"Can I go now? I've got to go to see Hope-Simpson," I asked my PE teacher who was teaching us Physics.
"May I go to see Mr Hope-Simpson," she replied, raising a carefully drawn-on eyebrow at me.
"Well you can if you want but I'm pretty certain he wants to see me for careers advice."
A hush filled the room and I instantly felt stupid. I hadn't really intended to be sassy. A normally quiet girl who never wanted to be in trouble for anything, I had just got hung up on the inflection of what she had said. Obviously, I knew what she was saying but my reply just popped out. In my head I thought I was in huge trouble but I think she just told me to go, after a sharp intake of breath.
When I got to the deputy headteacher, who was an actual legend, he told me that I could do anything I wanted to do. I had broad interests and a good spread of probably good O levels to come.
"Just follow your interests," he said.
Well now that I'm older and I've been following my interests for a while I can see that he might not have given me the best advice.
My butterfly mind can't sit still. It flits from one subject to the next. One moment I'm interested in Victorian bonnets and the next I'm wanting to know more about how the different coronavirus vaccines are made. I start to make a cake and while it's in the oven knit an ear saver for nurses. I check Twitter for something to get outraged about, see the cream egg advert and start to look at adverts for chocolate where men break into strange women's bedrooms or women in a bath suck off a flake. Oh, listen there's a bird in my garden I've never heard before. I have 3 books on the go and am desperate to walk somewhere new.
I always feel that I should pin it down and stop it wandering. Could I have achieved more in life if I had been able to stick to one subject at a time?
Today marks the start of the second week of remote learning in Lockdown 3. Parent's are beginning to feel the pressure of forcing their children to focus on a lesson for that long.
"Is it reasonable to expect a 7 year old to independently log onto Zoom and have pens and paper ready by 9am each morning?" a parent on Twitter asks hopefully.
Of course it isn't. But apparently it is reasonable to expect the parent to have set them up by 9am.
This is the government's fault. Schools are to be prosecuted if they don't provide the education but there is no way of doing this for a 7 year old that works. Our school makes videos (don't even talk about how time consuming that is), so that parents can get their children to watch them when it's appropriate. I saw a different headteacher complain that the parents at his school had decided they didn't like videos and wanted live zoom lessons so that the teachers could be responsible for watching what the children did, rather than the parent. You can't please everyone.
My job, at the moment, is to make pastoral care phone calls. I ring and check everyone is getting on ok with the videos. Before I make the calls I watch the videos that have been set for the day, so that I can give pointers about how to complete the work. I'll confess that with my butterfly mind, I can't watch a whole lesson in one go.
That's right.
I'm a grown up and I can't watch a whole video.
They're not boring lessons. They are very well done but I can't seem to get through a whole one without getting side tracked.
The big problem with having this kind of mind is that everything takes so much longer but it’s ok because I don’t sleep very well and so was able to start my day at 4.30am.
You could think of it as a bad thing but aren't butterflies so much more beautiful when they are flying freely then when they are pinned in a display case?
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