The white bunny

When I first started my training to become an art teacher, as part of the course we had to attend lessons at the university half the days of the week and we were placed at a school the other half of the days. The theoretical lessons and discussions at the university were meant to be complementary, supportive and enhancing of our teaching experience at our placement schools. They included, amongst a plethora of other subjects, practical tips about coping with challenging behaviour, insightful articles into child psychology, marking exercises and mock exams, information on the latest research findings on education, art exercises and staging lessons and presentations with our piers and so on and so forth. Although these lessons, discussions and lectures were of the highest standard and although I believe they were genuinely intended to support and prepare the trainee art teachers, there could not have been a deeper gap between theory and practice; the days at the placement schools could not have felt any more distant, detached and disconnected from the course theory, unless the schools were placed on the moon.

The course tried to place each trainee teacher in two different schools within the one academic year (if full-time) that the course lasted. They tried to pick two schools that were as different from each other as possible, so that the trainee teachers got a glimpse of how diverse the environment, the teaching methods, the students and the teachers could be. No one could have prepared me personally for the first month in my first school placement. I was very excited at the prospect of trying out my art projects, which we were all able to build and create from scratch, based on the current -at the time- curriculum and we were going to deliver our art projects under the watchful eye of the art teachers. Before any of that though, there was a period of about two weeks where we just followed the art teachers around the school, observing their lessons and taking valuable notes.

My first placement was in an inner London secondary school and from the first day there I was totally horrified and deeply shocked at the way the students behaved. Originally I thought that I had just observed a particularly "challenging" class, but when the scenario more or less repeated itself in class after class and day after day (with notable and memorable few exceptions), I just knew that the next months were not going to be anywhere near what I had expected and hoped for. Taking aside incidents including guns, knives and an assault on a support worker, the presence of the police in the school and terrifying hourly stampedes on the stairs, the atmosphere in the classrooms and the interaction amongst students themselves and between teachers and students, were so unsuited to a school environment, so far from anything I had ever experienced or could imagine, that I felt at a complete loss of how and what I could ever offer and get out from the experience I was letting myself into.

Despite all that, I was quite confident in the projects I had designed for the students, I thought they were imaginative and could be educational and also fun and I had put measures in place so that I could adapt and expand them easily according to the students' specific abilities. I had also picked up some tips from the university lessons on teaching, such as to try and learn and remember the students' names as early as possible, to try and always address different students in a class and not only focus on a few memorable characters, to always label the action and never the person (so that a student's action is silly for example, but never the student), to always carry through on a threat or punishment, to establish an effective and carefully thought out seating plan for each class, to be fair and pleasant, but apparently not to smile for the first term. And also to dress in a smart, contemporary way, never wear old fashioned clothes or clothes of any extreme fashion. I was secretly a bit excited to try all these things out and see what worked and what did not.

My worse class was on Wednesdays. The class's art teacher was from the beginning very hostile towards me, for no apparent reason. She was not supportive at all and several times undermined me and ridiculed me in front of her students. The students were out of control in her class, there was a lot of screaming, throwing items and running around, everyone shouted at the same time, the books and equipment were all damaged, the language used was foul and there was no beginning, middle or end to the lessons. I never had a chance to properly introduce my projects, I tried to several times, but was unable to get everyone to be quiet and listen to what I was saying. The art teacher always cut in, interrupted, interfered, asserted herself in a wailing voice and more or less pushed me aside and pushed her way around the classroom, banging her palm on the tables and distributing photocopied handouts with colour-in shapes. I found this lesson on Wednesdays so traumatic and all consuming in a negative way, that the night before I was unable to sleep, I had horrible nightmares if I did manage to sleep and the morning always found me in a cold sweat and unwilling to go to school.

In a desperate attempt to establish myself as a teacher on the Wednesday class, I bought a pair of glasses, with no prescription lenses, but ones with a slight tint, which I wore and hoped they gave me an air of authority of some sort, while at the same time I was able to hide behind them and get some protection. I thought they worked for a little while, when one Wednesday the teacher said in front of the class while laughing and pointing at my face something like: "...obviously Miss here has no clue what she is talking about, don't listen to her, let me show you how to do it...". I just had a blank moment then, had no idea what to say or what to do, I did not know what I was doing in a foreign country, in some horrible teacher's lost class and when I went to rub my brow, my hands hit the glasses' frame and it felt so alien a contour that I really thought I had lost myself forever in the hell of that classroom.

During my time at that school, I took responsibility of giving one to one, after school tuition for A level in Art, to a girl who had entered the country as a refugee from Kosovo six months prior to me being placed at that school. The girl's English was very poor, she was very timid and under a witness protection scheme. She had a great work ethos and was absolutely determined to do well. It was one of the most rewarding experiences of that year, the girl spoke a little Greek and I think she felt very comfortable around me, because as the weeks passed she started joking and laughing more and more. She did pass her A level in Art with a B+ that year, but what this encounter made me realise, was that the main reason I was able to help her, was that I could related to her and understand her position fairly well. I could not however, sympathise and relate well at all with the majority of the students in this inner London school. For me their behaviour was unacceptable, rude, disrespectful  and unreasonable, but as it stands the majority of these students came from troubled backgrounds, were impoverished, neglected, abused and abandoned, so that any kind of behaviour from them was really a shouting cry for attention, structure and help. Even when I realised that looking at their files, it was still very hard for me to put myself in their shoes and I had not the tools, experience or understanding I needed in order to be able to deal with their behaviour and move passed it, so that I could do my job and try to teach them art. All the preparatory lessons at the university could not offer me what I needed, which was time and subsequently experience in that inner London school and I really believe that someone who had grown up in inner London, possibly in an environment similar to the one the majority of those students came from, would be far more suitable for the job and at a clear advantage. (Despite this straight path of logic, the art teacher of the Wednesday class was such a person from inner London and of a "troubled background", so clearly that alone is not enough either).

I have dwelled here a lot on the Wednesday class, which was the worst one I witnessed, however it is only fair to say that there were several other art teachers in that school, amongst whom a printer who had a wonderful way with even the most challenging students and in a firm, strict and very effective manner managed to deliver the most outstanding printing projects. I did try my best to study the way he handled the classes and the students and how structured, organised and at the same time flowing and effortless his lessons were. I took all that on board and thankfully had the opportunity to try out what I had learned on my second placement. My second placement could not have been any more different than the first; it was a small, selective public secondary school in outer North London (no fees were required to be paid by parents, but a very tough entry exam was in place).

I was in a way extremely lucky that I was placed in such a school the second time around and not at the beginning. Two trainee art teachers in that year were placed in a grammar, private or selective school first and in a large, inner London school the second time and they both ended up quitting the course before the end of the final term. The North London school was a pleasure to work in. The students were very keen to learn and were respectful of each other, of the teachers and of the school. They restored my faith in teaching and I was at last able to put most of my attention on delivering my projects and teaching them rather than constantly battling with behavioural issues. I did think a lot of the students and the situation at the inner London school while I worked at my second placement. Placing really bright students in one school was obviously going to make teaching a hell of a lot easier and more rewarding, but what was the solution for the inner London school, which hosted an overwhelming majority of "challenging" and "troubled" students? They clearly needed all the help and support they could get at that school, and although that was as plain as daylight to me, I am afraid to say that I was so deeply relieved not to be in that school any more, that I did not ponder on the matter any longer during that period.

At the second school, I became slowly more confident in the classroom and was soon able to try all my projects and design new ones. It took a while before I could relax enough during lessons, to be able to deliver a lesson in such a way, that I had the uninterrupted attention of most students for the majority of the time. But I was still on my guard in case I got suddenly a bout of behavioural issues similar to the ones I had witnessed in my first placement. This thankfully did not happen, but one day, after a lesson with year seven students, one of them approached me and asked to have a word with me. He said he did not want to bring it up during the lesson, but that the lesson I had just delivered to them was all wrong. The lesson was based on the colour wheel, and after going through the primary and secondary colours we had done a painting exercise using only primary colours. The student said that I was wrong and that the primary colours were not red, blue and yellow, but red, blue and green. He said the reason he was so sure about this fact was that his father had talked to him about it only the previous weekend. A more experienced teacher would have questioned a bit the student as to what his father's profession was or what they had talked about exactly regarding primary colours, but I did none of these, but in my newly found confidence shook my head and smiled, saying that the student must have misunderstood or got confused and that the primary colours were indeed, red, blue and yellow.

Forgetting totally about this incident I went about teaching and organising my paperwork for a week, when it was time again to give a lesson to the class this one student was in. This time the student was not so considerate towards me as to take me aside after class, but instead put his hand up and asked  permission to say something regarding our previous lesson at the beginning of the class. He said that since we were learning about colours and primary and secondary colours in particular, we should know that there is also a different set of primary and secondary colours, other than the ones I taught them in the previous lesson. This set of primary colours included red, blue and green and they were the primary colours of light. The secondary colours produced when those primary colours of light were mixed, were magenta, when blue was mixed with red, yellow, when green was mixed with red, and cyan, when green was mixed with blue. All the three primary colours of light mixed together would provide a white light. The student was so calm, articulate and confident in his speech, that I became progressively more and more dizzy and hot on the face as I listened to him and as stored and forgotten words from my own physics lessons at school flashed by, with white light being the most prominent memory. I thanked the student for the very interesting and enlighting contribution to our lesson and moved swiftly on as I had nothing to add or expand on this information; throughout that day my heart was pounding and I was drifting about in a smog of embarrassment and meagerness.

Although I believed the student on the theory of the primary colours of light and although I kind of remembered as much in fractions from my own schooling, I was still itching to read on these when I got home and actually understand what it was all about (something that clearly I should have done a week prior to that event, when the student first approached me). To begin with I found out that the reason both these sets of primary colours included three colours, had nothing to do with the properties of light, but with the human eye, which has typically three types of colour receptors, called cone cells. Each of these three types of cone cells responds to different ranges of the colour spectrum. So if we were goldfish, which have four types of cone cells, then our primary colours would have been four instead of three. Which were the three primary colours, was decided and disputed amongst scientists as they tried to pin down the three primary colour sensations that the human eye perceives. The human cone cells in fact do not correspond precisely to an exact set of primary colours and it is understood today that there are variations from individual to individual. Then there are two ways of defining these three primary colours: the additive way and the substractive way.

The way we mix colours in art, so mainly pigments, is a substractive way, because each time we mix a colour with another we substract or block some wavelengths of light. The primary colours we use typically in art therefore are the substractive primaries (red, yellow and blue-RYB). The primary colours my student was talking about, are the additive primaries (red, green and blue-RGB), which are basically colourful emmited lights mixed  to create more colours, typically used in television and computer displays (basically adding or mixing lights together). When all three basic additive colours are mixed together they produce a white (colour) light, while when the three substractive primaries are mixed together they produce a dark brown-black colour. After getting a basic understanding of all this, I had the idea of doing a small demonstration to the class the student with the primary colours of light  belonged, with a torch and some colour cellophane sheets. Although this would not have been part of the art curriculum, interdisciplinary teaching was highly advocated at the time, and I always thought that approaching a subject from a completely different starting point or perspective could give it a renewed understanding.

Anyway, I was quite pleased with myself for having the idea to follow through with this interesting information that my student had brought to light, and arrived at the school with my torch and cellophane sheets, in red, green and blue. At least I demonstrated the common sense to try this experiment before the lesson started, during the break, and I darkened the room as much as possible by drawing the curtains. When I shone the torch through each individual sheet a nice bit of colour flooded the surface of the wall. But when I put two sheets together on the torch, things did not happen as they should. The green and red sheets of cellophane did not create yellow, but a dark brown and when I put all three sheets of additive primary colours together there was definitely no white light, but instead a dark brown-black colour, just like it happened in painting. I stood there perplexed and annoyed, starting to sweat as the lesson was shortly to be started, when I realised that I was actually not mixing lights together at all. I needed one torch per cellophane sheet and I needed to be mixing the emitted lights of each upon the wall. What I was doing was still mixing colours in a substractive way, I was using the colourful cellophane sheets as pigments. Of course there were no more torches around, definitely not two more of them, so I never carried out the experiment in the class.

The funny thing about all this, is that even after I had worked in other schools in subsequent years, I still remembered the students from the school of my first placement the clearest. I am very curious to know if the situation at that school is still the same, and I often come up with ideas of projects in art that I think would have caught the attention of the students, as they were, of that school. The printer teacher who worked there, always had in his projects an element of magic, of something unpredictable and surprising happening towards the end of the projects, and the students always came back for more, secretly wanting to see how their work would turn out. I never tried the experiment with the colorful light since the fiasco of the one torch, so I thought it was high time I saw if the white light really did occur.

The white bunny

9 years

When I was nine years old, I remember feeling as if I was on top of the world and as if I was the centre of the world and the whole world was there just for me. I remember it as a magical time, when everything just fell into place and fitted around me perfectly and where I just glided along and through time in the most graceful and fluid way imaginable. The reason for this perfection of course, was that the whole of that year I existed in my own little world -or huge as it felt at the time- and I carried that world around my everyday business with such a natural conviction, that the world had no choice but to conspire and cast itself around my person.

That year I was given my grandfather's old radio, which I cherished and was glued to from late afternoon after school, till late at night. I had the great gift of being able to play whole songs in my mind, almost perfectly and was able to listen to them on demand, whenever I wanted, on the way to school, or before sleeping, just as if I had a walkman of my own. That ability gave me the sense of being in a movie of my own, as I could switch a song on when I was sat on the bus and looking out and that would give the whole view outside a completely new meaning. The most magical thing was, that very often just as I was playing back in my mind a song I really liked, I would turn on the radio and there it would be, playing at the exact same point as it did in my head.

People seemed to appear as if by magic, just when I needed them, the phone would ring and my friend would be at the other end just as I was thinking of her, the weather moulded itself around the weekends perfectly and I seemed to get what I wanted without even having to ask for it. One day my Grandmother and I went for an evening stroll like we often did, and we came across the most perfect little packet with a velvety bow, immaculately placed in the centre of the pavement when no one was to be seen around. We picked it up and walked slowly around holding it in plain view, but when we did not come across anyone who seemed to recognise it, we opened it, and there was inside it, wrapped in the most delicate and fragrant paper, a colourful candle in perfect condition, in the shape of a doggy, so beautiful and so lovely that we placed it in the cabinet with the tea set and wine glasses where it stayed till today.

The pick of that year came during the summer holidays, when my mother took my Grandmother and I to our two week break on an island, as she always did. That summer we were going to a far away, remote island on the East of the Dodecanese and the boat trip was an overnight one. We normally could not afford a cabin, so we spent most of the journey on deck and then we spent the night at the public "deck class" saloon inside the boat, sat on armchairs drilled to the floor around coffee tables. I remember so vividly that year on the boat, every little detail of the whole boat is engraved in my memory. I spent most of the afternoon sat on the upper deck, on the third horizontal line of the railing, with my legs dangling above the wide sea, using the vertical railing as a guard to stop me from falling over and the top, wide wooden banister as a support and a pillow. I watched out at sea and took in all the textures of the waves and foaming picks, mistaking them for dolphins and waved at the fishing boats which waved and horned back at me. The wind stuck on my long blond hair and gave it a taste of the sea and my fingers acquired a salty, crusty layer on them. The songs played in my head and the time passed as never before and I did not realise when sunset came. I faintly remember my mother telling me repeatedly to be careful and not to lean too much from the railing and finally to get off it. I watched the sunset at the tail of the boat, the white frothy, flat line left by the engine, leading straight to a red burning sun. The dolphins were now following the boat on for real from the South, the younger somersaulting ahead of the adults. The tourists lit up cigarettes and soon the sky darkened and stars became visible.

And then I felt a tap on my right shoulder and I heard a squeak, and when I turned around, there was my best friend from school. I could not believe my eyes and my luck and we both rushed to our parents to tell them of the good news and of how we were going to play together on the boat for a while. My friend and I, were both part of the gymnastics team of my neighbourhood at the time and although I was forced to stop due to my height a little while later, she was destined to become the National champion at running middle distances. She was a very petite, short and thin girl, with the most unbelievable strength and stamina wound up inside her. We took to exploring the whole boat. We started at the bottom and went through all the mazed corridors and cabins. We found all toilets, crew compartments, visited the helm and talked to the captain. Then we worked our way through the restaurants and shops and even slid through to the 1st class compounds. We crossed and zigzagged through the saloon doors, so that we found ourselves on the port side deck one minute and on the starboard side the next. We counted all life boats and safety rings visible and then we reached the upper deck.

By that time it was pitch dark and windy and the metal floor of the boat outside had become slippery with a layer of salty sea spray. With the songs playing in my head (and I assumed at the time in her head also), we took to dancing and spinning around and sliding on the salty floor, moving in unison or pulling and propelling each other with our hands, jumping over oblivious lovers in sleeping bags and skipping and hopping on the metal stairs. We found a way to circle the upper deck without stopping our dancing once, sliding down banisters and swaying each other high up in the air, and out of breath as we were, we heard amongst our giggling and our beating hearts people clapping and cheering. I assume that must be how actors and music stars feel with their audience, because we got so high on it, we circled around the deck twice more, my friend tumbling and pirouetting as she went and me feeling like I was flying, as the wind took my light body up and brought it down metres ahead with each jump. I felt weightless and one with the wind, like a spinning pod, blown above the wide sea, the boat sliding away below my feet, the music loud and clear in my head. The magic of it was indescribable and I remember my sky blue flannel sweater soaked in salty sweat and our shiny skin gleaming with complete happiness.

The next thing I remember was lying on a hard surface and feeling very cold and uncomfortable. Slowly as I came around from sleep, I could hear my name being called from a far away place and with a God-like, echoing voice. The darkness was faintly dispersed as I opened my eyes and it took me a few seconds to orientate myself and realise that I had fallen asleep on the upper deck on a wooden bench in an alcove. The megaphone was calling my name, a very untypical thing for a boat to do, and in my sleepy state I could not comprehend why that was. I found my way to reception, when I realised the time was three in the morning on the big brass clock and they had been looking for me. My friend was nowhere to be seen, I was later told she was grounded, but my mother was there, with an ashen face. She rushed to me and I opened my arms to embrace her and reassure her, when I got the one and only slap I ever received from her across the face and fell backwards on the wet, filthy patterned boat carpet. They had all thought I had fallen off the ship apparently and had wasted hours searching for me. With a taste of the years to come, I was dragged to a cabin we were charitably given by the crew, where I once again slept into oblivion.

But despite this setback, being nine years old still remains for me a most magical time and even today at times I am able to still play back whole songs in my mind, albeit only the very songs I heard in that year. Aretousa has a very strong mind about which songs and what music she wants to hear each day, and tries to put the CDs in the machine herself, recognising them by their covers. Occasionally she gets stuck on a particular song, just like my Grandmother did, and requests and insists that it replays again and again. I use trickery and bribery to nudge her onto something else, but not before she has a very good dance and gets it out of her system.

Music: Muadikime, by Bonga on the Angola 72 album