I need to start with a confession, at the moment, I'm drinking tea.
It's an English breakfast, with one artificial sweetener.
A curiosity for me, since I'm not a big tea drinker, and it's the morning.
Therein lies my problem: it's "too" morning.
Having been laying in bed for an hour, tossing, turning - I came to my good senses, said, 'This is ridiculous' and got up. When I came down to the living room, the clock reported it was 2:46am. You will need to excuse the poor photos, while my brain was turning all things over - my camera doesn't seem to have gotten the idea that it was time to wake-up. I hope you'll sit with me for a 'coffee break', and let me work through my churning mind. In short: It's 3am, Let's chat.
So that led me into my morning routine a couple of hours ahead of schedule: I sit my with little dog on the back deck - and do my morning things. This usually includes reading the paper (which isn't uploaded yet), and I'll take on the daily Wordle - and drink my coffee (My tea is nearly finished, now it's gone 3.15am that feels more appropriate to coffee - my morning elixer!)
But it raises the question - why did I find myself unable to sleep?
I don't really know - at least, I can't quite put my finger on it. In the depths of my stomach I just have this feeling that something is a little bit off, or that something has gone wrong - or perhaps it is a portent of doom! I used to get anxiety issues, which would affect my breathing - this isn't that. It's a feeling I don't remember or recognise - perhaps it's just annoyance to be up this early!
As we head into Monday morning here, I've looked ahead on my calendar, and I don't have a particularly busy time ahead. In my previous posts, I've shared that I'm a school teacher - and the week we're heading into is the last week of term before a two week holiday period. At the moment, a significant number of staff and students are not on site - at the moment, we're doing the "living with Covid" thing - and for schools, it's meant rolling staff shortages, and classes with 50-70% of your students only. It makes the teaching and learning aspect of schools quite chaotic. I fear for these kids -
Our young people in their final year of study - for them, this is the third year of disrupted schooling, having had lockdowns which kept them off site for weeks on end in both 2020 and 2021. With further great chunks of time away in 2022 with COVID or as a household contact where they're forced to isolate. Given you can catch COVID every couple of weeks, it wouldn't surprise me if they're back out again next term.
Then, there's the younger people again, just starting out in High School - they're only 12, but they're significantly behind all their comparable peers from years earlier. They're missing the basics, and fundamental resilience to cope with learning and its challenges. The truth is, learning interventions are powerful when they're targeted and individual - but, how does any school - or, bigger picture, any country - possibly hope to be able to 'intervene' in an entire generation?
So many students come to High School with low reading ages - this becomes a snowball, and they simply don't read. The gaps in their learning, over the years, continue to grow and become more accentuated - we're going to be faced with a knowledge crisis very, very soon. This is supposed to be the generation to solve all the world's problems - they're supposed to be so ingrained with technology, that anything will be possible given their digital birth. But...
Then, sometimes things just work out.
On Friday night just gone, I received a text message from one of my students who graduated last year. He was a good egg, but school really wasn't for him. That said, he persevered, got through - and on completion of his studies, he enlisted in the Navy. He was so proud to have just finished his twelve week course, which will see him 'fully enlisted' - it must be some sort of basic training that you need to get through to stay in the forces - and it will allow him to go off, continue his training, stay in a job and achieve a sense of purpose. His parents sent me a photo of him in uniform, they were beyond proud.
And now, it's definitely time for a coffee!
And that's a good news story!