I love the picture above. I love the fact that the teacher, sitting behind the security of her desk, seems to be serenely planning her great escape, with her passport ready to go and a stash of brochures piled in her drawer. The plan of the boat in front of her suggests that she is choosing which cabin she's going to book on the cruise that's going to take her far, far away from the four walls of the classroom and out into the big wide world.

Far away from the bored children, the rows of  desks and desk-bell which I can only assume children come up and press if they want her attention. The girl in the red dress is lost in a day dream while the boy at the back looks lost in boredom. The whole scene seems to summarise our classrooms today too, with children and teachers increasingly disconnected from their experience.

Teachers may have moved on from wearing a lovely party dress to teach in and certainly don't find spare time in the day (or evening for that matter) to plan holidays or even what to eat that evening, but the disconnection is still there. To my mind it all comes back to time: time to reflect, to breathe, to truly make time itself. Our educational experience today seems insistent on time being something that has to be crammed full of marking, meetings, assessments, planning, performance management, learning walks. book scrutiny, mock-steds, homework club, on and on and on. 

It means that we find less and less time for ourselves on a personal and professional level but equally less and less time for the one group of people who really do need our time: parents. 

So, 2019 gets underway and inevitably the majority of us begin a new year with a sense of looking forward, with plans both personal and professional and with a belief that betterment and positive development can come our way.

For the first few weeks we burn bright with optimism’s flame and then for most of us, Life seems to remind us that actually we’ve possibly over-egged our sense of what is achievable and that dreams and hopes are just that.

Maybe that’s just me but I have a feeling that I’m not alone...

One of the factors in this, is that we often wait for things to come to us or we commit to things that aren’t sustainable at the pace we set out with. Giving up alcohol, seeing friends more, eating more healthily, going to the gym, reading more books, less screen time, the list goes on.

This year however it IS going to be different....