One is not the loneliest number

Are you working from home this week? Embrace it while it lasts, I reckon we might miss it a little bit when it’s gone.

I’m trying hard to keep this column upbeat – here goes …

It’s mid-afternoon as I type. I’m at home on my own. My lovely wife is still working at the time of typing, and my Gap-year youngest are still plugging away – excellent and impressive safety measures in place for him and others. There’s a few cars driving past out the front, but I’d have said not as many as would be normal for this time of day, and they’re certainly drowned out by the noises of nature.

I’ve setup a big workdesk here at home on the back deck. It’s all covered over, so barring a weather catastrophe, I’m sweet. There’s an extra monitor hooked up to my laptop so I can multitask, my phone is connected to the stereo out here on the deck so I can listen to the news, JJJ and to Spotify. I bought extra coffee pods (that doesn’t make me a ‘magpie’ does it?) and I’m less than a metre away from the fridge out here, which now has chocolate biscuits as well as a healthy supply of you know what for when quittin’ time arrives. The pile of books and notes needed for lessons is quite large, so staying organised and neat will be a priority.

The big whiteboard that normally hangs in the garage (it used to say things like ’20 sit-ups’, ’15 arm curls’) has been moved and is now affixed to the railing of the verandah. When I’m not writing on that board, my eyes have access to the view that was almost the exclusive reason we moved out to Millthorpe. Stunning. Anyway, my first online lesson went pretty well. Can’t say I put on a coat and tie for it, and I was drinking a coffee for much of the time I was ‘teaching’. Nice. I’d recorded a short video for the Year 12 class about “Exponential and Logarithmic functions” with a few demo’s of how to do the questions on the whiteboard, and posted it to the online platform we’re using to communicate, just before our schedule get-together time. They all tuned in right on time, viewed the vid, got stuck in to the associated work, took a picture of the work they completed and sent it back to me via the ether. Some were all good (I was impressed the video worked), others asked for a bit of a hand in an email, and some even did more work than they had to! Maybe they were relishing the fact that the old fogie wasn’t out the front trying too hard with dad jokes or references to Star Wars in between the mathematical concepts. Online learning … sit down, get to work, no interruptions. I even had kids post a ‘thank you’ message during our computer chats.

Whilst giving the students feedback during and after their lesson, the birds are singing in the background, cows are moo-ing, sheep are baa-ing, chooks are clucking and my two little magpie friends are hanging around digging worms from the lawn and waiting for me to throw them a crust of bread.  It’s a perfect Autumn day in the Central West. I guess I’ll have to move this show indoors if the weather turns, but that’s a problem for another day. During my lunchbreak I’ll get the (boring old) Spag Bol ready for when the weary still-working workers arrive home later. Then I’ll put together a few more little videos for the students to view, mark some of their work as they send it through online, have another coffee, listen to a playlist (which, ironically, contained the song “It’s the end of the world as we know it” by R.E.M – bahaha), stay positive and get on with it.

As Darrell Kerrigan would say – ahhh, the serenity.