Looking Back on 2021

Every year I feel the need to look back on the last twelve months and take stock. It’s a tradition I’ve upheld since long before digital journals were a thing. A day or so after Christmas with a notepad and a pen, some good music playing on the stereo in my childhood bedroom, and even back then I’d think about all that had happened between January and that moment.

Today, the music in my ears is The Beatles. Like everybody who sat through all eight hours of Peter Jackson’s incredible documentary, Get Back, this Christmas, there has been a revival of Beatles appreciation in our household. But it makes me smile to think that whatever Christmas season I first sat in my bedroom with paper and pen, it is entirely possible that the music I was listening to then was The Beatles too. I have always associated the Fab Four with the festive season. Something to do with John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Xmas (War is over)” being the opening track to my dad’s one and only cassette tape of Christmas music he pulled out every Christmas Eve which, along with Paul McCartney’s bouncy and fun “Wonderful Christmastime” (also on the same tape) was the soundtrack to my childhood Christmases. But the December 25th I got my first ever stereo-system, complete with record player, I remember that it was my parents’ Beatles and Bruce Springsteen records which I stole first to listen to before I bought any vinyl of my own. And Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour were on permanent rotation long before that day, dubbed onto cassette tape from the tape both mom and dad played in their cars on long journeys. The only tape they played in common. The one dependable soundtrack to a family vacation whichever one of my dysfunctional parents was at the wheel.

So I’m listening to a Beatles playlist I’ve compiled over on Spotify and thinking back over the last twelve months. Last year I ended my 2020 year in review saying this:

“In 2021…I am going to focus on academic research. I am not going to wait until 2021 in fact. I am already starting now. A big research project brewing since the summer that I haven’t had time to pursue since September but refuse to put off any longer. I am deeply excited about it, as well as another non-academic writing project I’ve started. School will have to work around me rather than the other way round in 2021. I am looking forward to seeing where that attitude takes me, even if it ends in unemployment. You can’t stay somewhere that makes you unhappy, even if it’s the sensible thing to do…In 2021 there will be a higher calling of what is sensible, and it doesn’t involve putting my health, or the health of my family, at risk to get people through a series of pointless exams.”

So the first question I have to ask myself is - did the 2021 I imagined come anywhere close to the 2021 I actually lived?

The answer is: yes, I think so. But 2022 is going to take me radically further into that direction. But we’ll come to all that soon enough.

January 2021 was a weird one. Still recovering from a Christmas with COVID, my head remained fairly fuzzy for much of the month. On top of this, we were back into lockdown again until March. This one wasn’t anywhere near as pleasant as the first one. Instead of feeling liberating, online teaching was made a dull treadmill of miserable drudgery as the Department for Education insisted on replicating the timetable and workload of a normal school day online instead of adapting delivery to fit the different circumstances. Long, tiring days of staring at screens and trying to make the best of the imperfect expectations coupled with a cohort of students who had been told since the previous September that online learning didn’t work, and that any effort they’d put into their remote classes would be largely a waste of time as schools would simply strive to help them “catch up” on the assumption they had “lost learning” upon their return to the classroom. It meant every lesson was a battle. We teachers were expected to do more, and the students knew they didn’t need to do anything we said. It became joyless pretty fast, and very demanding on our time as we had to re-jig all planned lessons in our curriculum for the new remote conditions as well as respond to a billion incoming emails at all hours.

That said, it still eliminated the long daily commutes through Birmingham traffic and those few extra hours of sleep and free-time helped with the post-Covid recovery. Personally, it also forced my school to take Covid more seriously. The day before the government pulled their finger out and announced the closure of schools and new national lockdown, I had actually written to my boss to say I wouldn’t be coming in again until they sorted their shit out with Covid-safety. As the school had been the place I’d caught the virus, for reasons that were entirely avoidable, as well as predictable, I wrote to the Head at the time and said until I could be assured things would be different, I wouldn’t be coming back and would teach remotely from home until I could be assured of my safety. By the time we were back in March, a lot had changed. Home lateral flow testing became not only widely available, but was a condition of schools re-opening, and I had also received my first vaccine dose. Masks were made mandatory. Because of all the changes in conditions enforced by the new guidance from the DfE, I felt ok to go back and agreed to return. Had there been no January lockdown, I am not sure I ever would have.

Getting that first dose of the vaccine was a pretty special experience. As I stood in the queue, waiting for my jab, I thought how incredible it was that just twelve months ago there had been no pandemic yet, and no hope of a vaccine. How when the pandemic hit, people were talking about it being eighteen months or two years before we’d ever get one. And now here I was only eleven months into the pandemic and we had done it. Done it multiple times - Pfizer, Moderna, Astra-Zeneca…we even had options. When the needle hit my arm I almost cried. Not because it hurt, but because it was beautiful to think that all this might soon be over. Sitting in the waiting room after for the required fifteen minutes of monitoring, I tried reading a book but all I could think about was how amazing science was.

Of course, as I write now in December of 2021, the pandemic remains far from over. But, like a flu vaccine, the jab has made the virus far less dangerous to many and, once we get the dosage and time between boosters sorted, gives us a real chance of being able to live with this thing the way we used to live with flus and colds. It was frustrating that my wife wasn’t eligible for the vaccine at the same time I was, though. Because of my asthma, I got each dose fairly early, which protected me but did nothing for the person I shared a life with. It wasn’t until she got her first jab that I felt truly relaxed for the first time since March of 2020. And even then, it wasn’t total relaxation. I knew we needed two doses, not one. I also knew that the vaccine alone wasn’t enough to protect. That it only made the symptoms milder. That you still needed things like masks, distance, hand washing, ventilation to keep the virus at bay and that the British government were not getting that message out well enough even as the NHS nurses who administered the jab said it right to our faces. That the British public seemed desperate to act as if everything was normal as soon as possible and that the UK strategy was doomed to fail. But it was still nice, despite all this, to feel that day I got the first shot like at least when we inevitably get the coronavirus again, we hopefully won’t be doomed.

During that early lockdown I was able to research and write a chapter for an upcoming book series on Punk and Anarchism (which should be coming out this year) as well as start some research on that bigger project on education, anarchism, prison and punishment that last year’s year in review alluded to. But despite my best efforts to focus on the research, school continued to get in the way. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, picking up more and more snow as it rolls until it becomes a snow boulder, school work seems to start so manageably each term and then just pile more and more onto our shoulders until it dominates every waking moment…and far too many sleeping moments too. My insomnia during term-time is chronic. Since 2019, when the insomnia started, I have been feeling like it was time to leave my current school. It’s not any one thing, just the result of having been there far too long and feeling at odds nowadays with some of its more antiquated culture and values, as well as broader questions I was starting to have about contemporary approaches to education and schooling. 2019 was the year my first full cohort had gone through the system, from Year 7 to Year 13, and as they moved on to new and exciting futures that summer and I stood on the playground early that next September looking at all the new faces and looking for all the missing ones, I wondered if it was time for me to leave too? But by March the pandemic hit, and any thought of changing jobs, or even career, at a time when so many were losing theirs didn’t seem too smart. The first lockdown had its limitations but it also showed some new possibilities of education, and I became intrigued to see what changes and transformations might carry through into the new academic year when we returned to physical schooling. There was exciting talk about things like Black Lives Matter and decolonizing our curriculum, as well as the possibilities opened up by online learning technology. We had managed a two terms without punitive disciplinary measures, two terms with a far more flexible and humane approach to routines. What would we learn from these experiences? What would we take away? But by September 2020 it seemed clear that the only appetite was for returning to “normal” as soon as possible and trying to put the last academic year behind us. Soon I was once again asking myself if this might be the last year at my school, but as Covid distorted everything and messed with any sense of momentum, it was hard to make a judgement. Then my boss died and in the grief and turmoil - and under two different interim Heads - it felt like a dick move to consider abandoning ship, even as I found myself more and more struggling to find satisfaction or intellectual fulfilment in what I was being asked to do.

March 2021 was a turning point. After two months of online teaching, our Year 11 and Year 13 students were brought back to in-school instruction (along with everyone else) as a priority, risking their own health, our health, and the health of the wider community. A risk that would, perhaps, be worth it as the price we needed to pay to educate them. But instead of actually teaching them anything new upon their return, we were forced by the Department of Education to do nothing but prepare them for exams, examine them, and get them a grade. Education reduced to admin. It was everything wrong with British education brought to the foreground and I don’t know if I can ever forgive our profession for what we did to those kids - sitting them in schools for months just to test, test, and test them again, all without any pushback against to the DfE’s instructions, or even any serious outrage that the DfE and Ofqal had not anticipated the continuation of the pandemic and made alternative examination arrangements for the 2021 exams. Something secure, safe and online.

Likewise with the Covid protocols. Once again, things got sloppy fairly fast as schools followed the ever-changing DfE guidance without ever questioning it or the so-called “science” that was supposedly guiding it. If, since 2019, I had been asking myself questions about my profession, by 2021 the biggest question I had was why teachers - supposed intellectual role models for our children - were so bad at critical thinking or questioning instructions from on high. What sort of role models were we when we were daily given shit to eat and smiled and ate it gladly?

It had always been this way, I guess. When I was training as a teacher over a decade ago there were some teachers still following pedagogical strategies which had long been debunked but which they had been unquestioningly taught during their own training years and had been using too long to shake. New fads came and went, and everyone went along with them when they were told to and dropped them just as quickly when told they were no longer needed. But none of those dead-ends of blind obedience were as life-or-death as blindly following the epidemiologically ignorant Covid-protocols or as educationally defunct as following examination edicts that robbed a whole generation of students of months of a meaningful education.

The frantic focus on examination and generating data for “TAGs” (Teacher Assessed Grades), as well as “catch up” for all the “lost learning” of younger students, of course, also meant that the more radical transformations considered in the wake of the 2020 lockdown took a backseat as the priority of every school became churning out exam results rather than decolonizing their curriculums. This academic year, TAGs over and done with, the new priority is Ofsted, and the current mission they are on to downgrade “Outstanding” schools to “Good” or worse. With so many hoops to jump to prepare for promised inspections, who has time to focus on whether Black Lives Matter anymore?

I did a lot of thinking in 2021 about the structural impediments to meaningful change in schools, and the deficient character attributes the profession inculcates in its teachers, but these ideas had been percolating a lot longer. The paper I wrote on some of this in 2020 was finally published in Anarchist Studies this October (2021), showing me the snail’s pace of academic publication but reminding me how rewarding it was to free my mind up and be able to think again. While my larger research-project sprawled and stuttered across the year only in the infrequent gaps where I had precious free moments to pay it attention, I not only wrote the chapter for the book on punk and anarchism, but a second paper on punk - this time on punk and queer theory - and a paper currently in submission at a journal for Philosophy of Education which, because it is blind submission, I probably shouldn’t say anything too specific about until it is officially accepted or rejected. As well as those formal academic writings, I wrote another year of weekly posts for my Philosophy Unleashed blog during term-time. All of this work in philosophy, as well as the philosophy reading I managed to get done amidst marking and planning and everyday teacher admin, I found far more fulfilling that most of what I was doing in the classroom.

Not that I didn’t love teaching - I never stopped loving that. But the sense that I was entering my tenth year on the same never-ending treadmill when it came to the specific things I was teaching in this specific school, was never far from my mind. That I was maintaining something I had already created a long time ago rather than creating anything new. There were tweaks here and there- but were they enough to maintain my interest? And were they focused on things I actually cared about teaching? Increasingly, my real interest was in putting the school - and schooling in general - up to critical scrutiny regarding the ideological role it plays in normalising some of society’s worse features. Asking questions about the recent drive to “research-led” and “evidence-informed” pedagogy and who exactly was defining what counted as good “research” or “evidence” and, more worryingly, who was checking whether the ends upon which those judgements were based were ends worth aspiring to? Was “good teaching” good because it actually better educated our young people, or only good because it made them better at passing exams?

By September I decided that this most recent term would be something I paid close attention to in terms of how I was feeling each day. It was a new year, we had a brand new permanent Headteacher, and despite it being stupid to do so, even the Covid safety protocols were gone for the most part, so it would feel more like a “normal” term than last year. I would monitor how I felt about how I was spending my days at this same place for the eleventh year in a row. How bad was the insomnia? How fulfilled did I feel at the end of the day? How excited was I to get to work each morning? Or did I only feel dread? Like Marie Kondo looking through a cluttered home I would ask myself if the job still brought me joy. And I would ask myself how human I was still able to be as the snowball picked up speed from September to October to November to December. Was there still time to pursue reading and research that interested me intellectually? To write and play music? To write a story or a poem? To read for fun? Were evenings and weekends available in which to have an actual life with my wife, or was time beyond the demands of work something hard to come by? Stolen moments instead of a right?

The fact that so far the bulk of my 2021 retrospective has focused on work perhaps gives a hint at my findings? When a job dominates a life so much it had better be worth the sacrifice of time and energy, right? But 2021 wasn’t all work, work, work. After bouts of self-isolation because of our respective battles with Covid, my wife and I saw in the New Year alive and well together, enjoying the fireworks we could see from our window and if there was anything that I truly associate with 2021, it is her, and how lucky we are to have each other in our lives. In the fallout since the first lockdown so many people I know saw relationships break down while ours, happily, only got stronger. Most of this year it has just been the two of us, and she is still my favourite person. I am missing her a bit even now as I write this in another room, glad we are planning on taking a walk together later. Gratitude is important, and the fact that after basically two years of very limited social contact with the world beyond our marriage we are still excited to take a long car ride together and still spend most of our time together laughing and having fun is something I cherish and need to acknowledge for the privilege that it is. Not everybody has it. She inspires me every day with her creativity and skills too - in 2021, when things re-opened again, she was able to return to her pottery and continues to make amazing things with ceramics - but for most of the early part of 2021, while I was writing papers and doing philosophy stuff, she was transforming our garden by building us a pond. And not just a dig a hole and add some tarp type pond - a proper, bricked in and landscaped wildlife pond to complete the entire garden patio she built us the year before. Our garden now looks positively Mediterranean because of her wonderful additions. Not to mention that she accidentally got me into birdwatching as the year began. One of my birthday gifts from her - Alex Horne’s Birdwatchingwatching - stoked an interest and it coincided with the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch, so we spent a weekend in January…and then quite a lot of February and March…watching the birds in our garden, as well as buying a wider range of feeders and seeds to encourage them in despite the ever-present threat of cats. I now frequently do the washing up while watching birds feed who, just a year before, I wouldn’t have even noticed.

Along with birdwatching, and the mindfulness meditation I still do as frequently as I can manage, this year I also began learning T’ai Chi once things opened up again and I was able to find a local class. It’s early stages, and I’m still not very good at it, but it’s a lovely way to spend an hour. One of the things I realised last year was that I’m not very good at just relaxing. I’m always trying to achieve something beyond mere enjoyment or being. Those three things - bird watching, mindfulness and T’ai Chi - all allow me to switch off and just be, without worrying or thinking beyond the present. They are deeply necessary, especially in a year as stressful as 2021 has been.

It was nice in 2021 also seeing friends and family again who we hadn’t seen since the beforetimes of the pandemic. That was a sense of normalcy we both enjoyed whenever it occurred, be it catching up with friends and meeting the children born during the pandemic we had still yet to meet, going to see an art exhibition with them, watching a wrestling Pay-Per-View and ordering a pizza like old times, grabbing a curry together, holding regular international Zoom calls, or finally catching up with the extended family over Christmas just this last week, it was nice to have those momentary snapshots of how life once was despite our jobs as teachers making us a fairly toxic prospect for those friends and family members still hoping to avoid the plague. But the best thing was hearing that my sister and her partner were pregnant early on in the year and then, this October, getting to meet my new niece. Although already an Uncle to five nephews and nieces, I am honorary Gruncle to this one, as both our parents are dead I have been nominated both Grandparent and Uncle duties, thus Gruncle. She is incredibly cute and my sister is already making a great mother. We’re very happy for them, even if this year the curse of a Covid Christmas hit them and prevented us from spending the festive season together once again.

It was also nice in 2021 to return to the Lake District again. The vacation we had booked on my wife’s birthday during 2020 because we felt (hoped) the pandemic might be over by then but at least we should be able to travel within the UK whatever happened. Given the huge uptick in people wanting to stay in the UK this summer, we were lucky to have booked so long in advance and it was such a beautiful and relaxing time. Lots of walking, reading, drinking coffee and generally relaxing and enjoying the world. Our annual pilgrimage to Chatsworth House was also unimpeded by the pandemic again, although bad weather and general exhaustion made us give the usual walk along the Monsal Trail and stop off for a bakewell pudding in Bakewell a miss this year (we’ll just have to eat two puddings in 2022). And London too! When the pandemic hit last March we were into quite a rhythm of visiting the city pretty much every three weeks or so, so it was quite odd to have not been there for so long. This summer, however, we finally returned to visit my sister, and in October we actually stayed for a few days and enjoyed the city like proper tourists. Our first hotel in a time of Covid, and first restaurant meal. We got to visit the Tate gallery and stroll along the South Bank again. Little rituals we had sorely missed. It felt good to get glimpses of how life might one day be again, even if we lamented how stupid it was that people in this country couldn’t do the basic mitigations like wearing a mask that would make the move to normality again all the more quick.

I also got two more tattoos in 2021. I celebrated the first day of the summer holidays by getting Green Day’s Basket Case doodle from the Dookie lyric sheet inlay (and, more importantly, from the long sleeve t-shirt I wore pretty much daily in my youth, and still occasionally sleep in even now) etched into my shoulder. A few weeks ago I celebrated the start of the Christmas season by getting a spiderweb stabbed into my elbow, complete with a swinging Spiderman. My arm is almost fully sleeved now - almost unthinkable from the small little Kokopelli tattoo which started it all off all those years ago. I’m already booked back for 2022 to fill in the blank spaces with some little bits and pieces. Maybe it should be called twenty twenty-tattoo? I fucking love tattoos.

And of course I would be remiss without mentioning the music of 2021. From the “New Variant” rewrite of my Academy Morticians classic, Profitganda in January, to weird, one-off oddity, Alternatives to Extinction in the summer, my Angry Man With A Bass “live”, bass and vocals only “one take” album, and my recent Christmas single The Christmas I Could Have Died, while 2021 may not have been my most musically productive year, I’ve been really happy with what I put out and, more importantly, with how frequently I pick up the guitar and play at home. I intend on recording and releasing a brand new single early in 2022 with two new songs - Condemned to Repeat and I’m Sick of All the Hustle - that are real favourites. That said, one of the things I also reflected on in 2021 was whether or not I should just quit the bullshit of names like Strangely Shaped By Fathers (a name I don’t even like anymore) and just release music as myself - as DaN McKee? I am toying with the idea that the new single might be the first released under my own name instead of the SSBF moniker. Watch this space!

So yeah - 2021 has been another plague year, and somewhat muted as a consequence, but still one I’m proud of. A happy and fulfilling home-life. Lots of music and reading (follow me on Goodreads if you’re that way inclined). Some nice holidays, trips and visits. A paper published, a chapter to be published, another paper being considered for publication, and other research happenings starting too. I have gotten involved in the local branch of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain and started attending seminars which are inspiring further research ideas. And I’ve done a lot of teaching and thinking about teaching.

But I keep wondering how much more research and writing I might have accomplished if I hadn’t?

My dad always spent January 1st updating his CV. He used it as a way of reflecting on his professional life, and thinking about any other jobs he may want to do. Taking stock. It’s a family tradition. When I went to work that first day in September I made myself a promise: by January 1st, 2022, I would know whether I was happy staying at my current job. On that day, New Year’s Day, I plan on updating my CV, just like my dad did, and just as I have done every year since 2019, when I first started asking myself questions about my current job, and then I will either write a letter of resignation or I won’t. All I know for sure is, to paraphrase: “In 2022 I am going to focus on academic research…School will have to work around me rather than the other way round in 2022 and I am looking forward to seeing where that attitude takes me, even if it ends in unemployment. You can’t stay somewhere that makes you unhappy, even if it’s the sensible thing to do…In 2022 there will be a higher calling of what is sensible, and it doesn’t involve putting my health, or the health of my family, at risk to get people through a series of pointless exams.”