Still Street Dancing

And somehow I’ve learned to be okay with that

Somewhere out there, I am still street dancing.

Becky’s idea, for Red Nose Day 2000-and-whenever, was for the teaching staff to get up there in front of the whole school and, resplendent in backwards baseball caps and baggy pants, give their all for the entertainment of 360 children.

She wanted a 100% white, predominantly middle-aged, group of individuals who had not one of them previously heard of street dancing as a concept, let alone thought they might one day be called upon to pop, lock or waack, to get up there in front of the whole school and street dance for charity.

That’s how she sold it to us, did Becky. And I saw the smile, the curl of the lip, the narrowing of the eyes, and I knew what she was thinking. It was for Red Nose Day. Which, if you haven’t come across it, is connected to Comic Relief, which is — for the most part — connected to comedy. Scripted, improvised, stand-up, visual — you name it. All things comic. And, if you didn’t have naturally funny bones — and I don’t mean to be unkind, but many in that school didn’t — then there was always the option of making a fool of yourself in public.

This was that option.

And, as Becky told us in the staff meeting what we’d be doing — putting in time after school for the next six weeks to learn the moves — I thought that someone might just put a stop to it. Nearly twenty members of staff, with teaching assistants very much included, performing a complicated routine in front of the whole school, was not going to end well. Was, in Becky’s mind, not intended to end well.

And neither could that be permitted.

Getting Down with the Kids

Oh, I know that you need to get down with the kids. I did, at times, try to get down with the kids. I did the school residentials and I directed the school show, and I kept myself as up-to-date as I could with popular culture, when my natural predilection is for stuff from decades before.

I’d done karaoke. Got myself stuck in the middle of a zip wire. Shown myself up in every one of a thousand different ways. But it’s a difficult job, teaching. Maintaining any kind of respect when teaching. And I thought that the sight of all of us — alright, the sight of me; it was about me — failing to get even the slightest move right was going to be an embarrassment too far.

I still had to get the class through the Year Six SATS. Comic Relief is in February, for God’s sake. That’s five months of the school year still to go. I couldn’t afford to use up all that ridicule at once. And then there were the hours of rehearsals. I was working a thirty-plus hour week, even before taking in late night marking and preparation and the loss of weekends. Surely others would see it the same way?

No.

The Head thought it was hilarious.

That would be the same Head who turned up to rehearsals in a suit and pratted about, faux ballroom dancing one minute, committing any number of offensive sins against cultures he had no right to be copying the next.

He thought it was hilarious because he got to see how the rest of us failed time and again to master any of it.

And, if his phone went in the office, or if he could find anything else to do at all, then off he would go, like that time I was with him at a conference and an infant school practitioner wanted us all to stand up and take part in a game ordinarily played by five year olds. I got up. He got up. I watched him make his way straight to the exit without so much as an apology to the woman at the front of the room.

Because he could do that.

And that couldn’t be permitted, either, because he’d do it, I knew it, when we got to that Friday Comic Relief assembly. He’d do his bit of faux ballroom and then he’d work his way to the back of the hall and he would let us sweat and suffer and fail and fail and fail.

In a profession where — and this has only got worse — you have it drummed into you that you cannot fail. That the option doesn’t even exist.

Even if it is a damn good way to learn things.

Failing to Get Up Again

I don’t know when I decided it might be worth videoing the rehearsals. It might have been when, in week three, it was still proving impossible for the staff to keep in sync with each other for even the first few moves and the “senior staff” were absenting themselves more and more from proceedings because — have I mentioned this? — they could. I can’t say it was a plan. I was an arch “survival strategist” in teaching. I’d only got that far — five or six years into the job — by being so. If there was a way to cut down on the hours and the pain, then I had to take it.

So I started having the rehearsals taped. Including the one where I sat down, mid-krump, and just stayed there on the hall floor, like a five year old who has had enough of mum and dad shopping and will not move from Tesco until physically carried out.

And, yes, I used that in the edit. Of course I did.

In the end, we were never going to get there. A three-minute song (I forget the song…) ought to have led to a three-minute routine. We’d managed to collectively produce about twenty seconds.

But, with the magic of Movie Maker — and I was a dab hand with Movie Maker — I could take all those bits of people almost, almost getting the moves right, and the Head pretending to waltz with that office lady he liked, and even me sitting down mid-krump, and I could get three minutes out of it for the Comic Relief assembly.

I could save everyone’s day without it looking like I was saving my own.

Brilliant, huh?

And Becky wasn’t so displeased with it all. She’d said that, if anyone could teach that rabble to dance, she could, and so it hadn’t exactly gone terrifically well for her.

Especially when, thinking back to that first staff meeting, those narrowed eyes had been mostly directed at the Head. And perhaps she had been motivated to embarrass us for more than just charity.

All for a good cause

Of course, we couldn’t just show the DVD in assembly.

Of course, for charity, we could now sell the DVD.

Which, of course, means that somewhere out there, all these years on, I am still street dancing.

It has taken me many years away from the toxicity of that job to realise that, you know, I’m actually pretty okay with that. If I have to have an embarrassment on record, given how it all ended, and how many more embarrassments were to come, at least it’s that one.

One of the few that, ultimately, was for a good cause.

In line with the fabulous Memoirist Idol contest, I’ve been blown away by the other submissions, so it’s hard to choose just one. For a different view on teaching (a subject close to my heart), and the value of teachers, @lisagerardbraun has written just the most beautiful piece about what one particular teacher meant to her.