MY EDUCATION WEEK: Niall MacMonagle teacher Wesley College, Dublin
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8th
Up early, Hermione Lee’s brilliant lecture on biography at the RIA the night before still buzzing in my head. My idea of a really wonderful beginning to a weekend. Down for the paper before breakfast. Always look for poem first – the news that stays news. Today’s one is by Nerys Williams: “ATMs are glyphs in our throats/ stones in our stomachs”. You bet. Frisked everything else.
Washed five shirts. Ironed them damp during Playback.The week's uniform's sorted. Cut the grass and attacked a bush with a clippers. The secret of happy gardening is 11-minute spurts. Back to paper. Swam. Went to library, checked out a collection of essays on contemporary Irish children's literature, for a session I'm chairing at Pearse St Library with Geraldine Meade, Celine Kiernan and Melvin Burgess. Then to Barnardos in Rathmines where I bought an original framed painting by a Lucy Hill for €6. Googled her when I got home. In Oxfam bought another copy of Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader. I'll find someone to give it to.
To Project theatre for matinee performance of Colm Tóibín's Testament. Great believer in Paul Durcan's dictum that the only place to sit is in the middle of the fifth row. Open seating so we ended up in row Z. Still, Marie Mullen gave a powerful performance and the play quietly opened up and subverted Mary's received story.
Early dinner with friends. Talk turned to Dublin Contemporary and presidential hopefuls. Bring back Mary Robinson. Bed in time for A Good Readon Radio 4.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9th
Gave up buying Sunday papers years ago. Gave us four hours of our life back. Marked 26 fifth-year class tests on Bishop, Mahon, Hopkins. Some brilliant answers. Twenty minutes on a treadmill at the gym. Swam. I swim every day. Looking again at Melvin Burgess’s new novel. I read it in proof last July and he’s coming into school during Book Week; prepared a handout on Burgess for Form IV. Late afternoon, my wife and I walked to Poolbeg lighthouse, my favourite walk in Dublin. Our daughter organizes her room (yet again) and writes up a lab report.
She’s in second-year science. She invites friends around for dinner that she cooks herself. Wrote a letter and two cards. Checked e-mails. Phoned home. My 90-year-old mother wonders when she’ll receive her polling card. “Bless us and save us, but what is that Dana one doing in the race?” Sunday evening and again the little eternity that stretched before us on Friday’s four o’clock bell has whooshed by. Thinking my way into a talk I’m giving when I open a Thomas Brezing exhibition at the Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, next month. The South Wind Blows from the edge of Europe is a great wind-down. Washed the kitchen floor. The deal in our house is that I clean, my wife cooks. I like washing floors. Bed.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 10th
Eight classes. In school by 7.30am. Get a run at the day. Photocopied opening pages of the shortlisted Man Booker novels to read/discuss in class. Assembly. Great news: senior choir through to all-Ireland finals. Assembly and a sixth-year sings his own song, prompted by Wesley’s Bullying Awareness week; plays guitar. Impressive.
Reading Kate Thompson's Creature of the Night in first year. Then fourth year and speech-making plus Of Mice and Men.Next Form III and In Memory of my Mother.Break. Banana. Tea. Phone a parent who couldn't make a parent/teacher meeting. Watching I'm Not Scaredwith sixth years. Then Li Cunxin's memoir Mao's Last Dancerwith second years. Lunch with colleagues in a very loud dining room. The big roar. Free period. Marked first year class tests. Had results of a poetry competition that fifth-year pupils were invited to enter anonymously and a friend in King's College, London judged. A poem about a dandelion won "for its own brightness and freshness". Returned tests. Looked at an Alice Maher painting in class. Swam – no, threw myself into Rathmines pool. Apple, goats cheese, rye bread, walnuts. Coffee and 70 per cent dark chocolate. Iris Murdoch is right: "One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats". On my bike and into town for a Dublin Writers Festival meeting in The Lab for eight. On the wish list: Alice Munro, Marilyn Robinson, Stephen Fry, Fiona Shaw's The Waste Land . . .
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11th
What a day. What an afternoon; what an evening. Buzz. Buzz. Classes as usual in the morning but you’d know something special was happening. The windows were being cleaned! Wesley is celebrating 100 years of co-education this year. “There is no doubt co-education cultivates a greater mutual knowledge and respect” said T J Irwin, principal in 1911. Good for him. In his portrait; he looks serious but he was, undoubtedly, a visionary. It’s the only way to go. And all that old codswallop about girls performing better in single-sex schools seems to have been dismissed for once and for all. Rightly so. Terrifically entertaining assemblies by pupils in the lead up to the presidential visit which went like clockwork but never felt strained or artificial. President Mary McAleese addressed the entire school at 2.40pm and we heard a marvellous and original piece for choir and orchestra composed by former pupil Anna Rice. A gorgeous cello solo. Watching young people make music is one of the most beautiful things. The pupils were impeccably behaved and seriously impressed. McAleese’s speech was warm, graceful, eloquent. She’s a hard act to follow.
That evening two books: Wesley Women 1911-2011 and Co-Education in Wesley launched in a packed National Gallery. A classical trio, a jazz band, drinks, finger food, old friends, past pupils, great speeches. Annetta Kavanagh and her team’s Trojan work proved triumphal.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 12th
Hairsprayis the school musical this year. Rehearsals before and after school. Huge interest. A dynamic trio of young staff in charge. Boarders and day pupils giving it their all at 8am.
In senior classes, a page of 25 sentences, each one containing at least one grammatical error. What’s wrong with this and why? “Neither the man who he interviewed yesterday nor the man this afternoon were suitable.” [Two errors in that one.] The only sure way of guaranteeing a more accurate command of language is for Those Powers That Be to prescribe and examine grammatical rules. Am I right or am I right?
To school library, my favourite place on campus. Returned Julian Barnes. Why wasn’t Sebastian Barry on that list? There’s more humanity in it.
Half-day and today is round one of Wesley College’s own Poetry Aloud. Now in its 19th year. Begins at 1.30pm. Huge number of entries. Compulsory poems – Wordsworth, Delanty and Yeats – plus their own choice. The judge listens and decisions are made. We are there until 4pm.
Standard so high that 19 are put through to November final. One of my favourite nights of the year.
Into town to meet a former past pupil. He sent me a card from Tintern Abbeyon his honeymoon and now he's all of 44, a wood scientist and living in New Zealand, married with two children. Great to know that they leave your classroom and head out and make their way in the world.
Home by eight. Quick dip. Some marking. There’s no end to it.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13th
English department weekly staff meeting. Touch base. Great colleagues. We plan book week. Write mid-term reports for Forms V and VI, earlier than usual because of president’s visit. Morning break is sweet: a cake is organized by the Staff Welfare Committee to mark Wesley Co-ed centenary. Film studies with Form VI. Mike Nichols’s 1967 classic The Graduate. I first saw that film at a midnight showing at Puck Fair, 1968. I was 14 and had to be smuggled in. The glamour and excitement of it; the exoticism of California.
Annual prize day. Dig out the hood and gown. Elspeth Henderson, retired principal, Mount Temple, does the honours. Endearingly unassuming, she leaves us with the vital thought: “You must learn to like yourself”.
We sing Amhrán na bhFiann. Some applaud. No, no, no. Never applaud a national anthem. Drive home thinking that this time tomorrow I'll be in the IFI watching Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris.And greatly cheered that on the Saturday it's Donizetti's Anna Bolenalive from the Met in the Swan Cinemas, Rathmines. I fall asleep remembering the principal interrupting my lunch to ask me about doing this diary thing. Bless us and save us indeed. I can imagine the slagging.
THIS WEEK I WAS. . .
READING
The Pale Kingby David Foster Wallace
LISTENING TO
Tim Robbins reading of The Great Gatsbyin the car. At home, on vinyl, The Four Last Songsby Richard Strauss. The Jessye Norman version.
CLICKING
TED Talk: Tom Peters Educate for a Creative Society.
