There is a danger in the way we talk about resilience in Ukraine. We recognise people’s ability to carry on under extraordinary pressure, but we can become so accustomed to it that we stop asking what carrying on is costing them. For teachers, that cost deserves far more attention. A teacher working through a war is responsible for much more than delivering a curriculum. They have to respond to interrupted lessons, disrupted sleep, displacement and fear, while helping childre

Returning to writing has taken longer than I expected. I had gathered the material, arranged the subjects and imagined a rhythm for sharing them, but a calendar cannot do the quieter work of finding one’s way back to the page. Teaching continues, family history asks to be preserved, and grief changes the weight of things that once seemed ordinary. As I begin these Insights again, I want to allow those experiences to inform the writing without pretending that they have already

There is a teacher I know who increasingly sits down beside his students. Not metaphorically. Literally. He moves the chair away from the front of the classroom, away from the quiet architecture of authority that schools have inherited for generations, and places himself somewhere less certain: among half-finished sketches, uncapped markers, smudged fingers, nervous laughter, and the strange emotional weather that adolescence carries into every room without asking permission.