Lessons in Lockdown: is Covid-era Australia a ‘teaching nation’?
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Since the middle of 2020, I’ve been teaching English literature to Chinese teenagers in Australia.
It’s strange, interesting work — a mixture of language, literature and cultural communication. My students are in their early teens, the children of first-generation immigrants to Melbourne and Sidney — very different from the British students I used to tutor at GCSE and A-level in London. The classes, which are on top of their usual schooling, are based around the study of a book. My initial suggestion of Jane Austen was knocked back in favour of Brave New World — ‘That is very good book,’ said my client — and since then we’ve compromised, shifting between dystopian literature and E M Forster.
Of course, in a timely echo of Forster’s The Machine Stops, the little-known dystopian short story that shot to fame in 2020, the classes are held on Zoom. To my surprise, teaching over The Machine has not been as bad as I feared: Chinese students tend to be well behaved, and there’s none of the chaos of the one adult Zoom party I attended during the first British lockdown. On the contrary, they need encouragement to speak, even putting their hands up for permission to answer a question. Thankfully, like all teenagers, they still express themselves and use the technology to make visual jokes. Zoom backgrounds change regularly, and sometimes a set of teeth, a comb or other incongruous graphic appears on the head of the class clown.
The experience has given a sideways glance into Australia’s response to Covid-19. My first student, who started with me around the same time the country was being lauded in the UK for its judicious closing of borders, was upbeat about life under a short, local lockdown. ‘It’s nothing!’ she said, with all the bravura of a thirteen-year-old. ‘You just stay home!’
A year later, with Sydney under lockdown since June, it’s a different story. ‘Have you been outside today?’ I ask a class which, after a month’s confinement, has become uncharacteristically unresponsive. ‘Barely,’ groans the class clown. ‘What’s the point? We’re in lockdown.’
A few weeks later, and the decline in the children is marked. Faces I’ve known for months, a year, look different. Some are blank and expression-less, while the eyes of…
