A FUNNY OLD YEAR
Reflections of a day student
Clockwise from top left : Covid testing in the sports hall ; rehearsing in masks ; social distancing ; performing to an empty hall ; cleaning hands at one of the school ’ s 500 sanitisers ; rehearsing in demarcated areas .
When we all returned to school in September for the first time since the end of March , enjoying having a reason to go somewhere and laughing at each other ’ s self-inflicted bald patches and weird new interests in breadmaking and birdwatching , I remember hearing my Biology teacher talking about how she ’ d put all the lessons in OneNote ‘ in case we go back into lockdown ’, and laughing it off . After all the missed exams and summer projects , it all seemed so completely behind us . I mean , we ’ d just been through half a year of lockdown , surely there couldn ’ t be any more ?
The first sign that something was different was the lunch queue . Under the old lunch system , the Sixth Formers always seemed to be last and therefore got to enjoy messy tables and long wait times while the Middle School took all the good pudding . Social distancing brought us the draughty dining marquee right outside the Dining Hall on Jockey ’ s Platch where we could cram all the lower years and retake the hall as our own . Clearly nature is healing and the natural order of things is returning !
After term finished for Christmas and we enjoyed the holidays , all certain that we ’ d left our pandemic worries in 2020 , disaster struck . Every few days there ’ d be a worried text from Grandma about the new lockdown rules and a few hours after that a hurried email from the Headmaster about the expected arrangements . Plunging back into distance learning in January with only a few days ’ notice was horrible , of course , as I discussed with my friends for the brief interludes in remote lessons where we were placed in breakout rooms and able to talk to each other in the offhand , spontaneous way we would at school .
Distance learning on Teams and OneNote presented challenges : I myself have sometimes failed to receive worksheets for weeks and had hours ’ worth of notes mysteriously vanish . However , as any remote-learning student knows , there are benefits to the system too – while ‘ the dog ate my homework ’ is a tried-and-true classic , it can ’ t hold a candle to the sweet plausible deniability of ‘ my OneNote didn ’ t upload properly ’. If my Physics teacher happens to be reading this , though , I can assure you I wasn ’ t making it up – it really wasn ’ t working that one time .
One thing keeping my class going through the terrors of the Lent term was the heroic effort of the teachers to keep us entertained . Whether it was a toddler interrupting my Russian lesson to show us her revolutionary new ‘ adding machine ’ made entirely out of a cornflakes box , or logging into juggling club at breaktime to watch my tutor throw balls around her office hopelessly ( my tutor is , coincidentally , the editor of this article and would like you , dear reader , to know that her juggling skills have improved and this is nothing short of a gross mischaracterisation ), there was always something to wipe the vacant stare off my face for a few minutes . In fact as the term progressed I noticed I was getting a kind of Stockholm syndrome , quite enjoying being able to roll out of bed and into tutor group , safe behind the knowledge that my wifi ‘ wasn ’ t good enough ’ to turn on my camera .
Since I began writing this review , we have thankfully managed to return to school to an extent . Sure , we have to retch through lateral flow tests twice a week and at one point had to deal with the weird ghosttown atmosphere of school when half our year was in isolation , and it has been irritating to have some of the boarders in your class stuck video calling on an iPad , but in return we have been able to enjoy all the things we might have taken for granted earlier . Personally , I was over the moon to be able to return to the shooting range and get back to seeing my friends around school . I can ’ t say this academic year was fun , but I can give a wholehearted thank you to every one of my teachers , wider staff and classmates who contributed to it being less awful , and I hope that next year we ’ ll have collectively erased it from memory . Except all the education , of course . That should probably stay .
Spruce Campbell , Lower Sixth
SEVENOAKS SCHOOL 2020-2021 9