Compromises
In my last blog I shared with you how challenging I had found the first couple of weeks of working from home. I am sure you could sense the frustration that, despite being a professional, trained and experienced educator, I wasn’t ‘nailing’ home schooling when combined with working full time from home.
I ended my blog by trying to focus on the good things, the lessons I had learned and the small wins I needed to be grateful for. I’ve tried to maintain that positive mindset. I can’t say it got much easier over the Easter holidays. The reality was that, without school offering any structure, Matty gravitated mostly towards screens. Despite the wonderful weather, he wasn’t keen on spending a great deal of time outside without me prompting him. By prompting I mean, enforced dog walking. In my role as Head of Pastoral and Head of Key Stage before that, your daughters will tell you how much time I’ve spent warning them about the ‘dangers’ on too much screen time. But at home, it is a battle, and I am largely the bad guy limiting online gaming and nagging them to get their faces out of their phones.
And now Eddie, my 11 year old step-son who lives with us on alternate weeks, has a phone. The idea is to get him to become more digitally aware in the run up to starting high school in September. I’m actually led to believe we are a year behind with this and the average age for a child to get their first phone is 10 in Britain. For me, the greatest advantage of him having a phone is safety. We will be able to contact him and vice versa when he begins walking to and from school and when he ultimately starts ‘playing out’ (do kids play out anymore?) with his friends. However, I’m worried about exposing him to the perils of the online world. Screen addiction, social media and FOMO (fear of missing out), online bullying. I’ve been really fortunate in the respect that neither of my two older boys have experienced online bullying (to my knowledge…) and Matty actually finds social media intrusive and so largely ignores it. I’ve seen the 100’s of unopened notifications on his apps! His friends must find him very frustrating but I like that he’s not got FOMO. I have. I compulsively check my social media and pride myself in the speed by which I respond to messages, emails, etc… But should I be proud of that or am I a slave to it? The truth is, I’m missing human contact. I work in a job where I am surrounded by people all day every day and I have realised that I am happiest in SP4 (my teaching room) with your daughters. It is so much fun to spend an hour with a bunch of people with different personalities, sense of humour, talking about a subject that I love. I’m NOT going to over-analyse that realisation and what that says about me as a mum!
Zoom – I love seeing their faces. I love their smiles and I love their questions. I love that they have kept their enthusiasm and friendliness. But it is not the same. It can get awkward, not least because I feel like I talk to much. But I’m so grateful for Zoom. It gives me a window of opportunity to spend time in the company of a group of people who I genuinely love spending time with. Teaching is a pleasure. Sure, there are days when it is very difficult, not least the pastoral aspects of working with teenage girls. But at least I was a teenage girl once, the mind of a teenage boy is just a mystery to me… But on the whole, I know I’m in the right job know. And I do have a frame of referencing having worked in retail management straight out of uni and then spending 10 years working as a corporate training manager in financial services. This is the best job I’ve ever had.
Anyway, I digress…Eddie and his phone and my philosophy about screen time. I went to a child protection conference where one of the presenters said something that has really ‘stuck’ with me. That is, we need to realise that our children are digital natives. They have grown up in a digital world and understand it, including its risks, often better than we give them credit for. We, on the other hand, are largely digital immigrants having spent most of our lives in a different world to the one we now find ourselves in. To us, this new digital landscape can be frightening and strange to inhabit. I know that’s a sweeping generalisation and not true of everyone but I can certainly see some logic in those terms. Now we have the challenge of back-tracking on some of what we have said to our children about limiting screen time which weakens the argument when you’re trying to tell them to get off their iPad or phone at 10pm. But we are in a new environment, hopefully not for much longer, where we do have to admit that we need screens. We need them for our schooling, our work, our social connections, more than we are probably comfortable with. So, in that case, our other messages to our children still ring true but with some unavoidable compromises to get us through this period. They need to take care of what they are doing and what they are seeing even more so because they will be spending more time than normal online but they need to embrace the opportunity to hone their skills and use new software and platforms like Zoom that will be a really useful tool in the world of work, as we have learned! They need to avoid social media during lesson times because working from home comes with enough of its own distractions but they need to stay in touch with their friends and use the methods at their disposal to help each other. This is the time when we need to find a new balance and reach a new compromise between the ideal approach and the, quite frankly, surreal situation we find ourselves in.
So, when Eddie arrives today, I’m going to tell him I think he is doing a great job with his grammatically correct, and factual text messaging, in the hope of delaying the slip into emojis as the main means of communicating. And, I’m going to get him to show me how to make my first ever Tik Tok, because apparently, that’s what all the cool teachers are doing and I have FOMO about it!
I wish you luck with navigating through the screen time debate, may the odds be ever in your favour!
Lorraine Jones
Head of Pastoral