The diary of almost everything

For most of my adult life I have worked in education, which means I have spent an impressive number of years surrounded by small humans, school bells, glue sticks, and the mysterious disappearance of pencils that somehow vanish from classrooms faster than socks disappear in washing machines.

I started as a teacher and slowly worked my way into school leadership, which sounds far more strategic than it actually is. In reality it mostly means you spend a surprising amount of time solving problems that no one mentioned during teacher training, like locating missing jackets, mediating playground diplomacy, and occasionally discussing why someone believed pressing the fire alarm during lunch break would be an excellent contribution to the day.

Despite all that, I have always loved education. Schools have a certain charm to them, a slightly chaotic warmth where every day contains at least one moment that is unintentionally hilarious.

Children say things adults would never dare say out loud, someone inevitably asks a question that no one in the room can answer, and once in a while a student confidently explains that the moon is probably just a large lamp.
The world of school has always felt a little bit like its own village.

What has changed, however, is not the children… i think it is the parents.
Before anyone sharpens their pitchforks, let me say that there are many wonderful parents who support schools, teachers, and common sense in equal measure. But something in the dynamic has shifted over the years, and sometimes I feel like I missed the exact meeting where the rules were rewritten.

I grew up in the eighties, which was a time when the structure of most households was fairly clear. Parents were the adults in the room and children were the children, an arrangement that rarely required negotiation.
My mother was not my friend in the modern sense of the word. She was my mother. We laughed together and she was loving, but the hierarchy was unmistakable. If my mother gave me a look, the conversation was over. Not a dramatic look, not even a loud one, just a look that communicated with remarkable efficiency that I had reached the outer border of acceptable behavior.
And when I occasionally came home with a story about something that had happened at school, the first question she asked was almost always the same: “what was your role in this?”.
Not because she assumed I had masterminded the situation, but because she understood something about children that many adults still learn the hard way.

Children are rarely innocent bystanders in their own stories. They experiment with boundaries, test reactions, and occasionally produce highly creative versions of events in which they appear slightly more heroic than they actually were.
That doesn’t mean children never get hurt or truly end up on the receiving end of things, of course. Schools see that too, and those situations deserve careful attention. But childhood also comes with a remarkable talent for editing one’s own role in the story.

Nowadays the conversation sometimes goes differently. Not long ago I sat in a meeting with a student and a parent after an incident at school. The student calmly explained that nothing had happened, the fire alarm had not been pressed, no threats had been made, and the student had merely been standing nearby minding their own business and possibly contemplating the meaning of life.
The small complication in this explanation was that I had personally watched the student press the fire alarm, live, with excellent visibility and very convincing sound effects.
When I explained this, the parent looked at me with great sincerity and said, “My child does not lie.”
Now, there is a moment in such conversations where you realise that continuing the debate will not bring us any closer to the truth, and I refuse to turn these situations into a game of well-yes-well-no. At that point my role is not to conduct philosophical investigations about alternative realities. My role is to safeguard the school and the people in it.

So sometimes the conversation becomes very simple. A rule was broken, safety matters, and a consequence follows. Parents are free to agree with that or not, but the consequence remains. 

School is not a courtroom….it is a school!

Somewhere along the way, however, parents seem to have accidentally switched teams.
Where they once stood beside the school, many now appear to stand beside the child against the school, which creates an interesting dynamic because children, wonderful as they are, are still in the early stages of figuring out how the world works.

Another thing that has changed is that children are now often present during conversations that once belonged entirely to adults. Meetings about behaviour, expectations and responsibility sometimes unfold with the child sitting in the middle of the discussion while the adults negotiate what happened and who might be responsible.
When I was young I had absolutely no idea what my parents discussed with my teachers. Those conversations took place somewhere in the mysterious adult universe behind closed doors.
Which was probably for the best.

It allowed me to simply be a child, whose biggest concerns involved riding my bike, finishing homework, remembering the sandwiches my parents had wrapped in aluminium foil and the little carton of juice they had packed for me. Oh and trying not to lose the water bottle I somehow managed to misplace on a weekly basis despite the fact that my name was written on it in letters large enough to be visible from space.

Children today sometimes carry a much heavier awareness of adult conversations.
And occasionally they also speak to adults in ways that would have been unimaginable in my own childhood.

Not because we were timid, but because respect was simply part of the atmosphere. Teachers were people you looked up to. Adults stood a few steps higher on the ladder of life experience, and that difference carried weight.
At the same time I also remember that childhood itself felt wonderfully uncomplicated in certain ways. I did not worry about mortgages, school policies, workplace conflicts, or emails written at eight in the evening that begin with the phrase “I just have a quick question.”
Those things belonged to the adult world.

My job was to ride my bike, climb trees, and occasionally run upstairs at impressive speed because my mother had given me the look that indicated I had just crossed a line.
She was one meter sixty, she never chased me…she did not have to.
Authority, it turns out, can be surprisingly compact.

Perhaps that is what I sometimes miss most, that balance between freedom and structure, between being allowed to grow and being reminded that certain lines exist for a reason.

Children absolutely deserve a voice.
But they also need adults who are comfortable being adults.
Not friends, not negotiators and not defense lawyers in every situation. Just an adult.
And maybe somewhere between the strict hierarchies of the past and the endless negotiations of the present there is a middle ground waiting to be rediscovered, a place where children feel heard, parents feel responsible, and schools no longer have to conduct philosophical debates about the physics of fire alarms.

Because education was always meant to be a passport to the future.
It was never supposed to require a witness statement.

-Sophie Quinn