Something happened this week which really tickled me: I’d arranged for an outside speaker to come in to give a talk to students on Wednesday morning. On Tuesday morning, I got into work (I start late on Tuesdays) to find a barrage of emails from the front office – my guest has arrived, my guest is waiting, can I please come to fetch my guest, my guest is leaving as he has realised it is not Wednesday. I emailed him and apologised for not being there and was it still possible he would come back the next day? He replied that he would but in disguise and denying all knowledge of having arrived a day early.
It’s kind of a nice, silly story in itself but when I relayed it to my husband, he GOT it: “It wasn’t you!” he congratulated me, giving me a high five.
You see, it normally is.
I could probably write an entire book on my school disasters but here are just a few.
I once went on a course on 4/5 instead of 5/4 AND I took my NQT with me. We never quite got to the bottom of how it all worked, but there were two different courses and we were somehow booked on the other one, but it had gone wrong somewhere in the line of communication. We returned to school by morning break after our wasted journeys into London and back, and had to take back over our classes (I was WEARING JEANS). So embarrassing.
I was once in charge of a large school trip to see “Blood Brothers” at the theatre. I hadn’t ‘clocked’ at the time of booking (and probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it even if I had), but it was the day before the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. As the coaches approached the outskirts of London, the traffic slowed and we passed lots of signs about road closures: London was shutting down ahead of the royal wedding.
“We’ll just have to let you off here and then you walk in,” the bus driver told me. Now this was the days before satnavs or google maps, and I had visited London maybe twice before in my life, and never in the dark with over a hundred students. Another teacher just looked at me, told me I had an actual trip curse, but she used to work in London, and offered to lead us in.
Another theatre trip I booked was to see “Hamlet” at The Galleon Theatre. Now, I don’t know London well, and so don’t know all the theatres, but the website looked respectable enough. When we got there, we kept driving past it as the coach driver was confused that we couldn’t spot a theatre on that road. It turned out the theatre was actually the upstairs level of a pub, sandwiched below a youth hostel. And because the theatre room itself was small, they insisted we all waited in the pub, before the show started and again during the interval – it was dark and wet outside and there really wasn’t anywhere else to go. So basically, I had taken a load of underage students into a pub, and as we had arrived early we had a fair bit of time to kill and to make things even more interesting some heavily accented European young men were showing considerable interest in our girls on their way to and from the back stairs to the youth hostel above.
Perhaps the worst of all was “The White Devil” trip. It was another small theatre, so small in fact that our 71-seater coachload would fill their entire theatre, but I was delighted to have found a performance of the rather obscure text I had introduced, and I also convinced the theatre company to run a workshop for our students before the show, which they said could take place in a local school hall. Because of this unique and complicated situation, the communication was done over the phone, not booked through a website. And it seems that I and the man on the other end of the phone had different ideas about what “next Thursday” means. Specifically, I thought “next Thursday” meant the upcoming Thursday, the closest one, whereas he meant a week on Thursday. So one Thursday after school I had 70 people loaded waiting on a coach and I thought I’d make a last minute phone call to check about the lack of physical tickets – as they’d never sent any to print, should I just present myself at the box office?
The man on the phone said, “You don’t have any tickets for today – you’re coming next week.”
So I had to unload everyone off the coach and get them to phone their parents to come to collect them, as the trip was actually the following week. I actually cried, again it was pretty embarrassing, but I think I was partly crying at the relief over what I’d just avoided – the thought of us all arriving in London and trying to get into a show for which we didn’t have tickets. The wonderful office lady also managed to sweet talk the coach company into not charging us twice.
The following week we set off again and when we got to the school it was all in darkness, and so the deputy head went to investigate, before returning to the coach and telling us, “I don’t think we are going to be watching a show this week either.” But then the cast and director did turn up, so we went in for our workshop, and then to the little theatre for the actual show, but for some strange reason, despite telling us we had the whole theatre booked for ourselves, there was one other solo audience member who was sitting smack in the middle of the tiered seating and we all had to fill in around him.
Another time I was sent to a conference on behalf of the department, and I got there and then someone popped up and announced there had been a burst water main and for health and safety measures they needed to evacuate the site and so we all needed to leave. It still seems so odd – I still wonder if there was something else going on, like a terrorist threat. But again I had to do the walk of shame back to school, wearing casual clothes, with a very unlikely sounding excuse.
Another time, I had arranged a “Great Gatsby” end of year party for our sixth form Lit students. I’d even got them out of lessons to teach them all the Charleston in preparation. In a move which in hindsight was a bit much even for me, I scheduled it for the same evening as a presentation I was giving about a year-long research project I’d been doing. Never one to shy from the limelight, I’d even contacted the local press, and the local mayor, who was going to be attending wearing his official collar. And then that day I got sick, sick like I’d never been before. I was bringing up just loads of green bile, but I felt like I just couldn’t put off the presentation now everything was arranged. So I somehow managed to drag myself to work, the presentation was a blur, and then everyone had to go off to the party and dance the Charleston without me.
I could go on and on…
Since I had children, moved school, and went part time, the number of trips I have organised or courses I have been on is... zero!
Life is safer this way, it seems, for me, and for those I work with.
And bless the speaker for coming back again. I felt his pain.
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