The Road to Claremont Pier
Tags: Teaching, Lockdown, Poverty, Books, Lowestoft

My 2020 Reading List

For around 5 months of 2020 I couldn’t read anything. Half of the books in this image were read before the end of March and the world locked down. Then, for months, nothing. In spite of the added time — or maybe because of it — I was unable to focus on a single book, or a single page. I’d read a paragraph, and then look up to the rolling news. I’d re-read the paragraph as nothing sunk in, and then check the notifications on my phone. Was it 2pm yet? Had today’s statistics been released? To the next paragraph, but let me just check WhatsApp first, and how is the online learning going? Ah, another student email. Let me just answer that before I carry on. And repeat.

My lockdown was better than some. I have no kids, no rampaging toddlers that need attention while on a Zoom call, no competing priorities. But as someone who lives alone, it came with added isolation. Usually this is something I enjoy, but without the team spirit of my brilliant humanities department and the daily entertainment of hundreds of teenagers, it was tougher than expected. The void opened up, and in went Tiger King, The Office and Mad Men. This lasted most of spring and early summer and scratched at the surface of something deeper: that my mental health was being affected. As someone who has thrown themselves into their work ever since teacher training, I felt both busier and less connected to it. What helped to get me back on track was the chance to work on something bigger than my own narrow horizons, and that was Oak National Academy, something I am very thankful to have been asked to do, and proud to have been part of.

Climbing back into something that resembled normalcy, I also began reading Citizen Clem. This was part of a trend. In 2020, I read more politically than before. With the exception of White Heat and Things Fall Apart, none of the books had anything to do with lesson planning, curriculum or school. No education books. Following the 2019 election, my focus has been on how we got to this point. Recent political history, like All Out War and Fall Out, are entertaining first-drafts of history but while the author is well sourced on Conservative issues, my interest is on the left. This has driven so much of what I’ve read this year. Citizen Clem reminded me what a credible leader of the British left once looked like. Attlee was rooted in his community and what concerned the working class in the first half of the 20th century. But more impressive than his vision was his character. Calm in a crisis, expertly managing the egos in his party, and recognising where the excesses of the revolutionary left would actually hurt the working classes that he represented.

I followed this up with Left Out and Beyond the Red Wall and crashed back to the present day. I serve a community that was Labour until 2010, but now is solidly Conservative. It is, statistically, the most deprived ward in the county. Our students have challenges that would turn your hair white and some of their lockdown experiences reinforce why we have to try everything possible to never again go back to that. And yet, in 2019, this community voted overwhelmingly against Labour. To me, it wasn’t hard to see why, and while we’re nowhere near the ‘Red Wall’, the experiences expressed in that excellent book resonate in many other areas. An educational divide. A values divide. A feeling that Labour had forgotten about them. If Attlee is one political compass point, then George Orwell can be found in that same direction, and the modern left is everything Orwell rolled his eyes at in the The Road to Wigan Pier. You hope, when you serve a community like this one, that has seen cut after cut, that has students who struggle to access remote learning because of a lack of technology, that 2020 will help Labour and the left come to terms with this.

A question I’ve been asked by students before is ‘Why do you bother working here?’ Of all the places I could apparently work — why work in a town like this? Why live in a town like this out of choice? Spend years being left-behind, of seeing jobs lost, parents unemployed, crime and poverty, and the lack of pride becomes internalised. I wish I knew, or any politicians knew, the way out of that hole, but the pandemic year has reinforced for me the need to be part of the solution. Anyone who works in a school in a deprived area already is. Teaching has always given me a sense of purpose and lord was I happy to be back in school in September. But while we already lived in an unequal society, the impact of the pandemic is going to add even more hurdles for the kids that our school serves, and at the end of the day, individual teachers and schools can only do so much. Schools, fingers in the dam while the cracks grow wider, are only part of the solution. What’s the rest?