Bedtimes and Borrowed Hours
Some words on the years I have spent juggling part-time, quarter-time, slice-of-time jobs — written between bedtimes and borrowed hours, and offered here as both a reckoning and a small manifesto for the work of teaching.
A shorter piece, originally written for LinkedIn.
Over the past couple of years, I have lived in the professional (fr)agility of what I believe contemporary business jargon has given the moniker “the portfolio career.”
During the course of this continuum, I have frequently found myself balancing three, maybe four, sometimes five, and in times of crisis, six, different part-time, quarter-time, slice-of-time jobs. I have had days which have started at 4.30am with teaching the 1947 Partition of India and ended at midnight with designing an online lesson on how to insert bolts properly in a mine shaft.
Through public holidays, over weekends, in between my son’s naps. In the passenger seat of the car on the way to a weekend away. On a chair at a campsite. Lying in a hospital bed with pneumonia. On maternity leave. On my birthday.
The whirr of my computer has become a kind of white noise to my life, humming beneath bedtimes, borrowed hours, and the small, sacred pauses that were meant to be mine.
To say it’s been hard would be to sanitise my lived experience.
At times, it’s been debilitating.
But, throughout these years, there has remained one professional constant for me, and that is that I am, at heart, always a teacher. And that making learning happen is where I come alive.
That matters because I believe strongly that innovation in education is not an autonomous bot that generates an ideal lesson plan, or a system that uses completion as a metric of success.
It is bringing the right minds, with the right energy, and the right love for learning, into the room.
It is dreaming together - and finding ladders to the moon.
It is also, crucially, about bringing more “Ed” into “Edtech”.
Because teaching (whether in a classroom, in a mineshaft, or across a boardroom table) is an acquired skill that lives in corporate learning, in professional development, in every room where someone is trying to understand something new.
Fellow teachers, leaders, corporate CEOs, and lovers of learning.
Let’s retire the phrase “just a teacher”
Teachers change the world.
