As some of you might know if we have worked together, I am as passionate about music as I am about teaching.  When I was full time in the classroom, I used music to punctuate the day, signal it was pack up time, bring the mood up or calm it down. I wasn’t great with discipline or ‘classroom management’ so singing was the best way I knew to bring a fractious group together, to move on from a challenging moment, celebrate successes and build a sense of community.  Music remains such an incredibly important part of my life and I have been struck by the way so many musicians have used their art to make sense of the experience of lockdown. There has been some extraordinary work produced in this time. Like all the arts, music is a way to both make and express meaning - and ‘making meaning’ during 2020 has been a challenge and a gift.  

 One song in particular caught my attention recently. Missy Higgins is a well known singer songwriter here in Australia. She recently released a song “When the Machine Starts”. You can listen or watch here.  As my home town of Melbourne emerges from lockdown and months of remote teaching, we join the rest of the country in returning to school albeit in a “covid-normal” way.  Listening to Missy’s song conjured up an image in my mind of the ‘machine’ that can be our schools. It reminded me of the Leunig cartoon below:

For a period of time, some (not all, I know) learners and teachers have felt they have had a reprieve from what Huberman once described as ‘the classroom press’: the machine. 

In her song, Missy pleads, “When the Machine starts will you remind me? I saw the truth once…Please don’t let me forget.”  It got me wondering about those lessons we all felt we had learned during lockdown and remote teaching. What have we done with the gold we mined from our experience of remote learning? What did we promise ourselves we would relinquish, restore and renew on return?   I have had SO many conversations about these things, and they include:

• More choice for learners

• More opportunities for learners to plan aspects of their day

• Smaller, more focussed teaching groups

• Stronger connections with families and home life

• More ongoing reporting through seesaw and other digital platforms

• More team work – genuine collaboration with colleagues

• More trust in our learners. Get out of their way! 

• More use of digital technologies to enhance creative collaboration and sharing of learning

• A slower more thoughtful pace

  Many teachers returned to school exhausted by the remote teaching experience BUT also committed to taking what they had discovered back to the classroom – determined to do things differently.  So now, I am wondering….did we?  Are we? Will we?  What’s changed?  Have we had the courage to resist the inevitable spinning of the wheels, the acceleration of speed, the frenzied, fragmented rush that is the anti-learning pace of so many classrooms?   

  I am not saying that the remote experience was preferable for teaching – far from it. BUT it did offer us some lessons we were determined to remember.  It revealed to many of us some new truths about ourselves, our children, our families – about what it means to teach and what it means to learn.   For some of us it was simply an intense reminder of all that is good and beautiful about meeting with young people face to face on a day to day basis and that we would never take those beautiful faces for granted again! For others it opened new doors to thinking about how we can design for more powerful learning.  Regardless of the lessons we learned, how can we help ourselves remember -  when the machine starts up again?

When the machine starts up again
Will I forget what it’s like to be standing here looking up, drinking in the sky?

When the machine starts
Will you remind me
I saw the truth once
I saw it floating in the air

• Oh, don’t let me forget
  Don’t let me forget
  Don’t let me forget

  When the machine starts up again
  When the machine starts up again
  When the lockdown ends
  And the speed is picking up
  Will you remind me, darling
  What it felt like just to stop

• Lyrics By Missy Higgins, 2020. Missy Higgins - 'When The Machine Starts' Stream / Download: https://MissyHiggins.lnk.to/TheMachineID