The Small, Giant Challenges of Teaching in a War Zone

Kyiv, Ukraine | 18 October 2026

It's 19:45 on a Sunday evening in Kyiv, and I've finally sat down to mark my students' end-of-unit English tests. There's no electricity, so a couple of battery-powered LED lamps have been recruited to illuminate the papers spread across my desk. Their rather feeble light falls upon the familiar landscape of language learning: misplaced articles, confused verb tenses, spelling mistakes, and sentences whose grammatical architecture occasionally defies the laws of English. I find myself smiling at the irony that these papers, too, are suffering from outages, although theirs have more to do with missing connections between understanding and expression than with Ukraine's battered electricity grid. That's precisely why I'm sitting here, of course. Somewhere between identifying a mistake and understanding what produced it lies the real work of teaching. Each error tells a little story about a student's developing understanding, and my task is to listen carefully enough to know what to do with it.

Then my phone announces a red alert. Missiles are heading our way.

Suddenly, the English tests seem rather less urgent. The lamps continue illuminating the papers, indifferent to the notifications arriving on my phone, but my concentration has evaporated. I cannot continue marking. Not because I've lost interest in the work, or because the lack of electricity has made it impossible, but because there is something profoundly difficult about assessing a child's command of the present perfect while wondering what the next few minutes might bring to the city around you. Once again, war has insinuated itself into one of the most ordinary activities of a teacher's life, and what should have been a quiet Sunday evening of catching up on paperwork has become another exercise in managing uncertainty.

A few days ago, I published an article entitled Ukraine's Teachers Need More Than Our Admiration, reflecting on the extraordinary demands placed upon educators working under the conditions of war. I argued that our admiration for their resilience, however sincere, risks becoming a rather comfortable substitute for addressing the circumstances that make such resilience necessary in the first place. Tonight, sitting at my desk with a pile of unfinished tests, makes that argument rather more personal. It's one thing to discuss the challenges of teaching in a war zone in the language of educational policy, teacher wellbeing, and institutional support. It's quite another to find yourself unable to perform a perfectly mundane professional task because the electricity is off and missiles are approaching.

Teaching, as anyone who has spent much time in a classroom knows, extends considerably beyond the hours spent in front of students. There are lessons to prepare, assessments to construct, work to correct, individual difficulties to identify, progress to document, and the perpetual intellectual puzzle of finding better ways to help different children understand the same material. Much of this work takes place in the evenings and over weekends, away from the visibility of the classroom and often beyond the recognition of those who imagine that a teacher's working day ends when the students go home. Under ordinary circumstances, these demands can already be considerable. Here in Ukraine, they must somehow be accommodated alongside electricity cuts, intermittent connectivity, air raid alerts, disrupted sleep, and the exhausting uncertainty of not knowing whether tomorrow's carefully prepared lesson will take place in a classroom, an underground shelter, or not at all.

What interests me particularly, both as a teacher and as someone concerned with the relationship between learning, cognition, and the conditions in which education takes place, is the cumulative effect of these interruptions. A power cut may seem a relatively minor inconvenience, especially when one has managed to acquire emergency lighting and alternative sources of electricity. An air raid alert may last only a limited period, and on many occasions the immediate danger passes without a direct strike nearby. Yet the consequences cannot simply be measured in minutes without electricity or hours spent in shelters. Every interruption breaks a sequence of thought, redirects attention, and demands a degree of emotional and cognitive readjustment. Even when the immediate disruption has ended, returning to the previous task is not necessarily as simple as picking up where one left off.

Consider the apparently straightforward business of correcting an English test. Good assessment demands rather more than identifying mistakes and allocating marks. A teacher must distinguish between a careless slip and a genuine misunderstanding, recognise patterns across a student's work, compare current performance with earlier progress, and determine which difficulties require immediate attention and which may resolve themselves through continued exposure and practice. The objective is not merely to establish what a child has failed to understand, but to discover how that child might be helped towards understanding. This requires concentration, patience, professional judgement, and a willingness to engage thoughtfully with the evidence of learning. It is difficult to do any of these things particularly well when part of one's attention is occupied by the possibility of an imminent missile strike.

We speak frequently, and quite rightly, about the impact of war on children's education. We discuss learning loss, interrupted schooling, displacement, psychological trauma, and the extraordinary challenge of maintaining educational continuity in circumstances that continually undermine it. Yet I wonder whether we have adequately considered the corresponding effects upon the teachers who are expected to help children overcome these difficulties. Teachers are not somehow insulated from the conditions affecting their students. They, too, lose sleep during attacks, worry about family members, struggle with unreliable infrastructure, and carry the accumulated strain of living in a country at war. Nevertheless, they are expected to arrive in their classrooms capable of providing precisely the stability, attentiveness, emotional security, and intellectual guidance that their students so desperately need.

This is where the language of resilience becomes particularly problematic. Ukrainian teachers have demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to adapt, improvise, and persevere, often under circumstances that would bring educational activity elsewhere to a complete halt. Their determination deserves recognition, but I am increasingly uncomfortable with the ease with which we celebrate this resilience without sufficiently examining what it costs. There is a danger that the more successfully teachers compensate for disrupted infrastructure, inadequate resources, and relentless psychological pressure, the less visible the underlying problems become. Their resourcefulness may unintentionally encourage the assumption that, whatever happens, they will somehow find a way to manage. An educational system that depends upon the continual exhaustion of its teachers is not demonstrating sustainability, however inspiring their individual efforts may appear.

The challenges themselves are often so small that they scarcely seem worth mentioning. A laptop that cannot be charged, a lesson interrupted halfway through an explanation, an internet connection that disappears just as an online student begins to understand something important, or a pile of tests left unfinished because the teacher must attend to an air raid warning. None of these incidents, considered individually, comes close to representing the greatest tragedy of this war. There are people losing their homes, their livelihoods, their health, and their lives. Families are grieving. Emergency workers and medical personnel face dangers that make my difficulty in completing a Sunday evening's marking seem almost embarrassingly insignificant. I am acutely conscious of that distinction, and I have no desire to dress an ordinary professional frustration in the borrowed grandeur of someone else's suffering.

Yet it is precisely the apparent insignificance of these moments that makes them worth examining. A society does not function solely through the dramatic actions of those whose courage rightly commands public attention. It also depends upon the millions of unremarkable activities through which people sustain daily life, care for one another, and prepare for the future. A nurse completing patient records, a parent helping a child with homework, an electrician repairing a damaged connection, or a teacher correcting an English test is participating in the quiet continuity upon which the survival and eventual recovery of society depend. War does not merely destroy buildings and infrastructure; it makes these ordinary activities increasingly difficult to perform. What appears trivial on one particular evening becomes considerably less trivial when multiplied across thousands of people, hundreds of interruptions, and years of accumulated disruption.

There is also something educationally significant about the particular work lying unfinished on my desk tonight. Each of those tests represents a child attempting to acquire the linguistic tools with which to participate in a world extending far beyond the immediate circumstances of Ukraine's war. Some of these children may eventually study abroad, pursue international careers, engage in scientific research, build businesses, or help shape the reconstruction of their country. Others may simply discover the pleasure of reading a book, understanding a film, or making a friend in another language. We cannot know which particular lesson, conversation, or moment of understanding will eventually prove important in a child's development. We teach because education enlarges the possibilities available to human beings, and because those possibilities remain worth cultivating even when the future is painfully uncertain.

This conviction has become increasingly central to my work on the JVDT Learning Hub and my exploration of more accessible, structured, and responsive educational approaches. Trauma-informed pedagogy, for example, cannot be reduced to a collection of sympathetic gestures towards children who have experienced distress. It requires us to consider seriously how stress, uncertainty, disrupted routines, and diminished feelings of safety affect attention, memory, motivation, and the capacity to learn. Similarly, structured pedagogy and carefully designed digital learning tools should not merely aim to make instruction more efficient in ideal circumstances. They should help teachers preserve continuity, identify learning needs, adapt to interruptions, and reduce unnecessary demands upon their limited time and attention. The point of educational innovation, particularly in a crisis, should be to strengthen the human relationships and professional capacities upon which meaningful learning depends, rather than adding another layer of expectations to an already overloaded system.

We cannot reasonably expect teachers to compensate indefinitely for the consequences of war through personal dedication alone. They need safe working environments, dependable access to electricity and connectivity, adequate teaching resources, realistic workloads, and institutional arrangements that acknowledge the particular pressures under which they operate. They also need opportunities for professional development that respond to the realities of their classrooms, practical support for their own psychological wellbeing, and technologies designed around genuine educational needs rather than fashionable promises of transformation. Above all, they need recognition that protecting the quality of education requires protecting the people responsible for providing it.

Tonight's experience has reminded me that the smallest disruptions can illuminate some of the largest questions facing education in Ukraine. What happens to the quality of teaching when concentration is continually fractured? How does prolonged uncertainty affect the professional judgement of educators? What forms of support genuinely reduce the burden upon teachers, and which merely require them to become more resourceful in circumstances that should never have been considered acceptable? How can we construct educational systems flexible enough to withstand disruption without normalising the conditions that make such flexibility necessary? These are not questions that can be answered by praising resilience, however generously or frequently we do so.

It is now Sunday evening, and my students' English tests remain unfinished. The battery-powered lamps are still casting their modest circles of light across the desk, and somewhere in those pages are the grammatical misunderstandings and emerging competencies that I had hoped to examine tonight. Their mistakes will still be there when I return to the task, as will my responsibility to understand them and help those children progress. For the moment, however, my attention has been claimed by something rather more immediate than the subtleties of English grammar.

I find myself thinking about the strange disproportion between the enormity of war and the tiny, almost ridiculous ways in which it enters our everyday lives. A missile warning and an unfinished school test scarcely belong in the same sentence, yet here they are, inhabiting the same Sunday evening. Perhaps that is one of the defining experiences of living and teaching in Ukraine today: the continual collision between the exceptional and the ordinary, between the demands of survival and the responsibilities of everyday life, between the determination to build a future and the necessity of responding to the dangers of the present.

Tomorrow, circumstances permitting, there will be lessons to teach, mistakes to correct, and children whose questions deserve thoughtful answers. I will return to the work, as will countless Ukrainian teachers whose own Sunday evenings have been interrupted in ways far more difficult than mine. But I would rather we did not mistake our willingness to continue for evidence that the conditions under which we work are somehow manageable, or that our capacity to persevere absolves others of the responsibility to help.

Ukraine's teachers do not need to be reminded how resilient they are. They need the conditions that will allow them to devote more of their energy to teaching and less of it to overcoming the obstacles that stand in its way.

And tonight, sitting in a darkened Kyiv apartment with a pile of English tests, a couple of little LED lamps, and warnings of incoming missiles, that seems to me a remarkably modest thing to ask.

This reflection follows my earlier article, Ukraine's Teachers Need More Than Our Admiration.