From the Head of School

 

Time for the less efficient

I passed by a colleague in the corridor earlier this week: she was carrying an iron and ironing board; ‘Why the iron?’ I asked.  We both laughed about not having enough time to do the ironing, and she explained that, with Grade 12 courses coming to an end, there was time to provide life skill lessons.  Today was ‘ironing’, which had followed ‘finding a flat’, with ‘opening a bank account’ ready for a later session.

Meeting my colleague was an unplanned moment, a mixture of the informal - are own ironing habits - and the professional - extra activities for the Grade 12s.  Before the pandemic I would not have been so aware of these incidental moments, certainly not how essential they are.  

Of course, we continued to meet during lockdown, but the meetings had agendas and set times and were all very efficient.  So many of our technological solutions to pandemic restrictions were efficient.  But communities can’t just be efficient; they need room for the spontaneous and the unexpected.  For relationships to be productive, they must also be social.  We are never just professionals.

Over the last six weeks we have come back to school, started our activities programme and from next week will start having trips.  It is easy to think of these things as ‘extras’; indeed, during lockdown they were the first to go.  But when they did, they no longer felt like extras - like another lump of sugar in our tea, nice to have but we could do without; the longer we went on without them, the more we realised how important they were.

We need to find time in life for things that don’t have a stated objective: unproductive time, casual meetings, chance remarks.  We are social beings whose natural habitat is the group.  It was so good last Friday to see students during High School Field Day just take joy in each others’ company: the actual physical presence of classmates.

My colleague with the ironing board wasn’t delivering a curriculum, she was responding to questions and concerns.  Our meeting wasn’t scheduled, but was a chance opportunity for me to find out more about the school’s diversity.  I am looking forward to more opening up to human randomness in the next few months.