One damp morning last October, just as we were staring down the barrel of tier 3 Covid restrictions, I was racking my brains for inspiration for teaching post-1900 exam poetry. I was struggling, unsurprisingly. I mean, how were modernism and Philip Larkin going to help anyone during a global pandemic?

Then a line popped into my head from a little-known French poem, Breakfast, by Jacques Prévert: “I put my head in my hands and cried.”

I hesitated. Should we do this? Would it pack too much of an emotional punch? And shouldn’t we be doing exam stuff anyway?

Throwing caution to the wind, I added the poem to my lesson plan. At best, it might sharpen the students’ analysis skills, I thought. At worst, it would waste five minutes.

The next day, at the start of a live Teams lesson, I wondered if I had spectacularly misjudged. “First impressions?” I asked, feeling rather silly as we looked at the translated poem on the screen.

A few excruciating seconds of hissing silence followed. Then reactions flooded in: “Loved it.” “I never knew poetry could help.”

Inspired, I began using other poems that seemed to fit the current mood as starter tasks. There were “seasonal” extracts - Thomas Hood’s November (yes, in November) and uplifting ones; Emily Dickinson’s “Hope” is the Thing With Feathers proved a real hit.

The technique was simple: a poem added to a PowerPoint presentation lesson, a few minutes to digest it, then a quick discussion before switching to exam work.

There was no “right” or “wrong”; this was about appreciating the poems, not piling on the pressure.

Admittedly, there was the odd misfire. An extract from TS Eliot’s Journey of the Magi provoked heated arguments about whether poems needed rhythm and rhyme.

But such arguments were few and far between. Most of the poems went down a treat; students seemed to enjoy the chance to appreciate a text for its own sake.

What I assumed might be little more than a filler has turned into an integral part of our remote learning.

I now realise that one of the ways that I am coping with Covid-19 is by sharing with students a personal playlist of greatest hits but, instead of songs, I’m sharing scraps of poems that have leaped off a page for me and brought me comfort in these trying times. I think they are bringing comfort to my students, too.

While I understand the need for teachers to focus on catching up, it’s also important to recognise that students are suffering from pandemic fatigue. Spending five minutes on something that lets them take a break from thinking about exam work is certainly not time “wasted”.

And while I must confess that I still have literally no clue about breakout rooms, this is a type of “breakout” that I am more than happy to provide.

Claire Breithaupt teaches at a sixth-form college in the North West of England

This article originally appeared in the 12 February 2021 issue under the headline “A poem a day keeps the misery at bay”