Seasons of change

In Australia, this week marked the formal end of summer. Days are getting shorter, and daylight saving (for those who have the opportunity) will cease in less than a month. Rather than starting to become discernibly cooler, strangely, many parts of the country are sweltering under the duress of some of the hottest temperatures for well over a year, temperatures rarely experienced across this last summer when teachers, school leaders, and students were actually on holidays and might possibly have enjoyed these much more! The year is changing its expression…or certainly will do so in the near future.

Keeping students engaged in learning through 35+ degree temperatures can present quite a range of challenges, depending on location. For some, it’s a natural part of the cycle of seasons of life, to be embraced – summer gives way to autumn and then winter, heat makes way for cool, blossoms fall away. For others, tropical climates have a different rhythm, and high temperatures and humidity are ever-present and thus quite unremarkable – in such circumstances, school uniforms with blazers (endemic in Australian schools) seem quite incongruous above the latitudes of the tropics. Provision of air-conditioning is not the whole solution, either, because it presumes that climate control to ensure classes are all 22 degrees is a necessary precondition of effective learning. It’s a questionable, although understandable, assumption. Educators in various hot and cold climate extremes may beg to differ about the respective impact of climate, suggesting answers might require more sophistication.

Regardless of your context (and climate!), it's extraordinary to think we are already halfway through this first term. How has it been so far? What’s going well? What causes frustration? What’s to be celebrated? What furrows your brow?

Half-term has other traditions which might also prove beneficial to this week’s reflection. A tradition in boarding schools is a mid-term break which provides for a long weekend around this time. After five or six weeks away from family and the hopeful comforts of home, boarding students would decant from the rigours and strictures of their boarding house and head home for rusticated weekends. Few schools continue with such a tradition, and it certainly seems quite incongruous to a day school which has never had boarders, yet it seems one that, symbolically, might still be worth considering more closely. For the vast majority of teachers, leaders, and students, a long weekend away from the demands of school in the middle of Term 1 is not likely to happen. But could the offer of a mid-term break, or what boarding schools may still refer to as exeunt (everyone leaves!), be an opportunity to recalibrate ourselves for the remainder of the term, even if it is only symbolic rather than realised?

Have I taken time to check how my term is going? If so, what insights have I gained? If not, what is stopping me from doing so?

Day to day pressures to perform can distract us from setting aside time to reflect on what we do and why we do it. Is there something to be done to remove those distractions? And, on an assumption that many of you may respond that “I cannot change anything about my circumstances” (because the administrative demands of your circumstance prohibit this), what can I change about myself in this situation?

Perhaps there are insights to be gained from another concept identified with the changing of seasons, that of cornucopia, especially its connotation of abundance. Naturally speaking, food does not appear only when we want it. It is seasonal, regional, local, and connected to its community (you could also check back in with Alain de Botton on this from earlier this term). This is something many of us have learned again more recently, to our embarrassment, from our land’s first peoples. For them, seasonal change of flora and fauna, including the sea country, is assumed; the land and the waters change, and so too must diet. Do we?

Yet food is not just something merely to be ingested – it is something to be savoured, to be enjoyed. It is to be enjoyed, though, seasonally, says food philosopher Michael Pollan (2009). Summer foods, like melons and avocadoes, give way to autumnal joys such as apples, oranges, and pears, while winter brings such delights as broccoli, leek, and peas (again, many of which are exotic to the Australian landscape, but not necessarily our diet). We have become accustomed to getting any foodstuff we want whenever we want it; such is the logistical miasma of contemporary supermarket approaches to consumption. Smelling and tasting the dynamics of seasons are different experiences altogether; as UK (French?) chef, Michel Roux, explains, there are “joys of eating food in its season”.

What is it in my current educational season that is unique? Special? To be savoured?

Many of us may not be able to exeunt, but perhaps we can carve out some time to reflect on what currently makes this term, or this year, significant…memorable…challenging…remarkable…forgettable...unique...or anything else (please feel free to add your description in the comments)?

Further reading

Pollan, M. (2009). In defense of food. Penguin Books.