8.45am
It’s the first week of a prolonged spell of gloriously sunny May weather, and I’m at the pier at Castletownbere in Co Cork, where several people are gathered, waiting to board the 9am ferry to Bere Island.
Among the scattering of tourists in bright walking gear and stout boots are Fiona Hartnett and Aoife Butler. They are both teachers at Bere Island primary school, Scoil Mhichil Naofa, where 25 pupils await them at the other side of the water. Today the two teachers are joined by support teacher Darragh O’Sullivan.
The teachers always have to be exceptionally punctual. School literally can’t start unless they make the morning ferry. “There’s only one way in and one way out,” Hartnett says.
When I ask her what are the particular challenges of teaching on an island, especially when she has to commute by ferry to get there, she doesn’t hesitate in her reply.
“Getting a substitute teacher.”
The ferry can take four cars, or on this particular crossing, one huge, fully loaded truck and two cars. Watching the heavy truck reverse down the pier and then navigate backwards on to the ferry into the tightest of spaces is to witness driving of a skill few people could manage.
“It’s like Tetris,” says Irish Times videographer and photographer Dan Dennison, who gingerly reverses his own (smaller) vehicle on to the ferry, looking apprehensive.
The ferry departs at 9am sharp for the 20-minute crossing, swinging out into the stretch of water that lies between island and mainland. The sea is utterly calm and a rare cornflower blue. When the ferryman hears we are reporters going over to do a story at the school for the day, he flat-out refuses to take payment for either us or the car.
9.20am
Hartnett has a car parked at the pier on the island. She takes Butler and O’Sullivan with her, and we follow. The road winds here and there and upwards for a couple of kilometres, and then her car stops at a single-storey building in a grassy hollow, fringed with mature trees. Children aged four to 12 are arriving: on foot, or hopping out of cars, or running down the road, little daypacks bouncing on their backs.
This three-room school dates from 1980. The right-hand room is Hartnett’s classroom, where she teaches junior infants, senior infants, first and second class; ages four to eight. The middle room has a kitchenette, storage for materials, a library, beanbags and a space for O’Sullivan to work one-to-one with students who need extra support. The room on the left is Butler’s classroom, where she teaches third, fourth, fifth and sixth class; ages nine to 12.
In March this year, enrolment data from the Department of Education showed that 127 primary schools had fewer than 20 pupils. Two-teacher primary schools, like Scoil Mhichil Naofa, are still woven into the social fabric of rural Ireland. Nowhere is their existence more vital to a community than on islands. Bere Island has a population of just under 200. As so many small rural communities across the country have lost services over recent years, such as post offices, banks and Garda stations, the local primary school has become an even more crucial social hub.
9.30am
The school day starts. Officially it starts at 9.20am, but on an island, there’s always a bit of latitude for getting off the ferry and driving up to the school. I’m sitting in Hartnett’s classroom, where they are working on a word-association game where she invites the class to tell her words they associate with “summer”.
Their island environment shines through in their answers.
“Beaches!”
“Fishing!”
“Sand!”
“Swimming!”
Hartnett does another word game. This one is word association with Bere Island itself.
“Island!”
“Shark!”
“Wild bulls!”
“Water!”
“Fish!”
“Walrus on a speedboat!” shouts out one child, clearly inspired by a television ad for a certain media company, and everyone falls around laughing.
“What are some of the things that happen in the summer?” Hartnett asks.
“Barbecues!”
Then one very small child pipes up, “The Tour De France!” with perfect French pronunciation.
There’s a silence in the room. These are not familiar words to the majority of the class.
“Yes, you’re right. The Tour de France happens in the summer,” Hartnett says. “What is the Tour De France?”
Silence.
The small child who threw out the phrase puts her hand up, waving it back and forth furiously like a branch in a storm. “It’s a cycling race,” she says triumphantly, clearly delighted to be in possession of a scrap of information not shared by her classmate.
10am
At the other side of the building, in Butler’s class, some of her older students are studying Irish tenses, while the younger ones are doing jigsaws that depict different parts of the world, or national flags. “How I mange the different classes in the same room is that one group is learning, while the other is working on exercises,” she explains later.
At one stage, when a child has completed a jigsaw of Europe, Butler comes over to shake it up and give the puzzle to another child.
“Miss, you’ve broken the world,” the child says, when parts of different countries in jigsaw form tumble on to the table.
10.30am
There’s a tin whistle lesson. The tune is the earworm Mary Had a Little Lamb, and it is fair to say not everyone finds the right tune, but everyone gives it a good go. Butler is endlessly patient with her young musicians. Over the next couple of days, I am to catch myself randomly – and tunelessly – singing Mary Had A Little Lamb.
At some point, Butler brings up on the interactive whiteboard the day’s Connections word puzzle from the New York Times. As it happens, I do this puzzle every day myself, and there are days when I don’t always solve it, usually foxed by American lingo, or sporting references I have never gleaned.
Everyone sits up excitedly when Connections comes on the screen. Butler calls different children to take turns at the board, choosing the four words from the 16 on offer that connect in some way with each other.
Throughout the day, I will continue to marvel at both Hartnett and Butler’s ability to both teach and multi-task, and how they each respond to the different concentration levels of children at different ages in the same classroom
Four of today’s words are “Hawaiian”, “Plain”, “Supreme” and “Vegetable”. In five seconds, the class has figured out that the connection is one of their favourite things – pizza. I wonder if the person who set today’s New York Times Connections puzzle knows it is being played all over the world, including in a small school on a small island off the coast of Co Cork in Ireland.
The children also play the New York Times game Wordle, and Flaggle, a game where you have to figure out which national flag is being slowly revealed.
“We do them every day,” Butler tells me later. “They love it.”
11am
Back in Hartnett’s class, during the lesson, one child asks to go to the toilet; another wonders aloud how long until lunchtime; another gets up, goes over to Hartnett’s desk, and starts playing with some pens there, until guided gently back to her seat. Another child brings up a water bottle to be opened. These are the youngest cohort of children in the room; the four- and five-year-olds. Hartnett navigates all these ad hoc interruptions with skill and warmth.
With some children in the class between the ages of four and five, the noise levels creep upwards from time to time. Hartnett has a simple but extremely effective way of pulling the children’s attention back to class. When the noise starts to get too loud, she does a quick unheralded clapping sequence that goes a bit like “Clap! Clap! Clap-Clap-Clap.” The children all join in and also clap the same sequence. It’s her signal for everyone to be quiet. And after every little clapping session, they are indeed quiet – for a time. She doesn’t have to say a word.
Throughout the day, I will continue to marvel at both Hartnett and Butler’s ability to both teach and multitask, and how they each respond to the different concentration levels of children at different ages in the same classroom.
11.20am
It’s lunchtime for both classes at 11.20am. I note the motivation, especially in Hartnett’s class, to be able to tell the time on the wall clock is strong. Connie O’Donoghue, who is five, has been doing a countdown under his breath to 11.20am. On the exact count of 11.20am, the children spring up as one.
I assume they are rushing to their lunch boxes, but no. They form a surprisingly patient queue to wash their hands by turn at the washbasin in the corner of the room, where each child has their own tiny towel (really a facecloth) hanging up with their name on it.
Then they dig into rice cakes and sandwiches and bananas and grapes and slices of apple. Everything is gobbled up by 11.30am, because of course it’s one of the two highlights of the day – playtime. The two classes burst out into the yard like so many corks exploding from bottles.
11.40am
It’s playtime in the yard for the whole school. The youngest child in Hartnett’s classroom is Oleksandre Loboda, who is four. There are three 12-year-olds in Butler’s classroom: Feya MacCarthy, Erica Murphy, and Abigale Harrington. There are sibling groups in each classroom too. Leo O’Keeffe Sullivan (10) and his brother Elliot (9), sit adjacent to each other.
As the children play together outside, I meditate on what it must be like to spend your primary school days – your entire primary school years, in fact – in such close proximity with the same few people. There must be some inevitable bonding for life, as well as bonus lessons in the art of socialisation. Most children tend to play and hang out with their peers, because their peers are the people they spend the most time in school with, but at Scoil Mhichil Naofa on Bere Island, at break time, everyone plays together. I see chasing games, and games of “It”, and rounders, where some runners have the short legs of six-year-olds, and others the longer legs of 11-year-olds.
We are inside, talking to support teacher O’Sullivan when Hartnett knocks loudly on the window for our attention, and points to the road.
“Cows!” she shouts.
A large herd of cows are running past the (closed) school gates, bawling and mooing, and flicking their tails. The children run up to the gates to gawk, and then return to their games. The Irish Times photographer vaults over the gate with his camera and runs after the retreating cows.
Noon
At noon, two minibuses pull up outside the school gates. Butler’s class is going on a marine treasure hunt to the Cloughland beach at the East End of the island. The minibus I travel on is driven by local woman Ann Harrington (a surname that repeats over and over during the day I’m on Bere).
The drive to the beach at the East End in the hot noon sunshine is ridiculously, absurdly beautiful. The fields are lush and dotted with grazing sheep. The odd winsome donkey watches us pass by, curious head over a gate, while the edges of the verdant island shimmer with beaches.
Up the airy roads and down the rocky glens the two minibuses go, as if we were in the cheesiest Irish version of the cheesiest Hallmark movie shot through a technicolour-saturated lens. What does it do to your consciousness as a child, I find myself wondering as I look out the window; growing up with such gorgeous landscape to look at, and having the rare freedom of living on a safe island to roam around?
They might take it all for granted now, but sometime in the future, the children in these two minibuses will possibly look back at their island school days on Bere and realise how special an experience it was to be able to go so easily to a beautiful beach for an environmental experience.
The Cloughland beach is indeed beautiful. It’s completely empty, for a start; a sandy beach with clear rock pools and mounds of glistening seaweed and a small pier.
On the beach, the children work in pairs of two to find the 16 objects on the “bingo cards” they have made on pieces of paper back in the classroom. Each pair shares a school iPad, which come armoured in heavy-duty purple covers. Every time they find something, they tick it off their bingo card and take a photo of it.
“Shell, sand, bird, water, fancy rock, ‘peri wrinkle’, jelly fish, jumpy things under rocks, bugs, salt, something weird or creepy, crab shell, something white, flower, rubbish, bird poo,” one sheet reads.
Twelve-year-olds Leo O’Keeffe Sullivan and Abigale Harrington’s bingo list, accompanied by lovely drawings, includes a number of similar objects, with a few additions of their own. “Seaweed, Elliot, a bus, anemone.” The Lesser-Spotted Elliot is duly found, and his photo added.
At one end of the beach, Jude Harrington (9) insists that we come to look at “the rainforest”. I clamber after him, over slippery, mossy stones, and find myself looking down from a height into a slice of narrow cove, the sand dappled with sunlight that shines though the “rainforest” trees above. It is such a gloriously unexpected surprise of a view, and I turn to thank Jude for bringing us there, but he’s gone, skipping back to the others, who have busied themselves with a new game.
All their objects have been duly found and photographed, so the children now turn their undivided attention to the universal game that children all over the world play near water – the game of who can throw the biggest stone into the sea off the pier and make the biggest splash. Back and forth they scurry tirelessly, sometimes lugging rocks in pairs, intent on their self-imposed task. Only the arrival of the minibuses to bring us back to school ends this game.
1pm
In Hartnett’s class, the lesson is about wind, and what causes it. Images come up on the screen of hair being blown around, of a wind turbine, of a storm. There is some restlessness until the topic changes and a picture of a Venus Fly trap appears on the screen. Hartnett explains how the plant works; how it gets nutrients from trapping flies inside its little green snapping leaves. Then she plays a video of this happening.
The children are agog. “Wow!” they shout, simultaneously appalled and fascinated as a plant swallows a fly.
1.20pm
There’s another break for both classes to eat.
1.30pm
Everyone goes out to play again for 20 minutes.
1.50pm
Hartnett’s class start putting their tiny chairs up on the tables, and looking for their shoes and lunch boxes and other paraphernalia. Not all these items are found.
2pm
There’s a big group picture outside. Hartnett’s class are picked up by their parents and guardians. School is over for the day for them.
2.15pm
The children have used their iPads to make a story about their trip to the beach, incorporating all the photos they took, and personalising it with their names and borders. They look fantastic. I feel about a million years old, thinking back to my own analogue school nature walks, which usually consisted of sticking leaves and sticks and seeds into a copy afterwards with Sellotape.
2.30pm
Most of the children in Butler’s class are reading. She takes each child up to her desk in turn to quietly look at their last night’s homework. I take the opportunity to ask the class what they like about their school.
“That I have lots of friends,” Meabh Hobbs (11) says.
“I like that there’s not many people here. It’s not crowded,” Anthony Murphy (9) says.
2.50pm
Tidy-up time. Books are put away into clear boxes under the table, one child takes the designated daily turn to sweep the floor, and the others put their chairs up on the desks. With only a few minutes to freedom, they are all now visibly longing to go home. Adults start arriving at the school gates. Bags are grabbed.
“Thank you, Miss! See you tomorrow, Miss!” they shout as one, and run out the door, leaving some unswept crumbs on the floor, and a sudden, shockingly deep silence behind them.
