The Dean’s Blog – ‘First Day’

As I slowly walked up the stairs from level 2 to level 3 in the New Building on Friday 5th August I gradually realised that in the deathly quiet building something was watching me. Disturbed, I looked up and back and saw myself surrounded by tall bushy plants bending over and reaching through and whispering round the railings overlooking the stairwell. It was a ‘Day of the Triffids’ moment. But it was just the wind from an open window somewhere creating a draught and then a door banged and I heard loud adult teacher type voices and the moment went. That’s where the kids normally hang out en masse, as they should, and inspect the ascending and descending people and pass judgement or greeting or just look casually cool, which they are very good at.

Faintly unnerving atmosphere
But today the school was just a handful of adults planning and prepping, a construct without content, a plan without data, a bus with no passengers or some such metaphor to describe the strange and for me faintly unnerving atmosphere of a large school building designed for kids and the normal noisy process of learning, when it is all ready to go, full of classrooms with desks and chairs and whiteboards and things, but devoid of a single kid.

Up a notch
Each subsequent day different levels of staff joined in the preparation. The activity fevered up a notch. The detail and focus of meetings went to ‘increase sharpness’. Policy, assessment, objectives, strategies, rubrics, syllabi, plans, unit delivery, scope and sequence, equipment, texts, facilities, major event prep – all these were created, renewed or developed or coordinated, fine-tuned and integrated into the year’s master plan. Necessary, and satisfying when completed.

Jugfull of pure white liquid fire
But as the bells continued to ring every 45 minutes I was constantly reminded of what D. H. Lawrence described graphically (but not, I think, as a metaphor for the start of the ICS new school year) in his short poem ‘Storm in the Black Forest’ where having described the electrical and aural components (‘jugfull after jugfull of pure white liquid fire, bright white tipples over and spills down... and then the heavens cackle with uncouth sounds.’) he expresses his frustration with the pointlessness of the whole natural show ‘...And the rain won’t come, the rain refuses to come!' For ‘rain’ read ‘kids’.

So everything is ok
But by this morning the gang of Triffids had been broken up, removed from its gallery view of the stairwell and each plant reassigned to and isolated in its separate classroom, to decorate a sunlit corner with a harmless splash of bright green. And tomorrow in their place come the real occupants, the kids. Not exactly with the patter of little feet as we know teens have big feet and hardly a patter as a few hundred of them explode out of classroom doors simultaneously at the sound of that bell, full of boundless energy, exclamation, relief, wild gestures and whoops of greeting. But this is as it should be and so everything is ok again now...for another year.

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