"Youuuuu well haf blud ohn yurrrrr haaaaaands!" screamed the crazy Scottish broad to a dance studio filled with 100 8th graders.
Why on earth was a woman with mad hair, a beaded hippie bag and a Scottish accent so strong that I was concerned it might be contagious telling a bunch of 13 year olds that their actions were dangerous enough to kill somebody and put blood on their (in some cases pre-) pubescent hands? Had they been peddling drugs to one another? Had they been holding Fight Club meetings during recess? Had they been playing Frogger with the traffic on the nearby high street?
No. They'd been doing Jesus arms on the stairs.
Let's rewind a bit.
The reason I was sitting in a dance studio listening to William Wallace's wife give a lecture on how everyone will die if you posture yourself like a large percentage of the world's Lord and Savior on the staircase during passing period was that I was spending a week following around the teachers of that school, as my grad school has requested. On that day, a Monday, I was following around a young teacher who I decided looked like Spiderman and, being a form tutor for Year 9, Spidey instructed me to follow him into an assembly.
I gotta say...it was a little embarrassing. This being a fancy new dance studio with fancy new floors that for some reason are allergic to shoes, we had to take off our shoes. I had dressed in what I thought was smart attire: boots, nice pants, a nice sweater, etc. But underneath my boots were socks with cartoon meese (mooses) all over. What seemed like a good confidence boosting idea in my hotel room had very quickly become a flashing neon sign that read, "DEAR MIDDLE SCHOOLERS: I'M A COMPLETE NERD. I WOULD BE HONORED IF YOU WOULD GIVE ME SHIT ABOUT IT." I know it's only moose socks, but suddenly I felt naked and looked to Peter Parker to protect me, but apparently his spidey senses had told him he had to go fight crime on the complete opposite end of the room.
Luckily before the kids immediately next to me had time to play Telephone with the phrase "Get a load of the new teacher's dweeby socks" (or however English kids would phrase it), Mrs. Wallace began the assembly. She quickly breezed through the less important issues, such as GCSE options and the bullying of visiting Year 6s, in order to provide us with a litany of the ways in which everyone will die if you put your arms out on the staircase.
And here's where I had to stifle a giggle. My high school's campus started at the bottom of a hill and had buildings all the way up to the top. It had enough staircases to make anyone with a mattress and no sense of danger go into a happiness coma, but in the six years I was there I can't recall a single instance of someone holding out their arms and causing blockages just for fun. And yet, at this school this problem was widespread enough among Year 9 that it became the main focus of an assembly. I had to stifle yet another giggle over how immensely creative these kids were. And what I couldn't understand was how a bunch of kids who were young enough to actually like Justin Bieber in a completely unironic way were able to sit there with straight faces and listen to a madwoman lecturing about how putting your arms out on the staircase will cause blockages that will make people fall over and kill not only everybody on the staircase but also everyone in Greater London. These children were clearly more mature than I was, and I'm about to be a teacher.
Sure, it wasn't as bad as the fit of giggles I had gotten at Westminster Abbey the day before. That was a nightmare. I was at a service there with a friend from home, and the entire congregation launched into quite possibly the most hideous rendition of any hymn ever. About half of the assembled could barely read English, God bless 'em, and so they were basically just inventing sounds that they thought could pass as English to the tune of the hymn. But then the other problem was that the tune itself was so hard to follow that they couldn't even do the tune properly, and nor could the English speakers. So basically Westminster Abbey, this old and majestic seat of church tradition in London, was filled with a completely random collection of sounds, pitches and rhythms that were in no way related to each other.
Let's say the lyric was "Can't read my poker face." Well, the person on my left was drawing out a rumbly bass "Can't" while at the same time my friend was singing out a short, high "poker" and the ambiguous foreigners behind me were singing something with an umpah band beat that sounded like, "Deh rampa doom lah!" Meanwhile the organ seemed to be blasting out "The Star-Spangled Banner." It was the sort of cacophany you would expect from Pentecostals, not Anglicans. This, combined with the serious and breathtaking architecture of the church and the slightly creepy presence of hundreds of dead kings, queens and nobility, was absolutely hilarious to me. Throughout the epic five verses of the most difficult hymn ever I struggled to get my laughter under control, as thanks to the acoustics every snort and giggle was amplified and sent echoing through the cathedral.
By the end I had gotten a handle on my laughter and had plastered a more dignified expression on my face than I actually deserved. The hymn had ended...about 250 different times and on about 250 different notes...and a reverent silence had fallen over this massive church. All you could hear were the echoes of the footsteps of the nun presiding over the service as she shuffled towards the microphone, leaned forward, and said quite simply, "Well done."
And that's where I just lost it. I snorted loud enough that the corpse of Elizabeth I probably woke up, and then I started laughing so hard while trying to stifle it that I was literally weeping.
So yeah. The fit of giggles I got from the lecture on why Year 9's Jesus arms will end up killing everyone in the school didn't quite match up to the Westminster Abbey episode. But both make me wonder if I'll ever grow up. Then again, and I say this sort of thing a lot, if you can't laugh at a congregation of about 250 people singing a song 250 completely different ways in a sacred building, or at kids coming up with a strange way of amusing themselves...well I'm not sure growing up is worth it.
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