You often hear - to the point of cliché - about the wonderment of children who see their teachers outside of school. They stare wide-eyed at Ms Smith as she rummages for her keys at the bus stop or pootles past the carrots and parsnips in Asda. Wow, they think, as it slowly dawns on them that this is not a teaching automaton beamed down from another planet, programmed to function only during school hours.

Sometimes it feels like some adults, too, believe that teachers do not exist beyond the classroom - that teachers’ sole purpose is to administer to the needs of pupils. To read some of the wildly uninformed and downright callous comments from the more febrile corners of the internet, you’d think there were no demands on teachers’ lives beyond the school gates. In outbursts lacking both empathy and perspicacity, they characterise teachers as feckless jobsworths, happy to see schools close so that they can idle away their working hours at home. It’s so wildly off the mark that you may feel disinclined to dignify such views with a response, but they do need to be challenged.

In truth, this week - once again - a Herculean effort has been demanded of teachers: schools are drawing on huge amounts of ingenuity, energy and patience from staff in a national effort to maintain contact with pupils and ensure a sense of continuity in their education.

As most pupils returned from an extended Christmas break on Monday, the return was almost entirely in “remote” form. Classrooms remained deathly quiet, but kitchens, living rooms and poky cupboards across the country became dens of activity as families sought out quiet corners and passable wi-fi connections.

Unfortunately, the powers that be could not fulfil their end of the bargain and social media was awash with complaints that online platforms, such as Glow and Microsoft Teams, had been overwhelmed. And, as one educator told Tes Scotland, it is teachers who will be fielding the bulk of the complaints from parents, not those responsible for ensuring that online platforms are functioning.

Many school staff are, of course, parents themselves, and they face challenges that are in some ways quite different from those they faced during the first Covid lockdown last spring. This time, for example, councils appear to be taking hardline approaches to ensure the numbers of pupils in school buildings are kept to an absolute minimum: teachers may be considered “key workers”, but unless their partner is also in that category, they are typically finding that their own children are not eligible to be in school.

At the same time, there is a greater emphasis on “live learning” (not fuelled, you would hope, by some of the badly misinformed hot takes about why remote learning should slavishly attempt to replicate the experience of being in a classroom). There is something to be said for pupils being able to interact with a familiar face, but plenty of potential downsides have been flagged up - not least that this means remote learning will be subjecting teachers and families alike to more rigid timetabling than the last time around.

This lockdown is also happening in the depths of winter, when the hours of daylight are almost entirely packed into the school day, and without the novelty factor that went a long way to fuelling remote learning last year. By Monday morning, stories were already being shared about homes becoming pressure cookers - just imagine the scenes in a small flat with young children, a shortage of mobile devices and unreliable wi-fi. As one parent put it to me, if a family has made it through this first week still on speaking terms, that’s got to be considered a huge success.

So, hang on in there and look to the future - because you’ll never enjoy being in the classroom as much as when you can finally refer to Covid-19 in the past tense.

@Henry_Hepburn

This article originally appeared in the 15 January 2021 issue under the headline “No sunshine, no novelty factor: lockdown ain’t what it used to be”