ABSTRACT

Do you know there’s a thing called ‘flow’? It’s a sort of emotional and mental state in which everything’s going right and you feel that you can’t put a foot wrong. Sportsmen and women obviously recognise something like that, and it may well be recognisable in every other walk of life. If that’s so – if you can attain the state of ‘flow’ as a teacher or a head – then perhaps the long summer holiday is a real mistake, because you just have to get back into the magical state when you come back. That’s the argument here anyway. Or perhaps, in truth, I was just attracted by the name of the psychologist who first described the phenomenon.