Distraction Lizard

 Phew! We did it! We made it to the end of term. It looked a bit touch and go there for a while. Some schools will have been Pingdemiced into finishing before the end but we survived. I can’t pretend it’s been easy. A very difficult 18 months of teaching and worrying is over for 6 weeks. We all hope that when we go back in September we will be able to do our jobs in the way we know. None of us are holding our breath on that one but at least we can have a few weeks of not having to worry. The headteacher won’t have to write a new risk assessment for at least 5 weeks.

Last days are always emotional. The leaving assembly had all the children singing together (outside) for the first time in 18 months. There are always tears. Parents are proud and sad and their children flip-flop between being ready to leave and wanting to stay forever. A school on the last day fizzes with unwanted emotion, in the way the air is filled with electrical charge during a thunderstorm. Some overly sensitive people can walk though the corridors and take on those discarded feelings.

School staff then become responsible for keeping those feelings in the right people. This is always a challenge, on the hottest day of the year when they are also trying to clean up the classroom, shred confidential documents, take displays down from walls and wade through their own treacle-like puddle of tiredness. 

This hot weather brings the lizards out to play. In Maldon we have a lot of common lizards in the grass verges. Lacerta vivipara is a small brown lizard that gives birth to live young in August (rather than laying eggs) and enjoys hot sunny days when it comes out to sunbathe. A little known fact* about these lizards is that they are particularly attracted to the kind of fizzing energy I’ve just described. Yesterday, one of these lizards made it into the school.

“We’ve seen a lizard!” 

“There’s a lizard!”

“Go and look. It’s a lizard!”

A corridor of excited children greeted me. The lizard had been taken out to the wildlife area once already, after nearly being flattened by an older child who was struggling to deal with someone else’s discarded disappointment. However, drawn in by the electricity of emotion it had already made it back and was having a short rest, basking in the sun on the wall outside the door. 

“Can we pull it’s tail off?” 

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Once the children go home there is a chance for the staff to relax. Pizza and drinks on the field felt like a huge treat in a year where we have barely been able to see our colleagues, keeping to our bubbles to protect the children’s education. It might have got a little loud and sweary. One of the great difficulties of working in a school is that there is so much that makes you want to say, “Are you actually shitting me?” but you can’t. There’s a build up and then the children leave. Those words have to go somewhere.

Once they were all out of the way there was a discussion about how useful the lizard had actually been in dissipating some of the energy and acting as a distraction. Some wise person then said, “The trouble is, you can’t always have a distraction lizard!”

That is a shame. 

I hope my colleagues and all the children have a fantastic ping-free summer. I’m now going to catch up on the Dominic Cummings interview.

The government’s own distraction lizard

*little known because I made it up.