Christmas Carol

Here we are at last - the end of term. For most teachers, it comes as a surprise; a strange thing to say, but as I have remarked before, the principal characteristic of ends of term is the imminence of the deadline, the compulsive need to have the desks cleared, the books marked, the marks entered, the reports written, the meetings held, the emails sent. Much of this frenzy is, needless to say, unnecessary. This is never more in evidence than now, at the approach to Christmas. By the time we arrive at the end of this term, there is very little which can't wait until the New Year.

Equally characteristic, at least for the teaching staff, of the end of term is a feeling of exhaustion. I certainly feel it, but I don't know if it is indeed really exhaustion or merely a kind of subconscious reflex, a state of mind occasioned by the imminent release of tension. In other words, I doubt whether I would feel exhausted now if we had another month to go before the holiday. Still, that sense of ease as I wake up on the first day of the holiday is all the sweeter, simply by way of contrast with what has preceded it.

The approach to Christmas in a School is signposted by events: reports, play, this year - and I think possibly for some years to come - the talent show, the CCF reception; there are two events which may appropriately  be called major, however: the publication of The Gryphon and the carol services.

School magazines are, at one and the same time,both the best read and the least read of magazines. The best read in that anyone who has written an article or who is mentioned in one, will turn to that particular page and read it obsessively; the least read in that this may be all that is read. A pity, because there is much that is worth taking the time to read, among which I would recommend particularly Adam Barr's superb imaginative response to Animal Farm. It's also a journal of record, to which future historians will turn as their first resource, a statement of who we are at any particular time. Robert Stevenson's task as editor every year is herculean and he continues to perform it with unquenchable enthusiasm and eye for detail. For a number of years now, it has been supplemented by the BGS News, sent out to parents at the end of the Christmas and Summer terms. This was designed to replace the possibly unreadable, certainly much unread, Headmaster's letter and it provides a jazzy snapshot of the extraordinary richness of our life
The culmination of the term comes with our carol services. They take place in our sports hall and at those words, the heart of anyone who has never attended one of these glorious events will certainly sink. Never could there be a more drearily functional space than a sports hall, but by some mysterious alchemy, it is transformed into a, if not exactly cosy, certainly seasonal environment with carpet, swags and Christmas tress. If there were an event which, in terms of school life, we might call 'iconic' ( a word whose meaning I find hard to grasp), it is this, in that it points to something deeply representative of the kind of school we are. It is loud, joyous, exciting, emotional and uplifting; much of this derives from the nature of the season itself, but the rest is the purest BGS. The collective affection and sense of community lifts us out of the functionality of the place to somewhere else. Part performance, part spiritual experience, it brings together more elements of the School as an entity than any other: boys, staff, parents, governors, old boys, friends, they're all there and on Monday night last, the Hall was packed to the gunwales, everyone together making a joyful noise.

And what noise! I'll pick out two parts which moved me: the first was Jonathan Rea's arrangement of Joy to the World (Jonathan , although on career break, remained much in evidence through his arrangements) which lifts its listeners, and I mean exactly that; the power of the orchestration had me on tiptoe through the energy of the music and that energy was indeed the energy of joy. Then, in contrast, there was Adam Bradley's solo performance of Graham Kendrick's Candle Song, threading his way delicately through its strangely melancholy chiaroscuro. The contrast in these pieces alone might give you a sense of the occasion and explain why it means so much to so many of us; it explains why twenty or thirty old boys come back every year to sing in the choir or to play in the band. It is performance, yes, but through the perfomance, through the sense of 'together', at its very heart, is the quiet simplicity of the incarnation. It's a simulacrum of Christmas itself: frenzy around a core of stillness, the enormity and the noise of the universe around a stable and a baby. A loud expression of the ultimately inexpressible.

Claire Buchanan, our acting Director of Music, and Andrew Thompson, made it all happen. Thank you.

To all who, by accident or design, stumble upon this blog , I wish a blessed and peaceful Christmas. As for the New Year? Well, we'll just have to wait and see...

Bangor Grammar's Got Talent

The theme of the week just past has to be 'talent'. It began last Monday in the Assembly Hall with Bangor Grammar's Got Talent, the culmination of more or less a term's worth of preparation and organisation, presenting eight remarkable acts. At the last minute, I was asked to be a judge and I went into the competition not knowing what was awaiting me or what I was expected to do. In the event -literally - it couldn't have been more enjoyable and that was because of the quality and variety of the acts. They had been selected through audition, so I suppose it shouldn't have been a surprise, but it was. Specially surprising was not so much the quality of the senior acts, any one of whom could have won, as the courage of the junior boys, each one taking the stage by himself, none with the luxury of performing with a group. Their self-possession and ability to work an audience was astounding, their assurance almost uncanny.

Mind you, equally astounding was the talent on display by the staff: Rosemary Shaw and Mark Dickson singing the duet Barcelona, and Claire Steele as Amy Winehouse, singing with a group from her form class, 8CS of course, including one dexterous drum major, whose twirling staff was an act in itself.

As for the judges, what can I say: wise, humane, pithy and impeccable in their judgements. Did I hear someone say that they stole the evening? Alas, no...

At the end of the week, last Friday, the CCF had brought back to life what had at one time been a most civilised feature of the end of term - their Christmas reception and prize presentation. Here there was on display a rather different set of talents, but no less remarkable for all that. Their talents had been honed over many months of CCF training and opportunity, their achievements not so public, but worthy of applause and admiration.

This was the week in which many schools had the melancholy task of announcing how they were going to cope with the massive cuts in their budgets over the next three years. It would be forgivable if their feeling was one of anger, however and at whomever directed. We live in a blame culture and it would be easy to blame the Department of Education or central government or the banks, but I'm not sure whether it is really anyone's fault. I know nothing about economics, but those whose opinions I value and respect tell me that the economy moves at its own sweet will, through troughs and peaks, at the mercy of dark forces beyond the ability of any government to control. That's not a consolation, by the way; it would be easier if we were able to blame someone, a human being, a group, a government, just to prove to ourselves that ultimately we can control these forces. I just don't think that it's the case. What I do know is that recession equals waste: waste of opportunity, above all waste of talent, the talents of teachers, especially young teachers, brim-full of ability and commitment, anxious, desperate to work and unable to find a permanent post, or having found one,now facing the risk of losing it.
So in our talent shows and receptions, let's take the opportunity to praise the talents we have and which, for the moment, are not being squandered.

School Play: The Holy Grail

This year's school play has just finished its 'run'. At first sight, The Holy Grail must seem a somewhat bizarre choice, but by now we have got used to the risks which Daire Cunningham runs. It was a re-make, or perhaps re-furb might be the better term, of the film, Monty Python's Holy Grail, and it turned out, how could we ever have doubted, brilliantly.

Monty Python's Flying Circus was first televised when I was either in or entering the sixth form and it somehow touched the nerve of the times; it became at the same time wildly popular and a cult. Its sketches and catch phrases and performers infused the culture of the time and it was part of that mildly and very English anarchy of the sixties and early seventies, outrageous and yet somehow courteous. That was over forty years ago and the world of comedy has moved on. What I watch now on the TV offers an ambivalent pleasure: coarse, cruel, edgy, uncomfortable and, at times, occasionally, very, very funny. But not kind. How could Monty Python speak to this generation, a generation that doesn't even have the films, of whch in my opinion The Holy Grail is the peerless example, within its frame of reference.

I was wrong. The cast got it. Their timing, pace, relish, engagement showed that they understood what was going on at a deep and unconscious level and it was clear, my goodness how clear, that they loved it. Performance after performance showed the same confidence and possession of the stage; they related to each other and, above all, related to the audience without any apparent ambarrassment - and believe me, at times there might have been cause - or diffidence. In one sense, they had no help: there was no set and all the action took place on our black stage, which is, by the way, looking increasingly shabby. So the world they created was entirely in the imagination, which is the only place in  which it ever could exist. It was a triumph of theatre, a joyous collective experience. And it was silly, childishly, irredeemably silly.
Monty Python is one example of a long particularly English tradition of silliness which spans back to  Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear in the nineteenth century. It passed through a golden age from the fifties to the early nineties largely thanks to the strange inspiration of Spike Milligan, the onlie begetter of The Goons, and a crop of radio shows which I loved: Round the Horne, together with Beyond our Ken, I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, two shows on TV, Michael Bentine's It's a Square World and Twice a Fortnight, both now almost completely forgotten, more recently perhaps, Not the Nine O'Clock News. The only survivor of that time is, I suppose, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. There was, of course, a more cerebral silliness in the absurdism of Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, NF Simpson and early Tom Stoppard, but that emerged from an understanding that the world was at bottom meaningless and all our lives and efforts merely ways of passing time betwen the womb and the grave. The humour of Monty Python didn't need, possibly didn't want, such high seriousness. Its silliness, a rather male sort of silliness, had no reason to exist, it just was. Their humour, Milligan and Bentine's humour, Monty Python's, was crazy, utterly without logical narrative or character or situation, depending on surreal jokes in a world removed entirely from  gray reality.

I woke up on Friday morning last to the first business segment of Radio 4's frenetic news programme, Today. One of that seemingly endless line of formidably articulate business people or financial consultants and advisers was being interviewed, the director of a property company. What's the economic environment like? he was asked. He compared it to an endless English winter, gray, drab, drizzly, unexciting, miserable... His comments chimed with this week's weather, which I don't need to tell you has been rawly cold, windy, wet and dark. All an appropriate metaphorical environment for schools, who, in the last fortnight have been living in a nightmare, faced with deficts on a previously unimaginable scale, betraying their deepest, dearest values to produce balanced budgets and preparing for a world of unemployed teachers, larger classes, reduced choices, diminished opportunities.

So The Holy Grail was like water in the desert; in the purity and innocence of its nonsense, it shone like a good deed in a naughty world.

AQE

Once again it has been a long time since I added to this blog, but the month since my last entry has not been without incidents or excitements, among which, of course, have been the three AQE common entrance assessments sat in BGS by 210 P7 children. The last was yesterday, the end of a long haul for the children and their parents. The relief was palpable. Our orientation day was virtually in the middle of October, so the testing has been drawn out over seven weeks and that, remember is only a short section of the entire process which winds its slow and wearisome way until the end of next May, which is when the children find out which school has admitted them.

No grammar school will have decided to become part of AQE or PPTC willingly. We entered it with deep foreboding, not the least of which was whether we would have the skills and the resources to run the tests humanely. I can hear the hollow laughter of the opponents of selection in the far distance, who will see such reservations and diffidences as simple hypocrisy; there is an easy way to be humane, they will say, and that is not to select pupils for Year 8 on academic grounds. There is not the space to detail the case here and now, but it seems to me that an academic means of selection is more reasonable than that based on the initial letter of your surname. If we believe that, then we proceed as best we can in a way that makes the procedure as straightforward as possible. That is why we try to beak the ice in our orientation day and why we are as welcoming and friendly as we can be.

Transfer, as we now call it, has always been fraught with anxiety. Never forget, however, that when the then 'qually' was introduced, it was seen as a liberating process which allowed access to grammar schools for children who might never otherwise have thought it was possible. Do not forget that we have in Northern Ireland a fully state system and, barring Rockport, no independent schools. Why no independent or private schools? Because the population base is probably too small to support one which is fully fledged and, more importantly, because, by and large, parents have confidence in the system. Many years ago, in the time when to be liberal was the default choice for students and most of us would have considered independent schools immoral bastions of the upper classes, when the term 'upper class' was used and possibly even meant something, I remember one of my tutors on the PGCE course in Durham, Ernie Bowcott, arguing that there was only one defensible and morally appropriate way of 'abolishing' what were then called public schools, and that was to make them unnecessary through the quality of the state sector.

One footnote: serendipitously, last week, my son, while ferreting through the bookshelves to find something to read, discovered my own old admissions card for the 'Qualifying Examination for Admission to Grammar Schools' in 1963. Yes, 1963; I was 10: go figure! Astonishingly, in those days, we sat five tests: two verbal reasoning (IQ?) tests, each of 45 minutes in December and January; then three further papers, all sat on one day in March, a one hour English paper and, after a 15 minute break, a one and a half hour arithmetic paper. Then lunch and we finished in the afternoon with a one and a quarter hour English paper. That's three and three quarter hours of test in one day to add to the one and a half hours of verbal reasoning.

All were sat in Templemore Intermediate School. I remember being walked down by Miss Wall, our teacher, from my own school to the centre for the verbal reasoning tests, about twenty minutes walk or so, but as far as I remember - to be truthful, I'm not sure -  we were on our own for the big day. Certainly no orientation, no welcome, just a come-in-sit-down-get-on-with-it-and-no-bloody-nonsense-sonny approach. I came from the perhaps rather precious purlieus of the Foyle College Prep School and to the other primary schools we were considered 'duffers', the worst insult I suppose which could be thrown. It probably meant wet or soft and, in fairness, I know I probably was. Did the anxiety and the shock affect my academic performance? Well, my arithmetic was so appallingly bad that nothing could possibly have made it worse - those old enough will remember train journeys, telegraph poles and baths being filled which seemed to form the completely bewildering content of the problems we were faced with - and by the grace of Heaven, my English was good enough, or so it seemed, to provide adequate compensation for my numerical incompetence. Anyway, I got the qually, but I remember my best friend didn't. He went on to become a doctor by the way, so what did anyone really know?

What does this tell us? That we should not be so soft and let the children 'man up'? Of course not. But it suggests a significant shift in the way we think about children and  the way we - adults, teachers - treat them. Above all, it shows that the normative relationship between parents and their children has also undergone a sea change. My parents left me to it and I expected nothing more; nor did any of my friends. Nowadays, the closeness of parent and child, the sense of sharing the experience, is very evident. My own son, who discovered the card, treats me like an annoying older brother. Not something that my father, whom I loved, but by whom I was slightly scared,  would have tolerated. The long term social effects of this changed relationship remain, literally, to be seen.