A DECADE OF DECADENCE

MR BALDOCK

I’m an English teacher so I’ll start this, pretentiously, with a bit of Shakespeare: “nothing against Time's scythe can make defence”. Whatever that means. I think you can probably assume it’s something to do with old people feeling glum about how quickly life zooms by.

Ten years may seem like a long time to a Reading School student, which is not particularly surprising seeing as though in 2010 many of you were still chewing rusks, enjoying the exploits of Dora the Explorer, or crying about Angry Birds. But, to some of the teaching and associate staff here, a decade has passed in merely a moment.

What can I remember about Reading School in January 2010?

For starters there was no Refectory, so any boy who wanted to buy (vaguely) hot (vaguely) food during lunch time had to run the gauntlet of the dreaded “tuck shop queue”. This was a daily Game

Of Thrones-esque scrap in the claustrophobic alleyway round the back of East Wing which saw tiny Year 7s mercilessly pummelled by lanky sixth formers in a seismic struggle for slices of pizza. Scientists studied this scenario in detail and were able to confirm that Darwin’s theories were still very much in evidence in 2010.

Despite my own undeniably immense physical and moral authority, even I found myself once or twice being overwhelmed by a sea of A Level Maths students, crazed by a surfeit of Swizzels Refreshers, as I vainly tried to keep order and remain theoretically ‘in charge of the queue’. A pathetic sight.

In the English classroom, GCSE students would have been right in the thick of producing their coursework. Can you believe it, Class of 2020? Ten years ago, 40% of both the Literature and Language grades came courtesy of essays written at school over the period of many weeks with plenty of drafts to check how good they were looking? It’s so unfair! The essays also had to be written by hand, which was great news for me and my colleagues because that process ate up hours and hours of lesson time; while the poor students were slavishly scratching out their miserable efforts, we could swing back on our chairs, smoke pipes, sip whiskey, stroke our chins and stare meaningfully out of the window thinking about important things. That kind of stuff was permissible in 2010.

There are, however, many aspects of Reading School life which have remained reassuringly constant over the past decade. The students in our classrooms were just as motivated and intellectually curious and engaged in learning as you are today; the teaching staff was just as expert and enthusiastic and caring as it is today; the red kites and gulls were just as keen on screeching maniacally and pecking lumps out of each other and menacingly patrolling the skies above our heads as they are today. Just as they will be in spring 2020, back in 2010 the BBC Young Reporters were roving the campus; the Eisteddfod choral practices were packing out every lunch-break classroom; the displays and events going on in the LRC were inspiring the creativity of bookworms and textual agnostics alike.

So, back to Bill The Bard: “Pleasure and action make the hours seem short”, and these past ten years have indeed flown past.

I’m sure that when I’m writing this same article in January 2030 and today seems to me as if it were only yesterday, we will all be living in space capsules, using personal jet packs, and experiencing human interaction via VR-enhanced brain-implants which provide a continuous TikTok feed of K-Pop lip-sync content.

Or we’ll be doing the bidding of our red kite and gull overlords.

But on any given day I will still be wearing a pair of socks or a jumper or a tie that I was wearing in 2010 and telling off someone in my tutor group for not tucking in their shirt.

“Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose,” as Macbeth once said.