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.

Grammarians

The last week has been about old boys. During half term, the Grammarians held their annual Bangor Dinner, a convivial, inevitably somewhat bibulous evening. On the afternoon preceding the dinner, I had the pleasure of showing two 'reunited' year groups around such part of the School as interested them, which really meant  only Crosby. The nomenclature of the year groups was confusing. The 'Year of 51' dated their time from their collective entry to BGS; the 'Year of 71' dated themselves from their leaving. The fifty-one-ers were energetic and exceedingly spry, a wonder given that it is sixty years since they were short-trousered Form Ones. Those who had left in 1971 were a remarkably consoling sight since they looked bloomingly young, in the pink and at their peak. I say 'consoling' because I left school in 1970.

Anyway, their pilgrimage was a very jolly one and as they made their way around the rather depressing Crosby environment, the memories came a-flooding: being told of the death of George VI in Assembly; the sight of 'the Bird', AL Hawtin, gown hoicked up, warming his posterior against the fire; sitting at  the back of class, viewing the games piches by way of a strategically placed mirror... and so on.

At the dinner, I asked a provocative question: what, from a school's point of view, are old boys for? If an accountant were to ask for a cost benefit analysis, could one be provided? Well, I think it probably could. Take into account, at least from the perspective of BGS, the money which the Grammarians donate, say to support sports and games; then there are the prizes which the Grammarians sponsor, or the trophies, scholarships and awards which they present in their own names; many send their sons to BGS; and last, but of the utmost importance, there are the old boys who become governors and invest their time, energy and professional experience to our great benefit, without any reward, pecuniary or otherwise. We simply could not afford to pay for their collective expertise at  the market rate.

So, yes, I think old boys add enormously to the school in ways which can be quantified. But there is something more and something which I think is just as important, but utterly unquantifiable, so much so that I'm not sure that I can articulate it with adequate precision. I read a reference recently to Edmund Burke's comment about society; it is, he said, "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead and those who are to be born". Heavy stuff, but it is relevant to what I'm trying to say and perhaps I can explain it in this way.

This morning at our moving Remembrance Service, the wreath on behalf of the Grammarians was laid by Geoffrey Alexander Bowman. One of the 39 names on the World War Two memorial board is another Geoffrey Alexander Bowman, lost in action, flying for the RAF in 1943. He was one of two Bowman brothers killed and the uncle of the living Geoffrey. As many will by now know, my predecessor, Maurice Wilkins, wrote an obituary of each former pupil killed in action, and trudged round to Main Street, through the blacked-out streets of Bangor from his home in Crosby House, to deliver them to the Spectator offices. He remembers Bowman's close friendship with Bertie Hannay, also killed, and his "happy nature and exuberant energy of mind and body", exemplified in the whole school photograph of 1934 when he is shown, as Wilkins describes him, "repressing his mirth with obvious difficulty". After the service, with the help of  Geoffrey and his brother, Terence, I was able to identify him in that photograph; there he was, responding I suspect to a rude noise or a wicked comment, caught in freeze-frame, his laughter a permanent memorial, an expression of vibrant, irrepressible, evanescent humanity.

'Time like an ever-rolling stream / Bears all its sons away,' we sing in one of the remembrance hymns. In this curious moment, I am conscious of the School as a continuum, an ever flowing stream, constantly changing, constantly renewing itself, but, somehow, always, quintessentially, itself. I stand in 2011 looking at this tiny expression of mischief  caught in a school photograph and I am connected to Maurice Wilkins, also looking at that photograph with darker and deeper feelings. Geoffrey Alexander Bowman, uncle, connected to Geoffrey Alexander Bowman, nephew. Those boys, that generation, connected to my boys, this generation: it's a connection which enriches our sense of ourselves, since we live in the same streets and learn in some of the same rooms, as part of Bangor, part of a place, part of a school of which we are merely the latest representatives, stewards of its name and reputation. Tradition, as TS Eliot pointed out, is a living thing, always changing, always being added to, not a dead weight. We serve this school with pride, humility and a sense of responsibility, drawing strength from the past while we prepare to hand it on to the next generation. Remembrance is about the future.

Speech Night 2011

The School has now broken for half-term and we are beginning, as my friends who are not teachers would have it, yet another holiday. Well, yes, teachers do well in holidays, there is no denying, and we're unlikely to convince anyone that we slog through them, selflessly devoting ourselves to the interests of the children we teach, even when this is actually true. The holidays are needed not so much by the staff, as by the children, who can and do get tired and fractious towards the end of any term. There is an old argument about whether the present holiday structure is the best and most effective in fostering effective learning and I have some sympathy with those who argue that a four term year with a shorter summer break is the best configuration to sustain consistent freshness and vigour. The long summer break is, however, a wonderful luxury...

The last week of a term or half term is always the same. A looming deadline imposes a sense of urgency and the thought that everything must be finished and tidied up NOW. This was certainly the case in the last week, which began on Saturday (22 October) with our AQE orientation day. In our case, it passed off smoothly thanks to the impeccable organisation of Jonathan Todd, our Examinations Officer, and the willing, voluntary help of so many staff, teaching and non-teaching. We also had the assistance of our prefects and, for the first time, some of our Year 8 boys, who were drafted in to reassure the P7 children and help generally with the organisation. This they did wonderfully well.

Much of my time since then has been devoted to the writing of The Speech for Speech Night. Prize Distribution speeches are a genre sui generis. They are a mixture of an annual report and educational tour d'horizon with something of the state of the nation thrown in for good measure:  I take my time to do it. It's difficult to balance all the themes and weave them into a seamless whole, but, when completed, it is undeniably satisfying. It's not poetry and as prose it is little more than adequate, but it's a useful intellectual exercise to draw out what are the really important issues. Maybe some time in the far distant future, some poor, harmless drudge will write his PhD thesis on the great issues for Northern Irish voluntary grammar schools in the 21st century and will access my collected speeches and find them useful.

Then again, maybe not...

There is no recognised form, but there is the absolute restraint of timing, by which I mean the length of time taken to deliver the speech on the night. George F. Kaufman famously said that plays are not written, they are re-written. This is true of Speech Night speeches. My first draft is always execrably written and long beyond the ability of any listener to endure.   Once it's there, however, the real process of writing can begin and the first priority is to cut and cut again. The prose looks after itself as part of that process. My 'rehearsal' ran for 25 minutes; the performance, I am told, but not necessarily reliably, stood at 27 minutes. Some year, the winner of the staff's sweepstake, a suitably grateful punter, will cut me in on the winnings...

Fortunately, the star speech is given by the Guest of Honour and  we were excellently served this year by Jonathan Allison. Details of his biography may be found at the beginning of my speech and if you read it, you will understand how fortunate we were that he so kindly accepted our invitation. Jonathan flew from the USA especially to be with us, an astonishing compliment, and his speech was a small masterpiece of reminiscence, reflection, humour and graceful compliment, all delivered with disarming affection and warm wit. The guest always has the graveyard shift, speaking at the end of a long evening when the boys and parents might be said to have had quite enough, thank you. Once he began, however, one could feel the audience audibly relax, evident in the attention they gave and the depth and resonance of their laughter. Once that happened, the time ceases to be a factor. Thank you, Jonathan.

Any time there is a public event, when, as it were, we let an audience in, I try to see what we look like from outside. Almost every time, I feel proud; proud of our boys, whose relaxed and diffident charms are unselfconsciously apparent, and proud of our staff, even - especially - when I know they would rather be anywhere but the Clarke Hall on Speech Night...

Year 8

My goodness, it's a long time between entries. The excuse is to have found a mountain of work up with which to catch if you'll pardon the refinement, after the HMC conference. A large portion of the time was spent writing references for medical and Oxbridge applicants and ensuring that their UCAS forms were properly filled in. No matter how many references I write, how many forms I read, there is always just a little tremor before I click on the button which sends them out into cyber space. That click may be the moment that begins the rest of their lives, determines their fates, a virtual bungee jump into the future.

While I was away, it was a good time to be a Year 8 pupil. They all had two days doing vigorous things in Ardnabannon, getting soaked and smelly in the process. I wish I hadn't been away and had had the opportunity to visit them because the excitement was still palpable when I talked to my own Year 8 class. Stephen Robinson came back with a mountain of clothes left behind and I was there when he emptied them out on to the Assembly Hall floor for the perusal of the few boys who actually realised they had lost something. The smell lives with me.

And there was also a most exciting robotics day for a few classes, when they had the heady experience of writing computer programmes which gave life and movement to small robots. I think back to my time in first year and to a past which really was a foreign country.

Speaking of fateful moments, we will welcome 210 P7 pupils and their parents into the School on Saturday next for our orientation day in preparation for the AQE tests. I don't relish it and the first thing I say to the parents is "Sorry! Sorry that we've found ourselves in a stand-off with DE; sorry that we are sticking to our selective guns; sorry that we have to put you and your children through this." And, of course, much else they need to know. For the children, it's a chance to introduce ourselves and to say that it won't be as bad as you think and that we'll make it as easy as, in the circumstances, we can.