Exhausted but happy

It's been a while. I'm really not doing very well at this blog, am I.

So much goes on in the round of a week, in a school, I think those who aren't in it anymore forget what a crushing death-march it is. Like Godzilla, school life just drives ahead regardless of everyone and everything crushing anything that gets in its path. You join it, or you are splattered to smithereens.

I attended an interview for a MA course on Monday, visited my new school (the one I'll be teaching in from September) on Tuesday, went on a theatre trip on Wednesday, and had a parents' evening on Thursday. A pretty insane week by any standards, but productive.

The most worthy of blogging about was the visit to the theatre. It's a shame I can't get hold of the pictures here. Our kids were a bottom set year 8 group, so we're talking 12 year olds with very short attention spans, and little or no experience of ever being in the theatre before. They were taken to the Old Vic by myself and two other teachers they knew fairly well. After an initial spree of surreptitiously filching their sugar-enriched supersweet caramel snacks on the train (they were asked to save them for lunchtime), and about ten arguments between the girls about who got to sit next to who, we finally made it to Waterloo station.

They left the train in a huddle and quietened down a bit while waiting for instructions. It's a big train station, and they don't usually get to go to London. To give you an idea, most of them stare out of the window with a provincial "Woaaah!" when they see the London eye. Hounslow has no such architectural delights. The sheer size and ostentatiousness of the architecture of Waterloo shut them up. They were waiting for us to buy the group ticket at the ticket booth (yes we got it after travelling, don't ask), and of course saw all the crowds on their way to the Ascot races.

Now at the best of times, Ascot hats look a bit surreal to those of us who know what it's about, but to our kids, it was about as foreign as I would feel at a tribal wedding in the Congo. They watched these pasty-faced, bare-legged 'ladies' sporting feathers, mounted animals, you name it, getting onto the train in the other direction, probably wondering why on earth those poor deluded people were going out towards Hounslow, and how likely they were to survive their trip.

We were then ushered through the suicidal traffic around the station to the Old Vic theatre, and greeted there by a sprightly young man who was by all accounts a graduate of a drama school turned professional guide. He seemed to love his job, and really engaged the kids in a discussion of how the theatre was built, and for whom, selling it to them very well, I have to say. They entered in quiet admiration for being allowed into an empty theatre, and got to go about asking questions about the place, and see the set of the play we were going to see. I was very impressed the theatre trusted a bunch of 12 year olds to not mess up their set before a major performance. But there you go. Just goes to show what Kevin Spacey has done with the place.

So after our tour, we were ushered to our seats, after a few drama warmup exercises and some questions to answer after the play was over. The show was Pygmalion, and was quite certainly the best Shaw production I've ever seen. Even our kids were kept on the edge of their seats till the end. Literally; we had limited visibility seats and had to lean forward the whole time to see anything. Kids that age rarely stay engaged more than 10 minutes with those sorts of seats, and ours stayed riveted for well over an hour.

The idea of Eliza Doolittle being transformed from a "gutter-snipe", as the Professor subtly puts it, to a lady is one which still hugely amuses kids from outer London. The teens I teach here are so class-conscious, fascinated by the wealth which surrounds their little pocket of depravity in Hounslow; their haven of British Asian family-centred life with its obsessions and dramas so removed from the busy city life in central London. They instinctively know they belong to an underclass, and can completely empathise with Eliza's hilariously goofy faux-pas as she tries to pass herself off for somebody she will never be, losing her working class identity in the process. I was just astounded at how engaged they were. Even their replies of "Yeah. Kay." when asked how they liked the show didn't mask their evident delight in seeing Eliza shift social boundaries and succeed and fail all at once.

All in all, the trip was a huge hit with them, and they even got their ice creams during intermission. Even though parents didn't show up till 45 minutes after we got back to pick up some kids, I was left with a real feeling we'd done something worthwhile. If those kids had that experience of the theatre at that age, perhaps they won't be completely condemned to a life of eating fried chicken in front of some crappy team sport every weekend. Sounds a bit classist, but it's true; we might just have opened up the question for later in their lives: why don't we go out to the theatre for once?

You can only hope!