DANCING ON THE TABLES - PART 2
MEMORABLE MOMENTS
The builder stood at the school office door. “I’m looking for the headteacher,” he said, scanning the people in the office. I tried to hide away in a corner, pretending to read the instructions on the laminator, but to no avail. “He’s over there,” my office manager kindly informed him, “He’s the one dressed as a Virgil from Thunderbird 2.” Ah, the joys of Book Week. Making learning interesting and enjoyable for children has one distinct advantage on the sterile rote learning some of our politicians would like to see return: children engage with it and that makes teaching them a lot easier and more effective. Every year, we would focus on a book theme and organise our teaching around it. The highlight for many children was the dress-up-as-a-book-character day although, no matter what the theme, a fair proportion would come dressed as Harry Potter or Elsa from Frozen. An 'Under the Sea' stories theme saw children dressed as fish, pirates, lobsters, Harry Potter and Elsa. Space stories would find the children dressed as astronauts, rockets, planets, Harry Potter and Elsa. Many of the staff were also very enthusiastic about dressing up, one teacher always making a visit to a local costume hire shop and arriving in spectacular outfits – her wicked stepmother from Snow White being a particular favourite of mine. When one teacher came dressed as a circus clown, we had to carry another teacher out of the hall: she had coulrophobia – a dread fear of clowns. The first year, I came as a rather fetching Worzel Gummidge with straw hat, an old coat, trousers with hay coming out at the waist and wellingtons. The wellingtons made a return appearance for Virgil Tracy, along with a blue tracksuit, yellow sash and Thunderbirds hat. After the meeting with the builders and an equally embarrassing conversation with one of the parents about his son’s behaviour whilst dressed like this, I decided in future years I would be an encouraging onlooker rather than a participant.
Remembering key events from my own primary schooldays such as performing in plays and concerts, and going on a residential visit, I was of the opinion that if you make something memorable, it is more likely to stick in a child’s mind. One Christmas in my last school, I decided to make our final assembly one to remember. It was the early days of Flash Mobs on the Internet where supposedly spontaneous events would happen, delighting the surprised onlookers as ordinary people suddenly began to dance, sing or play instruments. I loved these and decided I would do one in our final assembly of the term. It was usually a joyous affair anyway with staff and children a little demob happy and we’d sing carols, have performances from the school choir and finish with a rousing rendition of The Twelve Days of Christmas with everyone doing increasingly manic movements as the song progressed. My first approach was to a ten year old boy who’d sung a solo at the previous school concert. I thought he’d be game to standing up on his own and starting to sing and he didn’t disappoint me. Then I had to choose some other confident children in the four older classes. They not only had to be able to sing and dance but they also needed to be able to keep our enterprise under wraps for a week. Next I approached a few of the staff who I was sure would be up for it. Again, I received a positive reaction and so, the day before the assembly, having got everyone to learn the words to Jingle Bell Rock, we assembled in an empty classroom one lunchtime and went through the routine. The next day, everyone gathered in the hall for the final time that term and we were about halfway through the usual proceedings with me in full flow, talking about the good work that had been going on, when one of the children set Jingle Bell Rock going on the CD player. There were a lot of bemused faces, both staff and children and then Daniel stood up and began singing. Quizzical looks turned to smiles as children began popping up all over the hall, joining in with the familiar refrain. There were gasps as some of the staff, seated along the side of the hall, suddenly leapt to their feet. At this point, my plans started going a little awry. Children who knew nothing of our plans began to get to their feet and join in. When the point came for my performers to make their way to the front of the hall for a grand finale, they were followed by about a quarter of the school but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was fun and said a lot about the great ethos we had.
A year later, I felt I should do something equally different in the assembly. This time, I took Mariah Carey’s 'All I Want fro Christmas is You' and videoed different children or groups of children singing along to each line from ever more bizarre locations around school. I’d let slip to some of the governors that I might be doing something unusual again and a number of them were swelling the ranks of the adults as our Christmas assembly got under way again. This time, I reminded the children that a year ago, we’d all been surprised when Daniel had stood up and started singing – cue the video with Daniel yet again singing on his own. This time, the only mass participation was the applause that greeted the final shots. Now I had established a tradition and each year I had to think of something new to pop into the assembly. There was the staff choir that emerged carrying candles and singing 'Away in a Manger' from one of the side entrances, and then there was the pantomime. After gaining support from the staff who told me they’d be willing to perform, I wrote a version of Snow White and our intrepid band of actors met a couple of times after school to rehearse. Those staff who didn’t fancy acting but wanted to take part became one of the seven dwarves, coming in on their knees. The children loved it, although we did encounter a sticky moment. I had appointed myself narrator, meaning not was I was in control but also I didn’t have to act. Everything was going swimmingly well with much laughter at our efforts, until the wicked stepmother entered stage right with the poisoned apple for Snow White. The children began booing her: a good pantomime reaction, except they didn’t stop. The teacher waited for the booing to subside to say her lines – it didn’t. She tried shouting over the noise – nobody could hear her. She finally left the stage but the booing had taken on a life of its own and despite all their respected members of staff standing at the front telling them to quieten down, the children refused to be silent. Eventually after some time, order was finally restored and the panto continued but it was a salutary experience in the science of crowd dynamics and how tentative our control over the children could be.
As a class teacher, I was always looking for ways to make my lessons a bit different. By briefing (and dressing up) some of the children as participants in a news story, like a bank robbery or a plane emergency landing, I was rewarded with some excellent factual reports. By giving every child the name and basic details of a real Pilgrim Father and then putting the tables in the classroom together to create the boat and reconstructing the voyage, I was able to explore some of the issues and stories behind the event, in ways that a simple recount of the story would not have done. Some years later, I was thrilled to be recognised at a conference by some sixth formers, who greeted me with, "Do you remember turning our desks into a boat?" This had happened twelve years earlier. When I became a head, I encouraged teachers to do things a bit differently, to have the odd burst of spontaneity. After the rare appearance of snow one winter, I despaired at the teacher who came to ask me if it was alright to take the children out, but was thrilled with the teacher who was already out there, knee deep in snow, setting up experiments, handing out the magnifying glasses and challenging the children to make the tallest ice tower. However, sometimes unplanned events can have unexpected consequences as the following cautionary tale will show.
Halloween is an interesting event for primary schools. Should you be focusing on something that celebrates all that is evil, especially if you are church school? In my early teaching career, it wasn't really an issue and we’d do all sorts of work around the day. Later, as it grew increasingly popular with children and adults alike, it all but disappeared from classrooms. Mt last school's Parent Teacher Association used to put on a disco around Halloween time but they had to call it the Autumn Disco – very politically correct. The children weren't fooled: they still came along dressed as ghouls and skeletons. Back in the 1990s, things were a bit different. The headteacher of the school I was in announced one morning that he’d like to do something the following week for Halloween – something memorable. Ideas were asked for, but surprisingly nobody proffered any, so that when the day arrived, all that had been arranged was for the children to go into the hall and sit in the dark whilst the head read a bit of a spooky story. And then spontaneity arrived in bucket-loads. The deputy decided to put scary music on as the children entered the hall, so that by the time the head arrived to read his ‘bit of a spooky story’, the children were already in a state of high excitement and in no mood to listen. Three of us had decided, on the day, to dress up: I was a rather fetching ghoul with my hair backcombed and sprinkled with flour, my face painted white with black rings around my eyes. Another teacher and I went behind the stage where the head was perched, reading his story, and between the heavy curtains we fired water pistols. This led to groups of children suddenly erupting in screams as they were covered in small jets of water, much to the bemusement of the head who had no idea what was going on. When we made an unplanned appearance in the hall, the children, becoming ever more hysterical by the minute, grabbed at our costumes to reassure themselves that we were really just their teachers. We managed to escape – most of our costumes didn’t. The final act occurred when another teacher thought a bit of atmospheric dry ice would add to the occasion. As the children started coughing and spluttering, the head ordered the evacuation of the hall.
As we trooped back to our classrooms, the head stood and glowered, but said nothing. He began the next morning's briefing with “Ladies and gentlemen.” We looked down at out feet, knowing what was coming. “ We will never be celebrating Halloween like that again!” But it was memorable.
ALL THINGS MUSICAL
I showed a talent for maths and music at school. When applying for university, my father advised me to do maths because the subject was far more likely to get me jobs than if I had a degree in music. He was quite correct but I knew best and studied music. And it helped me get my first three jobs because I was a musician and musicians, especially ones who played the piano, were like gold to interviewing headteachers and quickly snapped me up. In my first probationary year, I was given various jobs to do around the music curriculum. I ran a choir for the seven to eleven year olds. I taught a number of recorder groups from ear-splitting beginners to quite sophisticated ensembles that featured soprano, treble, tenor and bass recorders. I conducted the orchestra – well, I say ‘orchestra’ but 'weird ensemble' might have been a better description. It consisted of four violins, two clarinets, a trumpet and a guitar – not your usual combination. Over the years, I have had many combinations in my ‘orchestras’ including trombones, keyboards and once a full rock band drum kit.
My first headteacher was also a musician and wrote many songs for the children that were very good. The same cannot be said for his piano playing which he insisted on doing in morning assemblies. Once, after he’d played the introduction to a well known song of praise in such a way that nobody could recognise the tune, let alone know when to come in, he rose up from the piano and, glowering over the top of the piano, thundered, “The reason I went wrong this morning was because someone had moved my piano stool.” The children may have been taken in by his excuse but even the most unmusical adult knew this was a load of rubbish. He was just rather poor at playing the piano.
That first term passed quickly and soon we were making preparations for Christmas. The head asked me to put together a programme of music for the annual Christmas concert which I duly did. I took the draft to him, typed in smudgy purple ink on the special skin that could be attached to the ancient banda duplicating machine. He looked at the various items I had included and then, smiling, said, “ Well this is very good, but you see, at this school we always like to have the composers' names included in the programme.” I agreed to rewrite the programme and went away to fill in the composers’ names knowing full well the reason for having to do so. The head had written two of the songs that the infant choir was going to sing himself, and he wanted everyone to know. What he didn’t realise was that I had written five pieces for the different groups I was working with – well you try finding a piece of music scored for four violins, two clarinets, a trumpet and a guitar. I gave the revised programme to the school secretary so I wasn’t there when the head discovered that his name checks had been outnumbered by mine. But I was there at the end of the following term when, once again, we held a musical concert. This time, I had meticulously included the names of every composer. Once again, the head had written a couple of songs; once again, my name was attached to about five or six. When I passed it on to him for his approval, he looked at the various items and then, smiling, said, “ Well this is very good, but I don’t think we need to include all the names of the composers.”
Concerts were always the highlights of my teaching year. It was amazing to see the levels that children could achieve when presented with a challenge. I had loved performing, as a child. Whilst my peers would be congregating backstage, their faces drained of colour, their hands restlessly practicing the fingering of the most difficult passages they were to perform, I would be standing there quietly confident, looking forward to going out on stage. Now I was a teacher, I found performances weren’t quite that simple because – no matter how much we’d practiced, no matter what I’d said to them beforehand, no matter how much I waved my arms around, pulling funny faces to try to get them to slow down or sing louder – the children took not the blindest bit of notice. I had no control. This I found quite daunting and my efforts to engage them became more and more animated with each concert. In the end, I learned to live with it but in my second year of teaching I still thought I could influence events with carefully chosen words of advice beforehand.
The Christmas concert following the composers' names concert, I decided to pay a visit to my choir prior to the start of the concert in order to gee them up. They were in one of the classrooms that opened into the hall, I was behind another entrance where the office administration and staff facilities were. When I ventured into the hall, it was thronged with parents, yet to take their seats, talking excitedly about the prospect of seeing their little ones perform. There was no way I could get through easily and so I decided on a more circuitous route, leaving the building and following a path round the outside of the school to an external door to the choir’s classroom. I duly delivered my rousing speech and, satisfied that they were as ready as they ever would be, I began my return journey. The outside lights I had triggered on my outbound journey had now gone off and wouldn’t be triggered again until I had rounded a particularly muddy flowerbed that lay to one side of the path. In the darkness, I discovered the location of the flowerbed fairly quickly, by falling head first into it. The lights sprang into life and as I pulled myself up I was able to see the extent of the damage. My suit, white shirt and bowtie were plastered in thick winter mud.
I staggered back into school to a sharp intake of breath as my colleagues caught sight of my bedraggled state. Some of the older women teachers went into full motherly mode and whisked me off to the toilets where I was sponged down completely. I emerged, a little damp but otherwise indistinguishable from the well-dressed young teacher who had arrived thirty minutes earlier. The head poked his head through the door and told us we were about to start and I made my way to the piano to begin an evening of conducting and accompanying. None of the parents would have been any the wiser about my close encounter with a flowerbed earlier in the evening were it not for the spotlights that not only flooded the stage but also raised the temperature in the room considerably. This resulted in my well-sponged suit drying out, so that by the end of the evening, the headmaster, whilst thanking the children and staff for their efforts, had to explain why his music teacher had come dressed in camouflage.
Over the years, I’d run many extra-curricular music clubs at lunchtimes and after school. At my last school, I decided to set up a percussion club based on the West End musical Stomp, where performers create complex sets of rhythms using everyday objects such as brushes and dustbin lids. The joy of this was that it was open to any child. You didn’t have to be learning an instrument; you just had to grasp some fairly basic rhythms. So we built up rhythmic sequences using empty cardboard boxes, old tin cans, even the plastic chairs we were sitting on. Along with this, I taught them some body percussion. This had its origins in the mines of South Africa where the miners, prohibited from speaking to each other, used various forms of clapping and slapping with their arms, legs and chests as a form of communication. This developed into the moves that I had learned at a music conference and which I passed on to the children. The highlight of our performance was the piece I’d adapted from a Stomp sequence where the children sat on chairs apparently reading newspapers and then they began to scrunch them up rhythmically before adding stamps and claps and movement around the row of chairs they were sitting on. It was all great fun and the audience loved it but sadly there was no transfer to the West End.
I applied for any grant that allowed us to extend our arts provision but one of the things that really irritated me was that we had to provide evidence of the impact any funding had had on the children - usually in terms of raised test results. Now that is all well and good. Obviously the powers that be wanted to ensure their funding was being spent effectively, and rightly so. But sometimes it got a bit silly. When we received pupil premium money to support those under-achieving from poorer backgrounds, we identified a lack of aspiration in this group and one way of addressing this was to take our oldest children to the local university to find out what universities were all about, to raise awareness. So, what impact did this have? Well of course, nobody knew because it would depend on how many would go to university seven years later who wouldn’t have gone without taking part on this day’s visit. The impact you have as a teacher often cannot be measured but occasionally you get a glimpse when your past pupils when they start making their way in the world and this was the case with James.
I had been doing some work with a top London based orchestra that had a residency in our local concert hall and wanted to do outreach work in all the local primary schools. Responding to a request for some teacher input, I helped them develop the programme and allowed them to try it out on my pupils. It was very successful and I wrote to tell them so. Just before they rolled the whole programme out, they contacted me to ask if I’d be happy with them using my words of praise in their promotional literature, which I was. A couple of months later, I received a letter in the post at school. The writer had seen a promotional poster when visiting the concert hall and assumed that I was the same person who had taught her son James twenty years earlier. She then went on to say how much I’d inspired him in his music – he was one of those two clarinets in my first 'weird ensemble'. It transpired that he’d gone on to study music at university and then moved into academia where he was now a doctor of music, lecturing students, composing and carrying out research into African tribal music. It was a wonderful letter to receive because, despite all the doubts you have as a teacher, especially when the children still don’t get it after the tenth time you’ve been through it, your encouragement, enthusiasm and belief can majorly impact their lives in ways that you could never predict.
DAY TRIPPER
For those readers who have or have had children of primary school age, you may well have experienced the day trip as a parent helper. As a headteacher, I encouraged my teachers to take the children out on short visits as often as possible, my reasoning being that children are far more likely to learn when they experience things first hand. Children were also likely to be far more motivated and inspired by a visit away from the classroom. Of course for the children, a day trip out revolved purely around the answers to these two questions, “When is it lunch?” and, “When are we going to the shop?”
My first experience of a day trip was taking the nine and ten year olds in my class as part of a year group visit to the Natural History Museum in London. This is the most fantastic museum, free to enter and crammed full of the most wonderful exhibits covering every aspect of the natural world. Having disembarked from the coach, we entered through the schools' entrance and the teacher in charge, Mrs. Kelvin, issued the instructions for the day. I found Mrs. Kelvin quite intimidating, me being a newly qualified teacher, she being a very animated senior teacher who tended to speak at the top of her voice and wave her arms around like a windmill. Her briefing included the times to meet for lunch and to reassemble by the schools’ entrance at the end of the day. Then we split into groups of fifteen and made our own ways around the different rooms. I took my group first to see the model of a blue whale that completely filled one gallery and then we marvelled at the amazing diversity of life under the sea in the fish exhibition. The life-size models of dinosaurs dominated the central hall and we lingered here for a long time. After lunch we visited the mammals, the insects and, with an hour before we had to leave, I took them into the human biology section. The children were totally absorbed and asking me lots of questions when suddenly a whirlwind entered the gallery – it was Mrs. Kelvin. Apparently, I had got the time for meeting up completely wrong, everyone else was on the coach, and the coach driver was about to have a nervous breakdown as he’d been parked on double yellow lines for twenty minutes waiting for my group whilst perpetually on the look out for traffic wardens. I hurried my group after the departing Mrs. Kelvin but they were confused and kept repeating: ”But when are we going to the shop?”
“You’re not going to the shop,” thundered Mrs. Kelvin scattering members of the public before her as she strode through the crowds of visitors.
“But you said we were going to the shop after the human biology section,” they complained.
“I know, I know,” I replied pathetically, “But I seem to have got my timings wrong. Sorry children.” The return journey was very quiet. The coach driver was furious, the other staff were embarrassed, my group were annoyed and nobody would speak to me.
When I moved to my last school, the previous headteacher had been very reluctant to allow teachers to take the children off the school premises. I believe she had had a nasty experience leading a trip once and that made her somewhat risk averse. There is much talk in the media about children being deprived of these kinds of experiences because of risk assessments. These came into force after a series of horrendous accidents where accompanying staff had not thought through their actions and I welcomed them. As well as providing as safe an environment as possible for the children, it also protected the staff taking them off site. Unfortunately, as with any bureaucratic process, they can be taken to excess. What was vital was that staff leading the trip had visited the places they were going to go to beforehand, that they were aware of any potential safety issues and that they had plans in place to deal with these. Simple really. On one of the regular risk assessment training sessions I had attend, one trainer told us that most risk assessments are just common sense and no matter how hard you plan for every eventuality, there will always be some unforeseen event where you need to exercise your own judgment. Memories of Peveril Castle came flooding back. When I received a phone call from the teacher taking her class of seven year olds to a nearby farm park began, “We’re all alright," alarm bells began to ring. “We’re in a lay-by waiting for a new coach to come and collect us.” I asked what had happened. “Well,” she explained, “we were driving along when a child pointed out that one of the coach’s tyres was travelling independently from the rest of the coach – in the middle of the road.” It transpired that the driver had realised something was wrong and was pulling over as the tyre decided to embark on a solo career. In the end, all that mattered was that the children were all safe but I did have to spend the remainder of the day on the phone to the coach company and writing to parents so that they heard it from school firsthand before it became sensationalised by the children. Not that they'd have had to try hard.
We had to limit the number of visits we could make because of finances. One of the reasons I decided to retire when I did was that I was becoming increasingly angry about the unfairness of school funding, within my local authority (since when it's got worse). My school was on the fringes of a major city and drew our children from a range of social backgrounds including a fifth of my children coming from areas that fell within the bottom ten percent of affluence nationally. We were not a deprived school but neither were we rich. Schools towards the centre of the city, who undoubtedly had a much tougher job than we did, rightly received additional funding plus every grant that was going. When I'd scraped and saved to send one of my teaching assistants on a course and she found herself in the company of five TAs from another school because, "The head sent us all because he doesn't know what to spend his money on," it tends to make one a little irritated. What really brought it home was an invitation to look round a school recently judged as outstanding by the lovely people at Ofsted. As the rightly proud head and deputy showed us visiting heads the various systems they had in place for monitoring the children’s progress, I became aware that they were utilising a host of additional staff with no class teaching commitments at all. No wonder they could all monitor so well, that was all they apparently had to do. My teachers had to carry out their monitoring alongside a full teaching timetable. OK, rant over, but the same applied to trips out. Schools in the centre could walk to a myriad of museums, parks, concert halls and theatres whilst every time we wanted to take our children out to enjoy similar experiences we had to hire a coach, hopefully with the required number of wheels, and that cost the hundreds of pounds that we didn’t have.
A day trip to the National Motor Museum at Gaydon in Warwickshire came at the end of a term long project my school had been working on alongside a local engineering company. It was part of an initiative to get children more aware of local industry and we had been taking part for several years. With the help of a team of the company's engineers, our children had constructed a working model of one of their machines; controlled by a computer program the children had created themselves. The day in Gaydon was to showcase this work, along with other schools working on similar projects, and to celebrate the work of this joint venture between schools and industry. To raise the status of the event, the Mayor and Lady Mayoress of Solihull had been invited to be guests of honour and during a break for lunch they went round engaging in conversation with the various staff who were there; this included the teacher from my school who had run the project and me.
“These children will remember this event for the rest of their lives,” intoned the Lady Mayoress. I chose to put a different perspective on it.
“What they will probably remember most is the journey down here.” I said. We had travelled down in two cars and although we were meant to be following each other, we kept getting separated and so every time the cars came into view again the children got very excited about it.” Having contradicted our esteemed guests, I decided to share with them a similar story that may not have shown me or the teaching profession in the best light.
At my first school, I'd arranged a visit to a schoolboy international football match at Manchester United's Old Trafford Stadium. The children found it a memorable experience, not because of the football which was largely uninspiring, but because of two incidents that occurred. The first concerned the appointment of a new headteacher for the school. We had left school at lunchtime on the day of the interviews with Mrs. Salter, the teacher accompanying me on the trip, daring the deputy head to get the result of the interview announced on the tannoy at Old Trafford during half time. “Nobody dares me,” the deputy whispered, as we were about to board the coach. She handed me a piece of paper with the first and last names of the candidates on, instructing me to listen out for an announcement at half time. Half time duly arrived and, amongst the birthdays and anniversaries requests, came a message for a Mrs. Salter from our school. The children immediately pricked up their ears. The announcer continued, “Your daughter has given birth to a son and they are going to call him…” On hearing this, the children mobbed poor Mrs. Salter with heartfelt congratulations.
“But I haven’t got a daughter,” she protested in vain. And with all the confusion and noise, nobody actually heard the name of the non-existent baby which would have correlated with one of the names on my list and identified our new headteacher.”
“I see,” said the Lady Mayoress, unsure how to react to this act of rather juvenile behaviour. Undaunted I continued. On the way home, the coach called in at a motorway service station for a comfort break and the chance for the adults to grab a quick cup of tea or coffee. One of the parents accompanying us offered to supervise the children who congregated around the electronic games and slot machines, so the other parents, the daughter-less Mrs. Salter and I made our way to the restaurant for refreshments. We had almost finished when the parent we’d left with the children came rushing in.
“You’ll need to come quickly,” he said.
“Why? Whatever is the matter?” I asked concerned that there had been an accident.
“The children have found a chocolate bar dispenser,” he explained. “They've discovered that they can put their money in, take out the bar of chocolate and then, by pressing the return coin button, get their money back. They’ve emptied the machine.”
The Lady Mayoress smiled sympathetically, “Oh dear, I imagine it took you an awfully long times to collect all those chocolate bars and return them to the manager."
“We didn’t collect them back in,” I replied cheerfully, “We got back on the coach and got out of there as quickly as we could.”
“I see,” came the Lady Mayoress’ curt reply, and with that she and her husband moved on to the next group.
“Well done,” said the teacher accompanying me, “Here was the chance to show some people of influence all the excellent work that is being done in schools and to raise the reputation of teachers and you’ve managed to ruin all that with your little stories.” She had a point.
NOT THE JUGGLER AGAIN
My assembly was going very wrong. I’d primed some children with answers to some prepared questions, but, bless them, they kept forgetting the answers. I had a chart on a clipboard at the front, but the visual aids I’d stuck to it kept falling off. I got half way through the story and found I couldn’t remember the ending, or why I had brought an empty bucket with me. I could sense the children loosing their attention…
My first experience of school assemblies as a teacher featured a very quirky headteacher, the one who made valiant attempts to play the piano. He’d trained shortly after the war when the country was desperate for teachers, and I think he’d moved fairly swiftly up the ranks to become a headteacher, bypassing the bit where you develop a rapport for children. He was one of those people for whom, serving in the military during a time of conflict was his greatest hour and, as a consequence, it was something we had to hear about on a regular basis. The majority of his assembly stories were personal recollections of life in the army. He used to get very agitated by the children playing games of cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians at playtimes. What he objected to was them shooting each other, presumably because he’d seen this for real during the war and couldn’t disconnect his horrific memories from the silly games children play. At the end of his assemblies we’d hear a familiar refrain. “So children, it’s all very well for you to play at shooting each other in the playground, but, in real life, if get shot you are dead. That’s it! You don’t get back up again. Your life is over – for ever.” And with these depressing thoughts in everyone’s minds, we had to go and try to get the children motivated to do some maths or science.
I don’t particularly remember assemblies as being that much fun when I was at school myself and they became a major irritation on qualifying as a teacher because I always had so many other things that I could be doing: hearing the children read, marking, helping a small group with a particularly tricky maths concept. Instead, I was having to sit there and listen to whoever was taking the assembly drone on and on. I was usually seated behind the piano, ready to provide the accompaniment to whichever hymn or song we would be having for our required collective worship. One morning, when I came to play, nothing happened. I pressed down on the keys but no sound came from within the piano. A quick lift of the lid revealed the reason: some of my colleagues had sabotaged the piano and filled it with cushions so preventing the little hammers from hitting the strings. How silly! Years later, I told my class of ten year olds this and the next day in assembly, as I walked towards the piano, I was aware of a buzz of excitement in the hall. Putting two and two together, I lifted the piano lid and, as I had expected, there were a pile of cushions inside, this time put there by my resourceful class intent on repeating history. Did they think I was stupid?
Once I became a headteacher, assemblies became a wonderful time of the day because it was then that I was able to interact with the children. They say that teaching is akin to acting and always having put on a bit of a performance as a class teacher, I was in my element in assemblies. I didn’t take them every day because for two days in the week we had a class assembly and an achievement assembly. The idea for the class assembly was that each class in turn would use the time to share the work they had been doing that term. It was supposed to be simple but, every so often, a spiral of trying to outdo the class from the week before would break out. Mrs. G’s class would share some of the songs they had been learning; the next week Miss H’s class would act out some poetry with words, song and dance; the following week Mr. I’s class would do a full scale reconstruction of the Battle of Hastings – and then I had to call a stop, remind everyone what was meant to be happening and we’d return to sharing our stories and our science experiments, until…
The achievement assembly was not as competitive and teachers made sure that every child achieved at least one thing during the half term so that their proud parents could come in to hear about what they’d done and see them receive a certificate. Any achievement merited a mention so as well as writing, maths and science, certificates were given out for effort in PE, for art, technology and music, for showing positive attitudes and for overcoming adversity. I had one teacher who never got her act together. She was always writing certificates a few minutes before the assembly began which meant the parents of the children in her class rarely got to see their children receiving them out at the front. “I have a few last minute certificates,” she would say, calling the children to stand up. I would often mouth these words to my deputy on the other side of the hall, and he would be mouthing them back to me, so frequent was the refrain. In addition to work done in school, I was keen for children to share the things that they'd achieved out of school as well and so we would have a little band of cubs and brownies showing off their badges, swimmers with their awards, martial arts experts with their belts. One particular morning as I entered the hall, the children and staff already sitting waiting, I was a little disturbed to find that the two rows of chairs set out for parents were completely empty. The two benches where children who were going to be rewarded sat bore a striking similarity to the parents' seats – they were empty. Sensing this was not going to be the easiest of assemblies, I began by thanking the parents for coming in. This caused quite a stir with the older children who’d already realised there weren’t any. I looked up and down the lines of teachers sat either side of the hall, imploring them to provide me with some recipients but to no avail. “You don’t have any last minute certificates do you?” I asked my usually dependable last-minute teacher. There were none. “Has anyone brought in something to show to us from home?” Nobody. “Any notices?” I tried, getting increasingly desperate. Not a jot. We couldn’t just troop back to our classes and so I had to come up with something. I told them a story.
I loved telling stories. Sometimes they would be traditional tales with a strong message that espoused the values we were trying to promote in the children. Aesop’s fables were a staple of mine. Other times, I’d make up stories or share a true story. These true stories were usually about people who had demonstrated courage or compassion such as Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela and sometimes they were about me! One I did every few years was about a boy overcoming his fear of the water to gain his one and only swimming certificate. It was a simple tale: ten year old boy gets changed, climbs into the deep end of the swimming pool with the task of swimming to the other end. Twenty minutes later, he still hasn’t let go of the side. Time to get out. This repeats itself over a number of weeks until at the end of the very last lesson the teacher says, “You’ve missed your chance now. Out you come,” at which point the boy lets go of the side and swims to the other end of the pool. As the children marvelled at how this boy overcame his dread fear of being out of his depth, I would ask them the name of the boy. My canny nine to eleven year olds would work out that if they might be able to name of the boy then it must be someone they know – surely not the middle aged bloke at the front telling the story. One or two would decide to take a chance on naming me, even using my first name which would normally get them into trouble. “Yes,” I'd say, “It was me,” and a murmur would go round the room. Perfect – message delivered and engrained in their memories.
Every year, my first assembly was always about a medieval jester, fallen on bad times, who is rescued at death's door by some monks. After months of care, he returns to full health and he tries to thank God for his recovery by doing what the other monks do: illuminated writing, growing vegetables, keeping bees. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do any of them particularly well. One night, the monks are woken from their slumbers by noises coming from the abbey church. There they find the jester juggling with the candlesticks, balancing on the pews and somersaulting from the pulpit. They are outraged and fetch the abbot who smiles and explains to the outraged monks, “He isn’t being disrespectful. He is thanking God by using the talents that he has.” That was my message for the children at the start of a new school year: we are all good at something – we must strive in those areas that we find hard and excel in those we are good at. It is a great story, but by the time they were ten years old, some of the children had heard it seven times already and, one year, my opening words were met with a groan. This was certainly not the way I wanted to galvanise the children for a year’s endeavour. I decided to make some changes in subsequent years, telling the story from different viewpoints or starting at different points in the story. So, one year I had the tale told by one of the monks, the next year it began with the jester doing acrobatics in the church. This way, when the older children realised it was ‘that story’ again, they all did so at different times and the communal groan was avoided.
I had a wonderful time taking assemblies and very rarely did they go as badly as the one I began this chapter talking about. However, when your plans have gone awry, your teaching aids have fallen apart and you’ve forgotten how the story ends including why you have a bucket, there is only one thing to do: I put the bucket over my head and just sat there. That certainly captured the children’s attention.
A LITTLE BIT OF STOCK
In primary schools, whoever controls the stockroom has great power. In my first school, this was the headteacher who ran the operation with military precision. At the start of term, you collected your allocation: paper, books, pens, pencils, and that was it, you made them last. He was so tight that when he once rewarded the staff with a brand new red marking pen each (we could hardly contain our excitement), not a single one worked, having sat on a shelf for years. As the term progressed, there would be a black market in the most used items, with teachers swapping all manner of things, mainly for packs of pencils. The head insisted that everything on the walls: posters, children’s work etc., were backed with coloured paper to make them stand out. Sadly, because he was so mean with the stock budget, the sugar paper we had to use was of very low quality so a stunning display with bold red, green and blue backings in August would quickly fade to a monochrome sludgy grey a few weeks later.
I had a small walk in stock cupboard in my classroom where I jealously kept my supplies. Sometimes the children would follow me in to collect their new book or ruler, and on one occasion, I walked out and closed the self-locking door as I left, unaware that I’d locked one of the girls inside. I was just sitting down to lunch when a child approached me; “Patricia says can you let her out of the stock cupboard now?” I’ve never moved faster, returning to release the poor distraught child. I decided from then on to take the door off the lock during lesson times, but this then created another problem. At parents evening later in the year, one mother enquired about ‘The Paper Club'. As I sat there nonplussed, she explained that a number of the children were taking home piles of writing and drawing paper. The parents thought it had my blessing – it had not. Apparently one enterprising child was making trips to my now unsecured stock cupboard to furnish her club with resources. The club folded the next day!
Of course, when I became a headteacher, stock took on a new dimension. It was one of the greediest items on the budget sheet. No matter how generous an allocation of funding it received, it was always in need of a top up half way through the year. I’d try refusing to order more of this and that, and then the teachers would politely enquire how on earth they were going to teach the children to write when there was nothing to write with and nothing to write on. Their arguments had a certain logic and up would go the stock budget again. In one school, I was in charge of stock. I quickly realised that the power wasn’t all it had appeared. Everyone moaned at me: there was never enough of this or we’d run out of that. No matter what system you tried to put in place, teachers took far too much, horded it, and never gave you an inkling of what they needed until it was too late to order it. I didn’t enjoy the job. I especially didn’t enjoy it when I mistakenly ordered what I thought was a fairly frugal 30 boxes of paper tissues, but turned out to be 30 packs with 25 boxes in each pack. Rather than admit my error, I kept the delivery and distributed the 750 boxes around the school. You couldn’t go anywhere for months without finding hidden stacks of tissue boxes, filling every available space.