Millions of children across the world have had their lives turned upside-down. However, the work set by teachers offers a valuable remedy to the purposelessness many might feel: an escape from endemic boredom and a reminder that continuous hard work will always be always stimulating, even in this barren upcoming term.

 

Many, including teachers, would argue that the government’s advice on how qualifications will be awarded has been damagingly ambiguous. Education specialists are in various different minds about how grading will be carried out, regardless of their personally preferences on this. Suggestions range from the possibility of awarding the grades based on existing data and teachers’ recommendations, to performing micro-assessments of the students online during the quarantine period to examine their performance in particular topics. Additionally, there is the strong possibility of an appeal system based on ‘resitting’ the qualification early next year, which would be an assumption of the ‘money where your mouth is’ strategy by the government. This is complicated further by schools’ individual perspectives, as some may encourage entire cohorts of students to take the exams next year so they can truly ‘earn’ the grades, frightened of the possibility that the marks given by the exam board formula could be interpreted as ingenuine in their students’ later lives. If this is the case, then clarity from the offset is key – learners must be granted ample time in advance of the examinations, to allow students to mentally organise themselves for the task of relearning material during the quarantine period (many students have refrained from touching their old revision notes for several weeks at this point).

 

This is connected closely to the argument in support of remote learning at this time. The continuous reminders from teachers would serve to keep the pressure up during these long, languid hours, maintaining the importance of education fresh in the minds of young people in addition to ensuring the relationship between teachers and students remains stable. Furthermore, for most students not in years 11 and 13, the work being completed now will be valuable in helping teachers finish their courses, with the knowledge being imparted to serve a key role in the qualifications to be earned in at the end of their key stage. In the full curriculum of a GCSE for example, the loss of over a term’s worth of lessons cannot be afforded, which demonstrates how continuous work remains a necessity during the quarantine period.

 

Moreover, work can serve as vital diversion from the depressing reality of current life. The essential structure of our days has suddenly and forcefully deteriorated, in what for many children is not a happy process. The truth of life detained in one’s house is a sheer, fathomless boredom, which not even a good selection of books or the endless stream of television over the internet, from services like Netflix, can remedy. My parents too have been plagued by a sense of purposelessness: as musicians, with their already meagre livelihoods decimated by the virus, they are faced by the base desire to perform and succeed (as is the nature of their normal life), and yet are defeated by the prospects they face. Here, there is a parallel with the lives of students; in particular, the motivated will find themselves faced by a dark purposelessness due to the cancellation of GCSEs and school – hours of work and effort preparing for these now hang redundant. The threat of several months of solitude coupled with the absence of work to keep us busy would be greatly detrimental to all of our collective psychological health as a cohort, hence why it is important to keep working in such desolate times.

 

Theo Horch, Wilson's School