I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole the other evening. This happens rather more often than I care to admit, but this particular one took me somewhere I wasn’t expecting: back more than twenty-five years, into a succession of school halls.
The culprit was James B Partridge. If you haven’t encountered him, he is the music teacher who has built a huge following by getting people singing the songs many of us remember from school assemblies. Not clever arrangements or achingly fashionable reinterpretations, but songs sung together, enthusiastically and without embarrassment.
Within a few minutes, I wasn’t really watching YouTube any more. I could almost smell the school hall.
For a number of years, school assemblies were a fairly regular part of my working life. I would arrive carrying whatever props, notes and enthusiasm I had decided were necessary that morning, usually to find anything from a hundred to perhaps three hundred children sitting cross-legged on the floor, teachers strategically positioned around the edges and a piano lurking somewhere near the wall. Depending on the school, there might be a lectern, a projector that worked only after considerable negotiation, and the unmistakable sense that the assembled pupils had seen quite enough visiting speakers for one lifetime.
And then, very often, they sang.
Watching James brought back just how powerful that could be. A hall full of individual children — the confident ones, the shy ones, the child who desperately wanted to be noticed and the one praying not to be — suddenly became one sound. Some sang beautifully. Some sang loudly. Some moved their mouths in the hope that nobody would notice that no recognisable note was emerging. But they were doing something together.
I had forgotten quite how much I loved it.
Of course, my memories of school assemblies aren’t entirely rose-tinted. Anyone who has regularly stood in front of a hundred or two children at nine o’clock in the morning knows that they can be a brutally effective audience. Adults will generally sit politely through something that isn’t working. Children have a remarkable ability to communicate, without actually saying anything, that you lost them about four minutes ago.
I learned a great deal in those halls. Keep it simple. Tell stories. Never assume that because something matters to you it automatically matters to the people listening. Make them laugh if you can. Don’t talk for too long. And, above all, treat young people as people rather than as an audience waiting to be improved.
I suspect some of those lessons have stayed with me through every speech, conference and meeting I have addressed since.
But it was the singing that James’s videos brought flooding back. Songs I hadn’t consciously thought about for decades were apparently still sitting somewhere in my brain, waiting for somebody to play the opening bars. There is something wonderfully democratic about communal singing. You don’t have to be the best singer. You don’t need an audition. Nobody is checking your CV. For a few minutes, you simply lend your voice to everybody else’s.
Perhaps that is why James B Partridge has struck such a chord with so many people. His videos are funny and joyful, but there is something else going on too. They remind us of a shared experience that many of us didn’t realise we missed until somebody gave it back to us.
And they reminded me of a younger version of myself: walking into another unfamiliar school hall, wondering whether I could persuade the children in front of me to listen, laugh, think and perhaps leave knowing something they hadn’t known when they came in.
More than twenty-five years later, I can remember surprisingly few of the words I actually said.
But, thanks to James and a slightly accidental evening on YouTube, I can hear those school halls singing again.
And I rather like that.
