Been a while and we are still in a Pandemic!

 I'm Back!

Well I have been missing from this blog for just over 4 years and have decided to resurrect it now! I haven't deliberately been missing but have been very occupied it doing other things, such as work! It seems a strange time to resurrect it and really should have been done about a year ago when the Pandemic hit Scotland. I think I was just in a state of shock and bewilderment like so many others! The good new is, I am still here! So how has my pandemic been?

Back in March of last year the shit hit the fan and towards the middle of the month the whole country went into a "lock-down". It was a strange feeling and a very worrying one. Nobody had ever had this experience before and so we were all a bit lost. All my teaching in both school and privately was cancelled. I say cancelled but very quickly I turned to Zoom and re-invented my teaching.Everything was online. I had never taught over the internet and actually had never heard of Zoom! Rapid fast forward and now it feels like the norm. I was pleased with myself in how quickly I reacted to the situation and before I knew it, I was busy everyday teaching cello to my pupils. It has to be said that not all the pupils engaged as quickly as myself and in fact it took most of the lock-down to get some of them to communicate with me at all. 

We were blessed with good weather and that made it a whole lot easier than it would have been. Walking everywhere became the norm and the lack of cars on the road was a great plus point of the whole adventure. I enjoyed the days and the freedom to do other things apart from work. It was, however. scary at the same time. Nobody wanted to catch this horrible virus and I was particularly paranoid given my age and Diabetes. Despite all the lies from the UK government and the promises of a great summer to come, I knew we would not be making our annual pilgrimage to Italy. It was all booked, flights and accommodation and would probably be the last holiday there with Kate. We had to bite the bullet and cancel it all. It was really disappointing but we knew it was the only choice we had. I still looked at Italy as being a country that had suffered more than many in this Pandemic but I was ignoring the reality of what was happening in the UK. Our number of deaths had risen exponentially and we were heading for the worst number of deaths, per 100,000, in the world! I should perhaps qualify this in terms of the UK. England was suffering particularly badly and Scotland at one point had almost eradicated the disease in the country. That was until the summer and all the relaxing of the rules! I and many others I knew, were fearful of this and so it proved. After the summer the numbers started to rise again and it would keep going that way up until today, when it is still horrendous. I continued to do a mixture of "in school" and online teaching throughout May and June and continued after the summer. Some believed they could go back as normal but I'm afraid I believed that to be a mistake.

Many things have happened through this pandemic and many arguments about the way forward have ensued but always near the top of the debates have been schools. There is no doubt that young people have suffered but then so have many older ones. Unfortunately when it happens to older ones it has many time meant a death. Young people have been starved of their education and their ability to socialise and many have suffered mental anguish in this respect. I could in no way trivialise what has happened to them but I also feel that it is sometimes enabling politicians, journalists and others to "fit" a label on the school generation. Headlines such as "The lost generation" are neither helpful or, from my point of view, correct. It has for one thing, underestimated the resilience of many young people. Many have had to learn to make their own decisions about their futures and be much more self-reliant than previous school age young people. Instead of being force fed their education they have found different ways to assimilate their knowledge. I think it has also shown that our education system is archaic in its delivery of education and that the "Holy Grail" of exam passing is often a failure of our young people. The fact that so many pupils had fantastic exam results last summer may be the true reflection of the ability or our young people and not, as many have thrown out there, be a ridiculous over estimate of their worth. The fact the Government nearly messed it up for them by using a fantasy algorithm, is more a reflection of their inadequacies than that of the pupils! The Education chiefs have been afforded an opportunity by this Pandemic  to change the way we think of education and how it should be delivered. How we should look differently at outcomes. The big question is whether they have the common sense or bravery to make those changes. I unfortunately think not!