Sharing a Raft

Metaphors, I love a good metaphor. How I long for the coolness of the plunge just one week ahead...

The last two months of the academic year are always tough.

Imagine you're next to a river, with a raft. In August, before the students start, you are putting on your wet suit, lifebelt, and doing the safety checks on the raft, making sure everything is where it should be...Class library? Check. Writing Centre? Check. Open ended resources that can be used for counting, building, problem solving? Check. Then the students arrive, and the raft is pushed off onto the water.

The first few weeks are relatively smooth, but the raft rocks a bit as we all adjust to our new space, try and work out who we can sit next to, who needs to be at the front, and when, who gets travel sick, who needs a bit of encouragement to take a bit of responsibility. The paddles get passed around so everyone can have a go at moving us onwards. Aside from a few bumps, we're ok.

We get to our first stop, half-term holiday, and get off to catch up with our families who have been following alongside us, watching from the shore. We have a break. Some stay relatively near the raft, others go to another locality, sometimes even continent, before returning for the next half term.

And so it continues. Bobbing along the river, sometines over rapids - reports, conferences, shows - with pauses to rest - Winter break, bank holiday weekends etc. - until we get back after the Spring break.

After Spring break, something's happened. By the time we get to May, we've been together for nine months, an important time for humans, the time we take to fully develop in our Mother's care, if we are lucky. The students start to try and get out of the raft, they clamber over each other, outgrowing their spaces, like the characters in Julia Donaldson's 'Sharing a Shell'.

All well and good, except June is full of events: think Sports Day, Shows, Trips etc. as well as end of year assessments, final reports, meetings and deciding which raft students need to be in next.

This means the river is now bumpy, as well as nearing the last day waterfall. Some of us will even fall out on the rapids, but hopefully we get pulled back in, with some support from the bank as our families stay near us.

Teachers are trying to work out the 'what's next?' for their own personal and professional journeys, while trying to support their students and families in their own transitions before the waterfall ahead plunges them into the refreshing and still pool of the Summer break, after which the next academic year/level starts. 

A tough time indeed.

After the waterfall, some teachers will use the Summer to take their rafts back up the river to start in the same academic level with new students. Others will shift to a different level on the same river. Others will empty their raft completely and leave it to someone else to take on another river, or some other metaphor entirely...

...but, eventually, all students will reach the sea, and get their own rafts to explore the world, meet others, trade rafts, share rafts, until they find a land and river that they can call their own.