It's a bit quiet in here...

In this country, teaching is a profession that COVID has hit pretty badly, especially for my subject area, Computing. Where I live - a classic northern industrial town - we have only really only had two lockdowns, one from March to June last year, and then a second that started with a local lockdown in August 2020 and still hasn't been fully released as I write this.

You may think that being in a lockdown would give me some time to get some extra writing done, but throughout most of that period the students have still been in school, despite the data clearly showing that this created a massive spike in the infection rate and has led to many of my colleagues and myself from getting COVID (which floored me for over 3 weeks!), it was pretty much work as normal. However, in my subject, at my school, teaching couldn't be as normal.

Our school is small and over subscribed. The building was originally built for 450 pupils, but now has around 800 attending. There's been extensions built, so that we can house them all, but we are left with a legacy of small classrooms that make social distancing tricky, and narrow corridors that if we went back fully to normal, it would be impossible. The decision taken (which has given our school a much lower rate of students being sent home to isolate for 2 weeks because one of their cohort tested positive) was to bubble students up in the same classroom for all their subjects, and reduce the amount of movement around school as much as possible. In an English school, typically years 7-9 (what we call Key Stage 3, I think equivalent to Grades 6-8) runs on a broad curriculum of 12+ different subjects, before reducing this number down in year 10 and 11 (Freshman and Sophomore years at a US high school). At our school, years 10 and 11 are allowed to move between classrooms, whilst all Key Stage 3 students must stay in the same room for all their lessons other than PE (for which they go outside, even in winter). For me as a Computing teacher, this means that I have to teach my subject without access to computers for these three year groups. As the person in charge of the subject area that means that I needed to rewrite my entire curriculum for 3 year groups and deal with students thoroughly fed up with both being stuck in a classroom and not being able to complete any practical work in a usually very practical subject. It has been... hectic.

Further, another part of my job is that I am in charge of assessment for the whole school. Normally this would mean that I monitor student's progress across the years and help teachers identify the students who are underperforming, etc. However, as exams have been cancelled for two years in a row, now that means I'm spending a lot of time trying to sort out the various different messes that the government have left us with to replace them. Last year it was a serious amount of data-mining for quality checking the grades teachers assigned. This year, we're having to provide portfolios of evidence, and someone (me!) is going to have to wade through it all and make sure it makes sense. Not only is it a much bigger job than last year, but last year the students weren't in school, whereas this year they will be, so I'll have to juggle all that around my teaching hours, too. 

In many ways I'm lucky to still have a well paid job, so I guess I don't want to complain too much, but hopefully that at least helps you see why my writing has taken a back seat.