Are You In It For The Long Haul?

Life is a Long-Haul Flight

Teachers: ever get a panicky email from a student who's submitted the wrong draft of an assignment, but you're 36,000 feet in the air and in a different timezone?

That was my experience on my first ever long-haul flight. I was on an Emirates plane, less than five hours out of Auckland and passing high above the beautifully lit Australian continent, when a notification pinged on my Chromebook. Said Chromebook only had about fifty minutes of power left- fifty minutes against the flight's remaining time of approximately ten hours. The two elderly passengers beside me had already drifted into a very peaceful nap (lucky for them! 😭), and my Samoan manners had kicked in. "Don't wake these poor people up with your loud typing." A friend at uni back in Wellington once told me that my typing sounds like firewood being chopped with an exceptionally strong ax. There is no school of music (or thought!) in which that sounds soothing during a long flight into a different timezone. I had my laptop on only so I could read through my notes for the conference I was going to. I ignored the email 'notif' for fifteen minutes, and then two more came in. Five minutes after, another three. I realized I couldn't ignore whoever or whatever it was that was popping up so urgently in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I opened it to find a very distressed student, detailing how they had sent me what was actually only a draft (and not a very good one), and then stating how this was probably the tipping point of their academic life and "it's all over now, isn't it, Miss?"

How do you respond to that? ... When I was preparing to sit my first exams as a high school student, my father, also a teacher, gave me some advice: "Look at the questions/scenarios/instructions carefully. If they contain more than three words, use a pencil to separate the two or three distinct parts. More than three words usually means the question has more than three parts. Questions, within a question. And you will need to answer them all if you want to get the two out of two or four out of four. People get three out of four marks when something is missing. Don't miss anything." I've never gone wrong following that time-tested wisdom. A very wise man, my father was. 

Sitting in my cold seat, staring out the window at the aircraft wing gently palpitating against the dark sky, I closed my eyes and tried my best to meditate on the advice I'd been given so long ago, by someone who is no longer here. As I played and re-played my father's calm tenor voice in my head, many memories of my own school years wove themselves into my thought-line. I could see myself sitting in the back of our Year 8 classroom, feeling so nervous because I was one of three 'nerdy' students who had been moved from Year 7 to Year 8 to trial the Year 8 National Examinations. This was to help answer a question that a lot of our teachers had had for many years: 'Are the Year 7 and 8 curricula so well-aligned that a reasonably 'good' Year 7 student might pass the Year 8 Nationals and be eligible to move straight to Year 9?' There I was, twelve years old in a class of thirteen and fourteen-year-olds who all already knew each other well. I was very nervous...and very unprepared for the exams. What we discovered that year was that the strands of the two curricula were very well-aligned, but the bulk of the content in some of the major strands of the 'difficult' subjects (Science and Social Studies) was vastly unalike. My Year 7 notes were not gonna cut it. Not even close. Without my knowledge or consent (😅) my mother took the initiative of asking the nicest Year 8 girl she could find if we could please have some notes for Science and Social Studies. Mothers, aye? To this day I still laugh at the memory of how mortified I was when said girl came up to me after class one Friday and handed me not only a whole folder of notes, but also BOTH her actual exercise books so I could photocopy what she had jotted down throughout the three-and-a-half terms I'd missed. There are so many comedies, drama-dies and book series about how mean and petty middle-school and high school kids are. But I'll tell you this: there are millions of great kids who are so well-raised and grounded that I don't think all of Hollywood would even KNOW how to properly portray them on screen or paper. What they say about women in film is also very true about teenagers: the ones you see on screen are NEVER as amazing as the ones you meet in real life. I made it into high school (yeah, all three of us guinea pigs passed the exams!) because of an undeserved act of kindness. I didn't know the girl well. But she saw a need, and she helped me. To this day, I count her as a dear friend. Precious, rare, beautiful. (We had a laugh about all of this over ice-cream and fries a few years ago).  

I opened my eyes. Back to the panicky email of my student, thousands of miles away and below. The cabin crew were bringing out 'breakfast'- a piping hot spinach ricotta that we could have with either coffee, juice or water. It occurred to me, as I slowly removed the packaging from the food, that I was here, on my way to Dubai, and then Europe, because someone had given me a random kindness that I didn't even have the courage to ask for myself. And she wasn't even holding it against me like some people might have- Coconut Wireless in these parts of the world loves a good "I helped her get everything she's showing off about" story. I was not only given a great gift, I was also given a great amount of grace. 

I clicked to open the 'compose' tab, and copied in all my students who were due to submit the same assignment. Others had actually not sent me anything yet, so the panicker was way ahead by even just worrying about the task. "Being as I am currently on leave, and will not be able to mark anything, anyway, I would like to grant you all an extension of three days on the final term task. You may send it in before midnight, your time, on the new due date. Those of you who've submitted 'drafts' are welcome to send in your final, correct files on this amended date as well. All the best, and be kind to one another :) "

I've been blessed with a lot of success in my career as an educator, but none so great as the feeling of having paid forward a debt that I had owed for more than a decade. If you receive grace, all you can do is pass it on. As I checked the flight map, I saw we had eight hours of flight time remaining. There was no land below or ahead of us for miles. Middle of nowhere but also in the best place I had ever been. My journey had come full circle. 

A short and not-very-good clip I took of our sunrise landing in Dubai.