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

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