What a lesson . . .

I loved that Susan Boyle video clip on YouTube. I’m showing it to my classes – if they promise not to tell anyone that I’ve used the int­ernet and an interactive whiteboard in a lesson. I have an image to protect.

What a lesson. The video clip is from Britain’s Got Talent programme in which ordinary Brits dance, blow up hot water bottles, pull cars with their ears and sing and let the judges decide whether they’re talented – or not. The audience gets to join in by applauding or jeering.

I’m sure they’d sneer and jeer and boo if a teacher was on stage juggling dry white board markers, a blown OHP bulb, 25 damp smelly yawning rowdy kids, a mark book and a national curriculum document – but it’s not for them to judge and that’s not what this is about.

When Susan Boyle walked on stage she looked a little bit agricultural: her hair a bit frazzled, her dress a bit frumpy and rather lacking in grace and poise and dignity. When the English audience heard her Scottish accent they sneered and some even jeered.

She said her dream was to be a professional singer and surely most of the audience thought ‘dream on sister’. When she said she wanted to sing like Elaine Paige more than a few eyebrows raised at her audacity. Her name’s Susan, which isn’t as elegant or exotic as Elaine, or Hayley or Charlotte or Kiri.

And then Susan Boyle sang ‘I dreamed a dream’ from Les Miserables. Her English audience were just as ill-mannered as before but this time they were cheering and clapping; shocked by what they were hearing.

Susan Boyle did as she said she would before she walked onto the stage – she’d said she would ‘rock the audience’. She rocked their prejudice and their ignorance and their preconceptions. I have music learning difficulties so I have no idea if she has talent or not. The judges were gob-smacked.

They’d looked at her and listened to her and decided she was common and out of her league and a waster and a dreamer and not up to their high standards. They’d pre-judged her in the same way the English military pre-judged the New Zealanders and Australians at Gallipoli.

Her story – unmarried and “never even been kissed”, church volunteer, stayed at home with her cat and caring for her aging mother, learning disabled at school, currently unemployed…this is a story made for our lessons on pre-judging and stereotyping and the value of never giving up on a dream and being kind to your mother.

This is a very good way to start the term.

— Peter Giddens