A lot has happened in the past couple of weeks. There has been some unexpected drama, and I hope that the fact that I have thought at points, ‘This would make great blog material!’ does not make me a horrible person. Alas, I am not in a position to tell about recent events for now, but perhaps in time, I will be more at liberty to reflect on them. (Can I give a teeny spoiler with a family reunion around a gravestone and a dog cocking a leg? It was like a scene from a comedy film.)
However, there was a dramatic incident that happened a decade ago, appropriately enough, involving drama, or rather Drama with a capital D as in the school subject, and I reckon enough time has passed for it to become allowable to retell, as time tends to take away the sting of tense situations.
At my previous school, I taught Drama to GCSE. I don’t think I was bad at it, but I never quite lost the feeling that I was an English teacher teaching Drama (which to be fair, is precisely what I was) rather than an actual Drama teacher. Drama teachers, in my experience, are often a special breed, and I’m not sure I quite had enough passion to pass as one.
But teaching Drama was great fun and came with plenty of rewards. I’m not going to lie: the lack of marking is a particular draw, although in the run-up to performances I was spending every possible available moment rehearsing, so I reckon it all balances out. But lots of students love it, and therefore really warm to the teacher as the facilitator of these enjoyable experiences, which is a very lovely position to be in. As a direct side-by-side comparison, there were a bunch of students I taught for both English and Drama at GCSE, and I’d say we definitely laughed together a lot more in Drama lessons. Drama teaching also came with some random quirks, like very jolly courses with some big entertaining personalities, and then there was once a joint Drama festival at a local school with some partner schools from Holland. (There was also a promised return visit to Holland which never materialised, which I was always a bit miffed about.) The whole thing was a bit mad. I got the students from our school lost inside the building and then I got told off by the deputy head: “Girls – stop running in the corridors!” The Dutch students performed a really odd skit with jokes about different types of Dutch cheese, and no one in the British audience laughed. Awkward. (It wasn't very Gouda.)
So there I was, merrily doing my best impressions of a Drama teacher, but also busy with a load of other stuff (I like to try to fit too much in – see https://sarahhadfi.wixsite.com/website/post/on-becoming-dispensable ) and consequently would run about the school between the different department areas (still running – see https://sarahhadfi.wixsite.com/website/post/on-running )
There was one day when it was the assessed A-level performance, and just as I was leaving to go home at the end of the school day, the wonderful head of Drama who I’ll call Crystal asked me if she could have the video camera as the performance needed to be recorded that evening. I said I’d look for it, and ran off. When I returned empty-handed and confessed I had no idea where it was, she told me she’d known straightaway that I’d lost it, because my face had looked so terrified (see, clearly not a professional dramatist). I knew the last time I had used the camera and desperately retraced my steps around the four different rooms I’d used that day, but to no avail. I miserably went to the IT office and pleaded did they have a camera we could use, but they said they didn’t have one.
The very supportive English faculty immediately flew into rescue mode, like an episode of 'Paw Patrol'. One man who I’ll call Mike, (and frequently did, although that’s not his name) remembered a school event where he had seen the father of a year 8 student with a video camera, and so looked him up and rang him. The lovely dad agreed we could borrow his camera but we’d have to fetch it and also he didn’t have a clean tape we could use to record onto, and it was a different type from the ones at school. So one English teacher offered to drive off to collect it whilst Mike said he’d drive to the supermarkets to see if any sold the right sort of tapes.
Meanwhile it transpired one of the A-level Drama students had got stagefright. Not the standard stagefright, which can be overcome with some warm up games and reassurance, but full on crippling anxiety, and couldn’t perform. But obviously the other students had to perform as it was their A-level exam, and so Crystal was going to have to stand in. It was a devised performance, meaning there was no official script, but the students had made notes, in some tiny font which Crystal couldn’t read (in her words, “At my stage of life, my eyes aren’t up to that!”) So the one English teacher who could touch type offered to stay on to type up the script with my reading out the small print (still crying from the mortification of having lost the video camera at the most vital time), and Crystal editing down to cues and her lines. And around us people were still trying to find video camera solutions. At one point, as I let out a noisy sniffle, Crystal told me (I think/hope mostly in jest), “I think you should just go to Holland – and stay there!”
Meanwhile, I bumped into another teacher and explained about all the upset, and she was like, “Oh yes – you left the camera in my room. So I just took it to IT for you.”
So I went back to IT, managed to find someone with a key to let me in, poked around, and, Hurrah! there was the department camera. (Why why why hadn’t they told me that when I went hunting for a camera in there earlier?) For which we had the correct tapes. The assessment could go ahead, we could phone back the kind dad, call off the search parties in Tescos. This time I was crying with relief.
Camera sorted, we now focused on getting Crystal ready for her stand-in role, and she realised that her leopard print outfit was completely unsuitable for the role, and all the other actors would be wearing black. I meanwhile, was in a very stretchy and forgiving black dress. Naturally, I offered her my dress, which she declared perfect, but her clothes didn’t fit me, so then I was stuck in the ladies’ in my underwear. So the typing English teacher came in and offered me her coat, which was a faux fur and without buttons, and that was kind of funny as I felt like a flasher leaving school with the coat wrapped round me and it made me think of “fur coat and no knickers”, except, mercifully, I was at least wearing knickers.
By now I was horribly late leaving school and it was pitch black outside so at least no one could really see me in my fur leaving school. But at that time my husband worked at a neighbouring school and I collected him on the way home. I’d had to phone ahead and apologise that I’d be picking him up at, like 7pm instead of 5pm, and he said something along the lines of, “Sigh. Come and find me in the heads of year office when you’re done.” So I drove to his car park and then realised it probably wasn’t a good idea to walk through his school just in a coat either, so I had to phone and plead that he would come to the car as I was in my underwear.
The next morning, my GCSE Drama class were all talking about the A-level performance and how Crystal had had to step in and how amazingly smooth it had all been, and I did tell them a bit of the story of how I’d lost the camera and given Crystal my clothes, and one girl was laughing so hard at the part where Crystal told me to go to Holland that she was crying. Which all goes to show that Drama is more fun than English.
So in that story, all’s well that ends well, and I do hope that the more recent drama can be looked on this fondly in time. And in case it’s not obvious, I do miss that school and that really lovely team. We had a fair bit of drama but a lot of laughs too. I've been very blessed with such an enjoyable working life and great colleagues.
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