Principal Report

I write this week’s Principal’s Report with the knowledge that as of next week I no longer have to work in my shed. For that alone, I am extremely thankful. Like many of you may have realised, working from home isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. 

As we come to the end of this period of remote and online learning, and welcome (gradually) the return of a staff and students to our school, I thought I’d take stock of the experience, and give a bit of a personal perspective of what working from home has meant for me and my family. 

First, as many of you know, the Neall family is very much an ‘Edenhope College’ family. Both Kat and I work there, of course, and all of our kids are students at the College. So each day of remote and online learning was almost a disaster about to happen. Each. And. Every. Day.

Once we were up, first there were the arguments about getting dressed. Apparently, there was no need for daytime clothes at all. So that was the first argument of the day.

Sometimes I had to have the argument with the kids, too.

Then, we had to work out what each student was going to do that day (and just as a sidenote, flexible learning – introduced by Week 3 – was a godsend for us). For us, and probably for many of you at home, this began with us looking for the various print outs of work and lesson schedules provided by the staff at the College, which had usually only been printed the day prior but were now already lost. We would then print them up again (side note: we should get a pin board or sticky tape these things to the wall – wait, who was the last one with the sticky tape?). Take two…

Kind of…

Then there would be the arguments about which pieces of work, or activities, had been done, were required by the teachers, were optional, could have been done but ‘I can’t remember’, or were apparently not necessary because ‘no one else in the class had done it’ and so on. We are already at 9:30 in the morning, and now Kat has a class to run online, and my email feed/phone messages/Webex conversations are piling up.

At 9:35, one of the kids asks if it’s recess yet. Yes, sure, go for it, I say. Leave me alone for a minute.

Then, and only then, I get out to the back of my shed, from where I’ve been trying to run the College over the past two months. Here’s a picture of the current ‘Principal’s Office’:

Not flash at all. Note the fly spray – needed constantly to eradicate unwanted visitors. Sometimes used on insects as well. 

From here I try to run Webex meetings, and also record Webex Lessons for my history elective. By the way, I’m sorry to my class for just how boring those lessons were. It’s not natural for me to try to teach to a camera. In fact, I think just for that reason alone, many of our staff are looking forward to teaching to real people, in real classrooms, with real faces…

I realised pretty early in the term that my internet didn’t work well in the shed. So, on multiple occasions during the day, I have to go back in to the house, where five different kids are studying five different subjects, and Kat is also teaching a class, all from the kitchen table. Now I need to run a meeting. Time to find another room…

This is every day for the past six weeks. I assume that for those playing at home, it wasn’t much different.

The whole world has been changed by the COVID 19 pandemic. We are fortunate that in Victoria, the steps taken to limit its spread have been so effective. Severe, maybe, but nevertheless, they have clearly worked. Up to now. 

We have to remain vigilant, and remain alert to the possibility that we may have to return to working from home in the future.

As we celebrate welcoming students and staff back to tour classrooms, I will be encourage both staff and students to consider what we have learnt over the last couple of months, and what we can take forward with us. The use of online platforms should not be easily forgotten, and we should make sure we consider how we can continue to provide continuation of learning for our students in case we have to return to online learning. Even if we don’t, the skills that our staff have learned over the last few weeks will help us provide more learning opportunities for our students in the future, better connections with our students and families, and the ability to work closely with other schools in our network in providing subject choice and teacher availability at the higher levels of learning. 

Today, I published protocols for returning to school for both our staff and students. As parents, you will have seen the student protocols on our Facebook site, and as a news item on XUNO. Please take some time to go through those protocols with your children. They exist to keep them safe, and the staff at the College safe also. Some of the protocols may seem extreme, but we need to remember that we are not out of this crisis yet.

I look forward to seeing some of our students (ears Foundation to 2, and Years 11 and 12) on Tuesday. Please remember that Monday 25 May is a pupil free day.

Have a great weekend!

Jon Neall

Principal

22.05.2020