Shoelaces, sleet and irrepressible energy – Fionnuala Ward on primary schools

If we were to be invaded by aliens, but school-obsessed aliens who talked of little else, and these aliens looked at all the websites and online chat rooms and pamphlets and leaflets available to parents of primary school children and, in an effort to enhance communication for all concerned, demanded that this content be whittled down to just one word, I would sidle up to their spaceship, knock on the door, stand back as it whizzed open and utter the word “velcro”. And if I managed to get on their good side and maybe invited in, I would attempt to inveigle one tiny, little addendum, and that addendum would be “please”.

Shoelaces are the bane of my life. As a primary school teacher, I spend an untold amount of time bending down to tie them into shape. And subsequently attempting to get back up again.

And all the while the wearer of those trailing culprits will be champing at the bit to catch up with friends or rejoin a game or do all manner of fascinating things that I in my dull, killjoy, safety-obsessed way have put on pause.

But then, children have an odd relationship with clothes. The lost-and-found section of your average primary school could keep the children’s section of a department store going for days if not weeks. I’ve witnessed gloves falling out of coat pockets and hats and scarves slipping to the ground right in front of their busy, ever-moving, oblivious owners.

Martyn Turner

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And it’s not just the smaller items. Children have been known to leave behind cardigans and jackets and even coats. How is this possible? To leave a building and not notice not wearing the coat you had on that morning?

But it is the items that are intentionally peeled off, deposited on a bench or dumped in a corner that particularly deserve our pity. These items have a poor likelihood of retrieval: 50-50 at best. Without a reminder, they’ll end up lingering in that box under the stairs, unloved and unacknowledged.

Of course, most of this has to do with the weather and its complex relationship with children.

Case in point, it was cold recently. Very cold. And with practically every window in the school open to keep the virus at bay, staff were wandering around in long woolly wraparounds, arms folded across the body. And as for the yard, it was bounce-up-and-down-cold, rub-your-hands-together cold, rub-your-hands-together-even-if-you-were-wearing-gloves cold.

That kind of cold.

A group of children initiated a game over in the corner. Some kind of team game that involved running from one point to another. Their coats were obviously an encumbrance to all that moving from A to B so they’d been dispensed with early on.

But not only their coats. We don’t have uniforms in the school and there were at least two children there who’d cut it down to essentials.

They were now in their T-shirts. Their T-shirts.

Really, there are no words.

And as for snow. Any sort of snow. Even a kind of delusional snow. They so love it!

Recently, a flurry of something or other happened outside the window.

“Snow!”, the children exclaimed in awe.

“Well, not really”, I felt obliged to interject.

The children were by now glued to the windows, watching as a few paltry flakes drifted downwards and disintegrated into nothing.

“Snow”, I pronounced, with the conviction of a long-term employee of the Met Office, “has to stay on the ground. So this is sleet.”

That didn’t go down well.

There was much talk of that sleety kind of rain staying on the ground if you looked really hard. And needless to say much looking really hard ensued.

I blame the textbooks. They’re filled with pictures of snowmen representing winter. No snowwomen in sight, of course.

But the thing is, for the most part these kids have not experienced snow. Snow seldom falls in, say, Dublin or Cork. At best, once every five or six years.

So we’re feeding kids, well city kids anyway, a kind of romantic nonsense. Winter doesn’t involve snow. It involves cold, for now. And nothing else. Climate change has seen to this.

But back to those shoelaces.

“I can do it,” a child recently exclaimed once I’d pointed out the problem. I watched as they clearly couldn’t before deciding to intervene.

It took a good 20 seconds to rectify the situation. And something similar to wrench myself back into a standing position.

If those aliens do make an appearance, there’s no guarantee they’ll go for my suggestion. They might well opt for something nobler and loftier instead. And far less contentious.

Can’t say I’d blame them.