One of my senior colleagues said that this has been the best few weeks of his career! 

There may be the frustration of teaching or being taught in a non-specialist classroom; physical exhaustion from colleagues lugging sets of books across the campus from zone to zone.

However, with three weeks behind us, I am genuinely so pleased to be back and so pleased with how term has started – above all so pleased that we are all together on site. And what have I enjoyed most about the term so far? The answer is easy – teaching History! I don’t teach much (they don’t let me and I am probably fairly rusty), just one class of hapless Year 8 boys, for a meagre two lessons a week. But it is just so good to be back in the classroom. It helps, of course, that we have been studying Henry VII, perhaps my favourite of all kings and such an enormously underrated monarch. As one of my students put it yesterday, ‘he was not the king that England wanted, but he was the king that England needed.’ Pure genius.

A few years ago, the International Boys’ School Coalition ran a worldwide research project to identify what it is that makes a ‘Master Teacher.’ They asked the leading boys’ schools across the world to identify exceptional practitioners who were then observed, interviewed and interrogated to try and understand what it was they had in common – what were the ingredients that make a great teacher? This was trumpeted as a potentially revolutionary project. However, the results were largely unhelpful as they suggested that, in reality, these ‘Master Teachers’ had remarkably little in common. They approached teaching in different ways, had different personalities and styles - proof, if ever it was needed, that teaching is an art and not a science, something that is instinctive, intuitive and deeply personal.

But there was one thing that the ‘Master Teachers’ all had in common; situational awareness. This is the ability to read the room, to pick up cues, to understand body language; to know which pupils understand and which are lost; who is about to become distracted and who most needs some warm words of encouragement to sustain them. It’s about knowing what is going to happen before it happens, about knowing the pupils in some ways better than they know themselves.

Remote teaching was engaging and useful, and it might even be possible for me to convey my heartfelt adoration of Henry VII (the great founder of the Tudor dynasty, the bringer of peace and stability after years of turmoil. I’ll stop now, you get the point...) But, for all the benefits of Zoom, this sixth sense, this crucial awareness of the thoughts and feelings that exist within the room and among the students was so hard to replicate or substitute. And it is this experience of being ‘in the room where it happens’ that I have missed the most. By the way, if anyone reading this is considering a career change, teaching is the best job in the world, especially when you get to work with such bright, enquiring and creative minds.