Reopening schools and reopening minds – why it’s not just the classrooms that our kids need to get back to |15 June 2021

Phil Brown (Photo source: Phil Brown)

As students across the country return to school after facing another lockdown, Phil Brown, teacher and deputy head of the secondary school at the International School Seychelles, shares with us his personal reflection on the impact of extended school lockdowns on children.

Seychelles NATION: What are some of your thoughts, in general, about the effects of the school lockdowns on students and teachers?

Phil Brown: There’s a scene from Steven Soderbergh’s grimly prophetic thriller ‘Contagion’ (2011) that I’ve been thinking about a lot this year. At the end of the movie, when the pandemic has been quelled and the vaccinations are rolled out, there is a devastatingly touching scene in a family home.

Matt Damon, playing all-American Dad, invites his daughter’s (vaccinated) boyfriend to their house where he has set up a sort of mini-prom for the two of them. The teenage couple slow-dance, while Damon weeps upstairs for his lost wife. It’s an unbelievably well-delivered moment of sentiment in an otherwise fairly emotionless look at the spread of a virus.

I’ve been thinking about that scene a lot because of what it tells us about the children in our lives today, and about what lengths we will have to go to make up for all the special moments they have missed this year.

One of the great privileges of being a teacher is spending a life watching young people grow up in front of you. When you see someone every day for five years, you don’t always notice the little changes that set in as the child slowly disappears and makes way for the fully-grown person they are set to become. We notice these changes most after the long summer holidays, when they come back standing a little taller, their expressions a little more mature, their taste in music a little more refined.

This year, as none of us need reminding, has been very different. Three times now, we have seen our students disappear into their homes for weeks and months of online learning to return as changed people.

After years of telling children to cut down on screen time, fearful of what damage computers might do to young minds, society collectively made a U-Turn and got its young people to spend untold hours ‘e-learning’ as we all took shelter from the virus. Now, after a year of being intermittently told to stay away from each other, we are now sending our children back to their classrooms.

Students, teachers, families, communities... all of us are significantly altered by the events of 2020-21, and now we face the hard task of putting ourselves back together again. The studies of what long-term impact this will have are yet to be written. So for now, all we can do is observe.

Seychelles NATION: Can you share with us your personal experience of the school lockdowns?

Phil Brown: This week, my school reopened its gates to students, marking the end of our third extended school lockdown in 18 months.

Each time this happens we learn a little more about how to cope, and get a little bit better at making life carry on. The first time round there was a sort of apprehensive excitement as none of us quite knew what we were dealing with, or how long any of this would go on for.

We waited for life to click back to normal, and we set online activities for our students to complete. Somewhere amid it all, my family welcomed a daughter into the world… I remember driving home that night through the empty post-curfew roads of Victoria and explaining to a police officer why I was out of my house.

The second lockdown, the one that began around Christmas, certainly felt like the longest and the hardest. Teachers around the world were now much better with the technology and we taught our lessons as online video-conferences from whatever spare corner of our homes we could find.

A day of online lessons, for students and teachers alike, was every bit as exhausting as a day at school… often more so. By this point, we all realised how serious the situation was getting on the island… I remember those online classes being the only time I’d get to talk to people who weren’t wearing masks. Frantically, we prepared our students for exams, not knowing if they would even happen.

Then came the third lockdown – the one we are just poking our heads out from this week. In many ways the third one was the least daunting – our teachers and students are all veteran remote-learners now, and we have all found our rhythm for making it all fit together. The fact that it was all beginning to seem so normal also made it the most melancholic.

I was in the school building for most of our last school closure, as our Cambridge International examinations have still gone ahead. Looking at the empty sofas in the Sixth Form Common Room, the shelved books in the school library, the vacant benches in the playground, the silent instruments in the music suite, the untouched play-equipment in the Early Years centre, the packed-away science equipment in the laboratories, it is devastating to think of these things going unused for much of the last 18 months. To think of the memories that should have been made in each of these locations, but weren’t.

Seychelles NATION: You mentioned that because of the lockdowns, there are experiences which you feel the children have lost and which will not be replaced. Tell us more about this.

Phil Brown: Every inch of a school campus, intentionally or otherwise, is there to make learning moments happen for students and teachers alike. Whether it’s the first time your teacher shows you how to do multiplication, or the first time you prop up a wobbly desk by folding up a piece of card, or the first time you learn to understand Shakespeare, or the first time you learn the true meaning of friendship sat in the corner of the playing field having long conversations with your best friend. These are the building blocks of a life.

Schools are places where families leave their children day after day to face the challenges of the world by themselves. Places where they find their own solutions through structured tasks like drawing graphs, or chaotic tasks like deciding who to talk to. And, at the end of every day, schools send the children back to their families a little changed, a little more experienced, a little better equipped to take on tomorrow’s challenges.

Over the month of May I have really missed seeing the students in the classrooms straining their minds over how to resolve equations or unpack metaphors. But I’ve also missed seeing them in the spaces between lessons, deciding what conversations to have, or how they wish to present themselves to their peers, or which games to play.

I have no doubt that young people around the world will be able to catch up with any classroom content they may have missed this year. But I will always feel sad for their lost lunch-times and bus-rides and unplanned moments that make up so much of what makes a childhood rich and memorable. These are the things which catch-up classes or extended days could never replace.

The experiences that shape us are analog, sensory things – the smell of a chemical lingering in a science lab, the heft of a book, the crack of a bat hitting a ball, the ten hungry minutes before break-time begins, the feel of the loose soil in the school garden, the sound of several hundred clapping hands in a sports stadium.

Seychelles NATION: Would you like to share any words of advice to the students and to the educational community?  

Phil Brown: It is time to pluck ourselves out of a deeply digital year – a year where our entire curriculum was delivered through electronic devices in the stifling comfort of our homes, as we floated from computer to fridge to computer to fridge to bed and back again. It’s not going to be an easy road back for any of us.

I suppose what I want to say to young people returning to schools and colleges is this… it’s going to be pretty overwhelming going back to classes. In many ways it’s going to be deeply inconvenient. Someone will sit in your favourite seat, or you’ll be sat nearer to (or further from) the air-conditioner than you’d wanted, or the canteen will have run out of the thing you wanted, or there will be that one particular class that you just find unbelievably difficult, or you’ll be exhausted at having to deal with people in all their chaotic, unpredictable messiness. All of this while wearing masks and distancing ourselves and sanitising our hands at regular intervals.

It’s overwhelming and difficult, but it is also one of the most important things that we learn to do. Getting out into the world and being among each other, soaking up the company of your teachers and peers, is one of the most valuable ways we can get our lives and ourselves back this year.

We aren’t all natural extroverts, nor should we be. But we are all social creatures that benefit from one another. If you’re finding it tough being back among people, away from the comfy nest – that’s ok. But keep at it – the world needs you.

And if you are the person who is finding all this positive, easy and exciting – then go find the kid in your class who’s finding it hard. Tell them how glad you are to see them again. Let them know the world outside their house is a welcoming place for them.

And for the wider educational community, it’s crucial to think about the things that so many children have missed out on over these two years… whether it is school dances, work experience, sports days, assemblies, choir rehearsal, loaning library books, or simply being around one another without any fear.

For each of these things, let’s think about how important they are at shaping us into who we need to become and how we learn to deal with the world. And when it’s safe to do so, let’s find a way to give these things back to the young people who have already lost so much this year.

For everyone reading this having just spent the week going into school – make the most of it. If nothing else, we’ve all learned not to take such things for granted. Stay safe, stay learning and stay looking after one another. I wish you all the very best.

Compiled by F.P.