Teaching is actually a form of combat: the teacher has to fight for the limited attention of teenagers. Extremes of heat in classrooms don't help. Here on the east coast of Australia as climate-change effects gather pace, the number of days when the temperature is above 35 degrees is increasing relentlessly. (Yes I know some deniers may be be reading this – check the temperature you boofheads.)
When the temperature is in the 20-30 degree range, there is no problem. I just crank up the air-conditioning box on the wall and let the cooling air flow over me and then onto the kids. When it is above 35 degrees, however, things get a little sticky literally and figuratively.
When I first came to Australia in 1990, temperatures of 35 degrees were sufficiently remarkable that the nightly news would tell us what we already knew: the day had been damn hot.
Frying together
Since then, however, even the Met people have taken to glossing over the summertime fry ups. Last year at my school, we had five days where the temperature got above 40 degrees – yes my fellow Irish people, it was warmer than a cup of tea! Human skin crackled and sizzled, and everything slowed down.
The humidity is the problem. Like public schools all over the world, our school was designed by blind non-sentient architects. They won the contract to build public schools by being the cheapest. In winter the schools are bearable but in the climate-changed Australian summer, the kids and I fry together.
Come into my classroom on a day when the temperature is above 35 degrees and the first thing you notice is the unmistakable je ne sais quoi of adolescent body odour. The really weird thing is that none of us notices how bad it is until somebody else turns up and reminds us all that excessive heat creates mini-glasshouses out of classrooms.
Just to make sure everybody gets maximum fun from the excessive heat, we sit on plastic chairs designed as a bit of a laugh no doubt by the architect’s first cousin. What’s the difference between a Qantas jumbo jet and a year eight student in class when it’s above 35 degrees inside and outside? Answer: the jumbo stops whining when it lands.
Irish winter days
Last week when the temperature hit 35 degrees with heavy humidity, I found myself momentarily longing for the bitter cold of Irish winter days from my childhood.
I remembered fondly daily walks to school that involved short-term numbness on exposed skin – and the crunching cold of poorly-insulated feet.
The best bit about the Irish winter was that you could always get warm. That can’t be said for the excessive heat hitting Australian classrooms now.
My quick trip down memory lane was interrupted by the kids’ demands to be allowed out to fill their drink bottles. What’s a teacher supposed to do? Teenagers are scary – dehydrated ones even more so.
The heat makes the kids short-tempered and reduces attention spans even more. As I run my class through laptops, the technology invariably stuffs up in the heat. I can hear the teaching gods laughing as I try to connect 30 malfunctioning devices to an erratic wifi system designed – yep you guessed it by the architect’s second cousins who became electricians probably because they failed architecture! Aaaagh. It’s enough to make a teacher reconsider their career choice.
So kids, what are we learning about today? Hmmmm? Well I guess the goal of this lesson is to remind all our fellow students in Ireland that, as their weather grows colder and snowier, there are some Irish people (strange ones) longing for just a small dollop of that chill.
