On Having Something to Say

At 10.20, she was scheduled to have an emergency.

Not a particular emergency. That would have required information she did not possess. She had simply allocated ten minutes to the unexpected, which was sensible when working with young children. The unexpected visited them regularly and had never once apologised for the inconvenience.

She had a system for everything now. One block, one task, one thought. Other thoughts were assigned to later blocks, where they waited without pulling at her sleeve.

It had taken years to achieve this. Her first weeks of teaching had felt like trying to dig the ocean. The ocean kept refilling itself and, quite frankly, seemed pleased about it. She had responded with systems. Then better systems. Then systems for remembering which systems worked.

Now she stayed ahead.

She worked hard. She never stopped. Stopping was her enemy. Stopping meant wasting useful minutes that could take a future burden off her shoulders. She planned ahead, she planned her planning time, then she planned some more. There was no room for chance. With this job that everyone underestimated, she had to stay on top. Or else, ocean.

These ten minutes had not been taken from another task. They had been saved for precisely this sort of thing. Sometimes it was a parent who arrived without an appointment. Sometimes it was her manager asking for a quick meeting during a supposedly class-free slot. Sometimes it was the principal asking for someone to present to high-stakes partners on the spot. She could not honestly complain about that last one. This was where she usually shone. She had worked out exactly how to do it. She was an excellent reporter of facts.

The emergency arrived at 10.17.

She was called to the art room because a child had hurt his hand. When she arrived, the playdough had just appeared on the tables. She led him into the corridor. He looked back at the playdough as he reached for her extended hand. It was his favourite.

“Miss? ¿Dónde vamos?”

“To the nurse’s office, sweetheart,” she answered gently. “She’s going to look at your hand, then give you a lollipop.”

The child smiled, then looked back. She gave his little arm a playful squeeze, and he leaned in, laughing.

What, did you think she was all firmness and rules? You guessed wrong. She was warm. She cared for these little ones. She had not even insisted that he ask in English. He was worried and what he needed in that moment was reassurance. Or so she thought.

This was unfortunate, because it allowed both of them to continue believing they had taken part in the same conversation.

The playdough, meanwhile, continued without him.

After the nurse had inspected his hand and produced the promised lollipop, she returned him to the art room and hurried to an unscheduled meeting about playground safety.

The meeting was described as a discussion. There was no discussion.

There were reminders. There were questions that were not questions. There were a few ‘without mentioning names’ accusations. She knew she was not the one being referred to. She had covered this a long time ago. The manager knew it too.

Keeping young children in one piece through a playground shift was no small achievement. Left to themselves, they would launch their bodies from the highest available surface and trust their imagination to negotiate with gravity.

The injured hand had not happened during her shift.

Obviously.

“Anyone have anything to say?” the manager asked.

This sentence had an unusual power. Before it reached the question mark, chairs began moving and bags appeared on shoulders. If someone did have something to say, they would be stared at sideways. The manager would stare first.

The meeting had served its purpose. People had been notified. Action had been taken. Very efficient. A waste of her time. Why should she waste time listening to this?

She did not stand up because she had never sat down.

This was one of her rules. She had discovered that it was much harder to relaunch from sitting than to remain on her feet. Even in meetings, she did not sit. She did not sit in the classroom while she brilliantly explained a language point. She did not sit while she checked the children’s classwork, organised her immaculate shelves or tallied the notebooks against the attendance list. She did not sit during playground shifts or when the children left for PE. She stayed on her feet, and everything stayed within reach: class organisation, activity preparation and a collection of time-pocket activities ready for the tired version of herself. She no longer thought about it. She just did it.

There would be plenty of time to sit at home, once tomorrow had been packed safely into blocks.

She had once read that Marion Bartoli trained with tennis balls taped to her heels to keep her on her toes. Bartoli won Wimbledon. There were no tennis balls taped to the teacher’s heels, but the principle was sound.

At the scheduled staff meeting later that day, everything was ready. She was praised for having the best homework and attendance records, excellent class management and creativity in her teaching.

She really was creative. She knew how to narrate, explain, demonstrate and transfer information brilliantly. Facts did not merely enter her classroom. They received an introduction and suitable visual support.

The children listened. They answered. They completed. They handed in.

The children also knew exactly what time the lesson ended.

No one ever needed reminding of that.

Their results were fine. Not miraculous, but this was a school, not Disneyland. Language learning did not materialise because someone had written fun in a lesson plan. She concentrated on what she could control and trusted the results to follow.

She had nothing against teachers who sat down. She had nothing against imagination, flexibility or activities invented in a flash of inspiration. She simply could not handle ambiguity. It was not how her mind worked. She worked better with rigour, systems, discipline and knowing exactly where she was going with each activity.

Then the meeting moved on to motivation.

And inspiration.

And teacher well-being.

Each word opened a question. Wrong block. She packed them away again.

What did they know about her well-being? She arrived prepared. She delivered what was required. She gave them exactly what they wanted. She got the job done.

Of course she had questions. A thousand silent lonely questions.

She had questions about the syllabus. Preferences for topics. Doubts about the sequence. She had questions whether any of it was working. She had questions about why some classes worked on Tuesday and collapsed on Wednesday. She had questions about whether she was tired, ungrateful, inadequate, excellent or simply still discovering the secret.

Experience had not quieted the questions. It had taught her how to keep teaching while they waited. To ask even one might threaten the system she had worked so hard to build, the same system that had returned the favour by giving her a firm grasp on this impossible job.

But did she had plenty to say. Is anyone who repeats slogans about well-being really interested to know whether she was actually well or, God forbid, happy? It seemed that the only people genuinely interested in what she had to say were the thirty little ones in her class.

“Anyone have anything to say?” the manager asked.

The teachers stood. The meeting had ended. Coffee was available elsewhere.

They moved towards the door like students in a classroom waiting for break.

Like students in a classroom.

Students. In a classroom.

The students in her classroom knew where to move, what task to do, how to ask permission, how to complete a grammar exercise, how to study for dictation, who was rewarded and when, and what time the lesson ended.

Yes, they knew exactly what time the lesson ended.

No one ever needed reminding of that.

A beautifully put-together surface. A useful one. It kept things visible. But it was still only a surface.

The children did want to hear what she had to say. And perhaps, if she spoke to them as though language were for saying things, they might begin to do the same.

She had asked them hundreds of practice questions. They produced correct sentences. She could not remember the last answer that had actually surprised her, moved her, or even saddened her. She could not remember the last time she had told them something she had not planned to say either.

And because she knew this was not Disneyland, she did not expect them simply to open up. She needed to find out what went on in their world beyond the tasks she had set.

Naturally, she made a plan.

Playground duty would not help. She spent it preventing children from testing the structural integrity of their skulls. She needed a place where she was responsible for neither the activity nor its result. Somewhere she could watch, just watch.

Fortunately, she had ten minutes reserved for the unexpected.

She returned to the art room.

The child from earlier was at his table, his good hand buried happily in the playdough. The other children smiled when they saw her. They loved her. This had never been the problem.

She caught the art teacher’s eye.

“Can I sit with you while you do art?” she asked the children.

Then, for the first time that school year, she sat down.

• She had built the system from thought. Thought kept going.

• She had been telling them who she was all year. She had used shelves, timetables and an emergency at 10.20. Her words will now follow.

• The children had always had room for her. She had finally decided to give the room ten minutes.

• A child can laugh and still be looking back.

• Bartoli trained with tennis balls taped to her heels. Federer seemed to have sweet-talked the laws of physics into carrying him. They both won Wimbledon.

• The clock had stopped. Even she couldn’t fit a nurse, two meetings and an existential crisis into three minutes.

• A microphone can amplify a teacher’s voice. It cannot give her one.