Cancelled Lessons

Cancelled lessons/lectures/seminars are an interesting phenomenon.


I remember clearly that there was no greater event than a free lesson. A lesson where you reach your classroom and discover that the teacher standing there is a substitute. You think:


“The teacher isn’t in”


Soon followed by:


“Free lesson” (I have excluded gratuitous exclamation marks, but in my memory they are there).


In school (or in mine anyway) a free lesson was an ‘anything goes’ pass for an hour of acting like a complete hell-child. The relief of not having whichever lesson had been scheduled is akin to a mini-christmas out of season. It is truly a sadistic bonfire night in the brain. I shudder to think of the anguish that my class put naïve sub teachers through, although a number of my humorous memories of school come from these situations. Sub teachers have a habit of saying incredibly strange things such as:


“Obey me child”, “No wonder the devil reigns supreme in this world with little children like you asking people if they want eggs” and “I used to be fat and stupid when I was young too” (All real examples).


There is a process that morphs this perfect state of free lesson into something else, and it intrigues me. The first hints of skewing happened, for me, in sixth form. Here cancellation of certain lessons begun to have less positive effects. I feel this is largely because I began to enjoy lessons in sixth form, and also that there was so much free time provided in sixth form that an extra hour here or there was not the intense release that a free lesson amid a week of packed lessons would be. Having said that, I do remember that there were still nightmare lessons in sixth form that I was more than happy to see cancelled and spend an hour vegetating in the ironically named ‘Quiet Room’.


In University, then, the phenomenon is even stranger.


This morning I made a concerted effort to be awake at 7:00am (which for me was akin to dragging the rotting carcass of a loved house-pet up the Himalayas, difficult), I showered, had breakfast, listened to some music to come round fully and then I loaded my bag with the relevant materials that I would be using in today’s seminars. I was on the ball. Not only was I on the ball, I was rolling around on it like a seal and balancing another ball on my nose. Literally.


Imagine my relief then when upon reaching the room I discover that there is no lecture at all. I was over the moon, relief pouring out of every pore like burning pitch out of the crannies of Notre Dame, like in the film ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ (I don’t know how Disney got away with that, rather a malevolent thing to show children, death by caustic tar). You would think that I was inundated with joy and goodwill.


Well you would be wrong, you assumption-filled bumpkin. I was righteously indignant! I had gone to the Herculean effort of GETTING UP (can you imagine?) and then I was left hanging by the underwhelming administrative skills of my lecturer.


Maybe I am a crazy subversive maniac crazyperson but I think that the Blackboard system is there so that lecturers can alert us of these cancellations in advance, so that I don’t have to wake up early in the morning, when it is really cold and dreary, when I really don’t have to.


The fact that lecturers aren’t running today and I didn’t know about it has nothing to do with the ‘fact’ that I have missed a fortnight of University and the course has probably just ended rather than this being a one-off cancellation, these things have no bearing on the situation!


I am also indignant on behalf of other people who had to catch peak-time public transport in order to arrive on-time for a non-existent lecture. For shame! That is three whole British pounds that at least one poor student won’t see again. That is real human money that is! The loss of that £3 won’t be easy to bounce back from in the current economic climate. You could buy a lot with £3. You could buy six bottles of water that cost 50p each. Three hundred penny sweets. Thirty thousand sweets that individually cost a hundredth of a penny. I’m not even sure if my mathematical workings there are correct. Please do get in touch and call me a tool if they aren’t.


So in a matter of around five years a simple thing such as a free lesson can utterly change its stripes and transform from a heart giving love hour into a bile filled grilling on the nature of making me get up early.


After writing this however I am uncertain whether this is an analysis of free lessons or whether it is really an admission of how I have transformed from a little tyke into a grumpy old git.


It’s the free lesson one.


In the words of Richard Herring:


“I am still proud of what I have done”.


Richard Herring gig tonight, I am looking forward to it.