Last night I went to a carol service. Nicole turned to me on the way there and said, it’s been twelve weeks! We confessed to each other how exhausted we were, in the midst of our one final push. One festive hurrah away from bed time. I’m delirious, I told her. I feel like a piece of burnt toast, she laughed, I’ve got nothing left to give. We spent the rest of the evening howling O come all ye faithful in-front of a brass band decorated with tinsel. When I eventually made it to bed, after brief anecdotes on the way back home of the increasingly bizarre scenarios we teachers were finding ourselves in, I giggled at how Nicole had described herself after the last twelve weeks.
There are people I know, whom I shall not name, who see a piece of burnt toast and say - ‘this has got potential’. Others do as I would and say no to a carcinogenic breakfast. Into the bin with you, we are now parting ways. It’s a symptom of good teaching to take metaphors and extend them between Monday to Friday, to use the everyday objects and scenarios to explain the bigger ideas we’re struggling to get across. So that is why, with the one last brain cell I have hanging in there, I want you to consider toast.
In a place where I claim to talk about food, I acknowledge that I spend a lot of time reminiscing over things that I have burnt. That’s just the way our brains are programmed it seems, to fixate on the lows and move on quickly from the highs for fear of jinxing the outcome. We don’t arrive into a pool of same-age acquaintances with a readiness to admit our failures, we save the successes as the evidence that our necks remain above the water. It is then, after weeks of affirming ourselves with our peers through the silence of success that we melt into a puddle of our own tears because actually we’ve been left in the toaster for too long, and feel quite crispy.
Don’t worry, I don’t combine toasters and water together literally only metaphorically. I’ve had enough passive aggressive emails from the accommodation manager to know what a fire hazard is. We start off making our toast with good intentions. It is morning, or late afternoon, we’re in need of breakfast or peckish before dinner and so we find a slice of bread and send it off. If you’re my boyfriend, you might even attempt to launch the bread into the toaster from the other side of the room under the pretence that you’re a new recruit for the NBA. Few of us are patient enough to stick around for the transformation of bread to toast and I can’t remember the last time I preemptively checked the settings on the toaster. Before you know it, you’ve done it, you’re forced to re-enter the vicious cycle as your blackened piece of toast reminds you - slow down! Or (in my opinion) worse, you’ve grabbed a knife and started scraping the charred crumbs into the sink. The mess has doubled. I hate crumbs.
We splinter off into our different approaches. We all respond to a crisis - toast related or otherwise - very differently. Let’s not forget that there are some of us who will just go ahead and eat the burnt bread, masking the colour with additional marmite. It’s a reminder to sit loyally beside my toaster for fear of not making the same mistake twice. I decide to slow down, to make sure things are as they should be before beginning - that the toaster dial is on 3 and not 5. Now I don’t know if that’s the toasting time or the level of toastiness, either way my point still stands. So whilst we all resemble burnt pieces of toast right now, scrape it off, start again, or dig in. However you cope, I hope you do it with a condiment.