the best class in the school! (I apologise for the music choices) and receive some lovely replies. It’s odd to be a teacher without students. Luckily Emanuel students are so fantastic it almost seems like they are in the room.

08:35  Lesson with the U6 on Kuznet’s Environmental Curve. The resources are uploaded already (the evening before), and I have some nice email chats with students working their way through the tasks. At the end of the lesson work comes in and I do my best to check it and mark an exam question using some clumsy MS Paint style ticks in Word, until I remember how to add a comment and things get a lot better.

09:50 Break. I forget that it is break and continue marking and returning work. Life without the pips is new and rather wonderful.

10:10 L6 lesson on coastal defences. Some great questions coming in over email that make me realise I need to be far better at explaining concepts to make them clear remotely than when my classes and I have the luxury of discussing ideas as a group and coming to conclusions together. Further emails come in containing essays to mark. It is becoming clear I will not be getting them all marked today..

10:35 There is a squirrel in my living room. I am too slow to take a photo. Maybe I should close the door.

Home office.

11:50 – 13:00 Year 10 do a smashing job with their lesson on the impacts of rapid urbanisation in Sao Paulo. Some of the work rolls in 20 minutes early! I contemplate setting more in future.

13:00 Lunch. I put together some home-made fusion Thai/Chinese vegetable soup and crumpets with cream cheese and cucumber and feel quite proud. If we can’t travel the world just now, we can perhaps put it all together in an anarchic mish-mash on our plates? As I eat I find myself missing Emanuel’s awesome lunches and amusing dinner table discussion.

14:00 Catch up on emails. My co-worker has fallen asleep. He’ll be so mad I took this photo when he wakes up!

14:30 L6 again. Final lesson of my busiest teaching day. Usually I have some free lessons I promise! Again it is necessary to provide some clarity on the lesson slides, but all in all the students are making things go fairly smoothly.

16:00 Geography department meeting on ‘Teams’. We discuss how remote learning is going and share some stories of success and challenges. Mr Worrell and Miss Rowley are particularly well organised and put some of us to shame. I harbour some feelings of envy about other people’s interior décor.

17:20 Decide to have a social distancing compliant walk on Peckham Rye. This is the first formal exercise I have done in approximately …. 8 years. It’s rather pleasant. I will tell other people they should try exercising. They will be surprised and delighted. On the way back in I decide the ‘garden’ could do with some pruning now new shoots are beginning to appear. Have to limit myself after 20 minutes or there will be nothing left. Is one supposed to cut back passiflora in March? Where is Monty Don when you need him?

20:00 Whatsapp the geography team to remind them about Celebrity Bake Off!

21:20 Adjust and prepare my lessons for tomorrow and upload them to SMHW.

22:30 Off to bed. Good sleep is vital for immunity. I have decided to re-read ‘Year of Wonders’ by Geraldine Brooks. A simply brilliant novel set in the self-quarantined ‘plague village’ of Eyam in the 1660s. Escapism…?