There is a distinct flavour to working in the field of learning support, which is a notion which was brought down to me as I listened to a remarkably incompatible piano solo. Duke (if I’m giving him a fake name, I’m giving him a cool one damnit) was in his form’s music class, all of whom were happily composing away using garage band on the fancy Macs in the (music department’s own) computer lab; their assignment was to create a standard 12 bar blues progression and use it as a base for a solo improvised section given a set of notes to use. Duke and I had taken what seemed like an inordinate amount of time selecting pleasing drum/guitar/bass loops, which had put him in a position to be both funky AND fresh. At this point I got him set up to record and set off to help his compatriot from learning support, King (why not?), who I could tell was getting a little frustrated with the user interface by the escalating inadvertent E.T. impression he was doing – which is one of the more endearing quirks of any of the department’s usual suspects, in all honesty. With King safely jamming away – having a string quintet launch into life with a midi keyboard-stroke is pretty impressive, after all – I came back to listen to what Duke had produced over the painstakingly produced Spector-esque wall of sound.
I knew something interesting was going on when I realised that Duke had played something at approximately 3 times the tempo of our blues jam arrangement. The end result of Duke’s keyboard throw-down was actually a jaunty classical-sounding piano tune (Allegra, it might be called? Something that brought allergy medicine to mind), which was played at lightning speed and keyboard-punishing strike-weight. There was something pleasingly surreal to the entire situation, and I found myself smiling and giggling a bit to myself as I listened to the last bit of the audio madness that had been crafted. When Duke saw this he too began to laugh, and soon King and the rest of the boys nearby were enjoying the kind of contagious laughter that only sugar-fueled young teens seem to produce. It only increased in volume when, mid-chortle, Duke took on a sudden serious expression and said that “you should get a mouth operation…NOW!!” before returning to the stepped-up merriment in the music class. Learning support is an interesting department.
The main problem, from a writer’s perspective, is that I can’t seem to describe it without extensive use of similes. Composition-wise, it is about as ethnically diverse as a South African yacht club – fresh from my recent stint in the land of the fiery sun (the south/being homeless), I was easily the darkest complexion at the coffee break table. Similarly it is about as youthful as those wraparound cataract sunglasses you often see at the cheaper malls – though at least they could be used to look at young women while you walk around town: there was to be no such luck for my day-to-day existence. The ladies (actually quite wonderful and nice one and all, I will emphatically say) I work with come from the time before you could name your child after a wind, emotion, or excerpt from a dyslexic spelling test….every day I happily sat down for coffee with some combination of Moira/Tracy/Janine/Janet/Deborah/Eunice with a dusting of Debbie/Geraldine and/or Phyllis, and was quite pleased to do so.
For a start it led me into conversations I never imagined I would be part of. On one memorable occasion a full 25-minute coffee break was taken up by an animated breakdown of stapler preferences in terms of weight, colour, durability, and capacity; my contribution – asking which of their favourite stapler models could shoot staples with the highest speed and accuracy – led to a good natured series of titters at my expense. It was, apparently, something that the ladies had never thought to include in their surprisingly technical breakdowns. I put my coffee mug into the dishwasher after carefully opening the spring-loaded door directly into my shin, and set off for class.
I hopped into my temperamental time machine and made my way to the end of the term, coasting to a temporal stop just in time to attend the much-ballyhooed ‘Headmaster’s shout’. This was a wondrous opportunity to eat as much ‘fuzh and chups’ and you responsibly could, all the while absorbing a perpetually-refreshing glass of many imported beer varieties, and it was fantastic. In fact, I was excited enough about this prospect that I had gone home for lunch hours before the party (as is my wont) and had adorned myself with a tie (as was my want) so that I would have something to loosen up. The vast majority of the largely 50 and up staff had never seen me due to my somewhat limited circle of movement (I don’t need to help the ‘A’ kids, you see), and so it was that I came to be speculatively eyed as I moved from fish to fish. Soon a stream of introductions began to seek me out – as a young fit new male teacher – with a series of requests to do clubs, trips, and (I suspect) one of those introducing himself. My protective cloud of Learning Support hens had flown the coop some hours previous, and I was suddenly free range and fair game – or so it would seem.
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