Newsletters

News from Mr Grady

Hello Everyone,

Today, we can say that the whole school is now fully back on site.  Wonderful.

It is a great joy to be around and about on the school site seeing students in lessons, and enjoying the live interaction that the remote curriculum tends to deny us, as well as hearing social interaction (at a safe distance of course) as students and colleagues move around the site and engage in chat and discussion at break and lunch time, and most importantly, outside my office door, and around the school, I occasionally hear actual human beings actually laughing.

It is difficult isn’t it, at times not to get sucked into a continuous earnestness, when faced by media reports, safety measures and reminders not to let our guard down, somewhere along the way the lightness of everyday school life can easily get lost.

One of my many flaws is my generally constant lookout for the humour, joke, or most importantly word-play or a pun in any given situation.  Colleagues I’ve worked with for a long time have occasionally had to interrupt conversations with me with: “you’ve stopped listening, because you’ve thought of a joke haven’t you?” 

I think people often mistake offering humour as being somehow superficial, of not taking something seriously, whereas, I would say that sharing in laughter, expressing humour, whatever the situation is one of the purest things that makes us human.  The spontaneous burst of laughter when something tickles you (literally or metaphorically) is one of the great, great joys of life, and in our lockdown homes and rooms, and in our socially distanced world, it has become perhaps harder to see humour, or indeed feel as if one can express it, just when lightness and joy, and a sense of being able to laugh at oneself is just what is needed.

I know very well in the coming weeks students, staff and parents will feel that there is “much to do” and “much to be serious about,” and I would agree completely, but approaching the next weeks, head down, earnestly, being serious every day, treating each new challenge or event as a serious obstacle to be negotiated will lend a size and fear to some of those challenges that is out of proportion.  Sometimes, having a laugh at something, finding the humour in it minimises the challenge, highlights its absurdity and makes it somehow far more easy to deal with. 

I am aware that humour is so often based on one’s own taste: For everyone of us that stifles a giggle when a clown slips on a banana skin, there is someone watching the event with stony-faced disapproval; for every satirical observation that delights the audience of a stand-up comedian, there will be someone for whom such sarcastic language is simply too much.  However, as an English Teacher, it is word play and inventiveness that I think always takes the crown, so I’ll leave you with Tim Vine’s observation: “The advantages of easy origami are two-fold.”

If I’ve even provoked the tiniest of chuckles, then my work here is done. 

Having said that, on reflection, the laughter outside my office door is laughing with me, not at me, Right?

Have a great week, stay well and safe everyone,
With very best wishes,
Mr Grady