“Have you prayed the Angelus today?” Silence followed, save the noise of shuffling feet. “I’ll try again, Year 9. Have you prayed the Angelus today?” More shuffling, with added mumbling. Then, only just discernibly: “No, Miss.” “Right! On your feet.” Loud scraping of chairs and pushing of tables. “The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.” Thirty teenage voices: smiling, sulking, shouting, grunting: “And she conceived by the Holy Spirit!”
And so it went on, while I pondered the twists and turns that had brought me to this overcrowded classroom in an enormous secondary school in North Oxfordshire. I had not meant to spend the academic year 2020-2021 doing a formal teacher-training qualification; nevertheless, it seemed a good way to ride out the uncertainty of the international situation, and also of spending it with more in-person human interaction than the preceding six months.
