The Dean’s Blog: Non communication – 'Three Incidents and an Historical Perspective'.

Incident 1: corridor to locker area Main Building level 2. Any time (all the time it seems) between 8.40 and 3.30 five days a week.

Students of many different ages but usually grade 5 to grade 8, run enthusiastically with loudly reverberating foot slapping along the hard surfaced, narrow corridor past all the EAL, Student Services and Dean’s offices. There are notices, explicit ones, repetitive ones, which say clear things like ‘Do NOT NOT NOT NOT run!’ Some of these are even in French. There is also a cartoon character I created with the inevitable sideways baseball hat proudly announcing ‘I do not run in the corridor!’ He appears in several strategically selected spots. He also appears to be the only one who doesn’t run. Sometimes I yell out the ‘unmisverstaendlich’ message, ‘DO NOT RUN!!!’ And I mean ‘yell’. (Last time I did this without looking up from my desk a member of staff put her head round the door and apologised.) There is usually a momentary slight slowing of the footsteps. Sometimes there is a glance of astonishment through my open door as the owner speed pasts trying to locate the source of this odd message. Sometimes a fellow tenant-colleague intervenes. Sometimes I stop a few kids and explain why it is a better idea to walk - fast if necessary - if clutching folders or other things with spikey corners, rather than charge down a narrow corridor that appears to them to have an acceleration run attached to the Stables end. They listen to me wide eyed and with attention before correctly reading the cues that I’ve finished...and then they speed on.
And then I turn back to whatever it was that I’ve now forgotten that I was in the middle of doing, thinking, ‘Not much communication there today.’

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Incident 2: Drop-off zone Tuesday morning 08.22.

The BMW metallic grey 3 series estate car puts its front left wheel firmly on the pavement by the Red Top gates, stops at a sharp angle and promptly blocks the in-drive for the queue behind. I approach. There is ‘a conversation’.
Me: Excuse me. (rapping on driver’s window) You are blocking the driveway.
Driver: I know. (Smile)
Me: People cannot get past you if you stop here.
Driver: I know. (Same smile)
Me: There is plenty of drop off space at the end of the Red Top over there.
Driver: I know. Out you get, children. (Smile is maintained - many doors open - children exit car).
I reflect, ‘Not much communication there today.’

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Incident 3: Gates to Red Top on Drop-off zone 08.25.

Some grade 7 boys had been observing the above event from the Red Top and rushed over to start telling me very excitedly and all at the same time...well, I don’t really know what they were telling me because I realised I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. The key vocabulary was new and there were heaps of single letters used as mnemonics. I still instinctively think LOL stands for ‘lots of love’ and that skews the sense somewhat.
It’s at that point, when the look of sad disbelief tinged with impatience flickers across the kids’ features, that I think, ‘Not much communication there today.’

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Historical perspective:

I wonder if William Shakespeare experienced this feeling in London in the summer of 1610 when he started to explain his tricky new play Cymbeline to the King’s Men. His acting company would have included a handful of restless and exuberant small boy actors who would have been about grade 7 age, too. As he tried to detail how he wanted them to portray the Queen, Imogen and Helen did he have to repeat embarrassingly often, ‘I prithee, paltry boy, corrupter of words, mince not thy meaning.’? And eventually, exasperated, ‘Get you gone, you dwarf; you minimus, of hindering knot-grass made; you bead, you acorn.’ It would certainly explain why he retired back up to Stratford the following year. Did he fight his way through the south and west London rush hour of carts, rabid dogs and peasants and collapse exhausted onto his unergonomic Elizabethan wooden stool at the end of the day? And as his wife, Anne, handed him a jug of hot mead and asked him how his day had gone, did he reply in a frustrated voice: ‘Methinks there was not much communication there today, forsooth.’?