SUPERMAN WAS SHIT

20 July 2006

Superman was shit, had to sit through almost half an hour of adverts so I could have spent more time yesterday afternoon writing. But today is another day with another schedule of stuff to get done, meetings to be had, children to be picked up, emails to be sent, parking fines to be paid, calls to be made and I need to make time for some mind-wandering.

I’ve reread what I wrote yesterday and there are some things I should come clean about. That thing about the teachers being the enemy was maybe a bit of a pose. I did hate school, there was not one teacher in the 11 years that I spent going to school who ever made me feel inspired. They always made me feel stupid. The teachers were the enemy. But there have been numerous teachers that I have met as an adult who I have thought truly inspirational and wished that they had been my teachers when I was a kid. Which would have been impossible on many counts but mainly because most of them have been younger than me. John McCabe at the first school I went to was one of these truly inspirational teachers. You could tell by the way his pupils so readily engaged with what I was trying to do with them. And the kids at his school, Broadway Juniors, were no more privileged than the others. It was just another school on another estate in a part of England where shipbuilding and coal once provided the employment but now nobody is quite sure how long the next job is going to last. That’s if there is one.

Now I know I’m in dangerous water by singling out one of the teachers for what might be seen as praise. There is a good possibility that all the teachers who were involved may read this so I had better add the following. I got total support from all the teachers in all seven schools. They seemed to appreciate and value, if not me in particular, artists coming in and working with their pupils.

It made me appreciate the hard work and stress that these teachers have to go through on a daily basis. I would be ground down within a few weeks and end up screaming and shouting at the kids. And then there are all the SATS and all that stuff and the pressure of fulfilling everything in the national curriculum.

So now that I have got the grovelling out of the way I can get on with writing about what I was going to do on our return sessions at each of the schools.

We weren’t going to be visiting them in the same order as we had the first time around. The first one this time was Belmont, the one with the sullen and attitude-laden 13-year-olds. I wasn’t looking forward to it. We took with us three or four of the framed SCORES from the gallery including the one about listening to skylarks and the last one about encouraging people to write their own SCORES for The17 to perform.

‘Good morning. Remember how last time I was here I got you to go ‘Aaaaaaahhh’ for seven minutes? Well I’m not going to ask you to do that again.’
An sigh of relief goes around the classroom.
‘Or even try to imagine what it would be like if music had disappeared. What I want you to do is write a SCORE for other future members of The17 to perform. Now the SCORE that you do, does not have to be one that involves people making sounds at all, even with their mouths. It could just be asking The17 – remember The17 can be any 17 people – so asking The17 to go somewhere and listen to something. Maybe there is a sound that you have liked hearing. Maybe it’s when you are lying in bed in the morning and you can hear the milk float coming down the street, stopping at all the houses and picking up the empties and putting down the new ones.’
‘Sir, we don’t get a milkman coming round our way anymore.’
‘Yeah, ok. I remember when I was about your age we had this classroom that was in a pre-fab built in the playground. When we had lessons in there and it began to rain I loved the drumming sound of the rain on the roof. My mind would always drift off from what the teacher was going on about and get lost in this drumming of the rain. That was a very special sound for me. Do any of you know what skylarks sound like?’
Not a hand went up. Maybe some of them did know what skylarks sound like, maybe they even love the sound of them but felt it would not be cool to let on they knew. I used to love listening to skylarks as a kid. Where we used to live in Scotland when I was about ten there were these fields up the road at the back of our house. I would go up there by myself, around June time and lie on the grass and wait for a skylark to start ascending.

‘Skylarks are little brown birds, a bit bigger than a sparrow, about the size of a starling. And what they do is start flying up into the sky from the grass, not a tree or a bush, and they climb higher and higher and higher into the sky until they are just a tiny spec against the blue, or most probably grey. And all the time they are flying higher they are singing this song of theirs. It’s not a particularly musical song like a robin’s or a blackbird’s but it just keeps going and going. Now I don’t know why I liked listening to it back then when I was ten. Nowadays when I listen to one it sounds to me like it is saying “Isn’t it great to be alive in this world today, right now, up here, just me and the sky.” Now I also know that this is just me anthropomorphising the situation, and that in fact he – ‘cause it’s always a he that is doing this thing – is just up there strutting his stuff for the female skylarks to check out.’
I could see their attention beginning to drift, I curtailed my soliloquy to the skylark.
‘So I wrote this SCORE here about taking 17 people out to listen to skylarks.

SCORE
8. TAKE

IN JUNE,
TAKE 17 PEOPLE TO A PLACE
WHERE SKYLARKS CLIMB
HIGH INTO THE SKY.

REQUEST The17 TO LIE ON THEIR BACKS
ON THE GRASS AND LISTEN
TO THE SKYLARKS AS THEY CLIMB
HIGH INTO THE SKY.

‘But if you do a SCORE about getting The17 to listen to something you don’t have to limit it to something you have already heard yourself. You could give them an instruction to go anywhere you want in the world. There are no cost restrictions or time restrictions, anywhere your imagination wants to takepeople to listen to something or to make sounds with their mouths. Or it could be just down the road to the bus shelter.

So just write it out like a short list of instructions, sort of like I have done it, put your name on it and we will have it artworked up so it looks like one of these that I have done. Not that I’m going to be paying to have one of these frames made to put them in, but we will put them up on The17 website so everyone can see it and download it and perform it, if they want.’

I was on a roll with these kids, they were actually listening to what I was saying.
‘So what I want you to do is to get into groups of no more than four, but you can do it by yourselves if you want, and put together your own SCORES.’

I realised that getting them into small groups might cause all sorts of problems about classroom politics and pecking orders. My two younger girls report back to me or their mum daily about all the politics that go on between girls in their classes. All the falling out and the new best friends until next week. I remember none of this going on between my mates when I was at school and I must have been oblivious to it among the girls. Mind you, I have always been oblivious to what’s going on with girls or women, could never understand why they found stories about relationships so interesting. Relationships to me always seem to get in the way of the action, the real life where things happen.

I just put that bit in so you can go, ‘I wonder what he is trying to tell us here about himself.’

Back to the action in the classroom. We hand out unlined sheets of A4. In fact, they were taken from the same block of A4 paper that I am writing on at the moment as I have filled my Black & Red notebook and have not got round to getting a new one yet. They get down to work with a gusto that I found surprising. Even those three girls that had been so full of attitude on our first visit are embracing the idea of writing their own SCORES. John Hirst and I spend the rest of the session with them flitting from group to group to answer questions and give encouragement. The time flashes by and the bell announces the lunchbreak. They rush for the door leaving us to collect the sheets of A4 with their scores.