It's so hard to write about my best memories of Rydings, because there are so many - it's the best school in the world, with the best people in the world, so every day produces things that you want to remember forever! So this is just a small selection of things that happened in each of the years I was at Rydings.
September 1996 to August 1997
I started at Rydings after 9 years teaching maths and music at Wardle High School.
I had a really mixed timetable that included lots of PE (we went out for lots of walks!) and also English, PSE and science. And a bit of maths. And a tiny bit of RE. We didn't do IT in those days - I persuaded them to put it on the timetable a few years later! Also I remember that I had no support in any of my lessons except for 10 minutes on a Friday afternoon (remember that, Mrs Lord?) There are a lot more teaching assistants these days!
I was the tutor for Class 8 (year 11). We used to eat our dinner in the food technology room because there wasn't room in the hall for everyone!
Rydings won the "Investors In People" award because of how well it treats its staff and students.
There was a general election, which Tony Blair won, so we had a Labour government for the first time in ages. I remember explaining all this to the year 10 and 11 students.
I started the school recycling as soon as I arrived. It was during this year that someone from Acre Recycling came in to talk to us for the first time.
I joined the Rydings governing body - they'd been asking for a teacher to go on it for months, and I couldn't because they met on a Tuesday and I had a choir practice. But then I left that choir, so I was free to go to the governors' meetings.
I went on Mastermind in February, and it was on TV in July. Didn't win though!
I arranged to trip to Alton Towers for National Science Week. Yes, we did do some work while we were there!
There was a comet in the sky (Hale-Bopp) and I spent quite a bit of time telling people about it in assemblies.
I took some students to the Buddhist centre near Todmorden, where we learned to meditate.
We didn't have the internet at school yet, so I took some students to my house to show them how it worked.
In July my friend Nigel brought his guitar to Rydings for the first time, and we had the first of many concerts. (The Pleiades were formed this year too, and our first ever concert was put on to raise money for Rydings.)
I went on the camping trip with Mr A. Hall and Mr Owen and a group of students. Had a great time, especially in the cave!
September 1997 to August 1998
In October we had the first football week, when players from Rochdale FC came into school.
We had a staff training course at Skylight Circus, where I rode a unicycle and walked on stilts and learned to juggle (I wasn't very good!)
I went on a course about Spiritual Development and came back very inspired.
I took Class 5 (year 8) Christmas shopping in Manchester for the first time. We also went to an exhibition at the Science Museum, which showed us what it might be like to be blind. It was the darkest place any of us had been to!
In February I was on TV again, with Esther Rantzen!
We went to see the Hallé Orchestra, and we did a project afterwards, on the Firebird. The performance was fabulous, and I particularly remember Matthew Wagenblatt as the monster, with bright green hair!
I went to Atlanta in May, and visited an American school. Their students exchanged emails with Rydings students afterwards.
It was the World Cup in France, and we had our first World Cup Fantasy League.
September 1998 to August 1999
The Secondary Department Christmas Show this year was the first one based on a theme - it was all about Angels (I'd had this idea in August, when I went to the Greenbelt music festival). I particularly remember Johnathan Simpson singing the song - not a dry eye in the house! And we had some students playing backing harmonies on recorders. Not easy, but they did brilliantly.
That was also the first Christmas that we had carol singers from the Hallé Choir visiting school.
Red Nose Day this year was based on a Zoombini theme. Mr S. Hall dressed up as the pizza-loving troll!
I took a group of students to visit a local mosque, where Tahir's dad showed us round and answered all our questions.
Mr S. Hall and I spent a few days learning about the National Numeracy Strategy. It's after that that we put number lines up in all the classrooms!
In the summer we had a proper rock concert - the loudest noise every heard at Rydings (yes, louder than Kyle and Naveed both shouting at once!) Some friends of mine called "Inside Lydia" (previously known as "The Nukes"), featuring the fabulous Oli on guitar, came and played for us. Some of the younger students had to go out because it was so loud! The staff were paricularly impressed with their version of "Freebird".
The two big events of the summer of 1999 were The Phantom Menace (Star Wars Episode 1 - the first new Star Wars film in many years), and the total solar eclipse. I went down to Cornwall to see it. Mr Owen went to a slightly different part of Cornwall, and he's teased me ever since because it was cloudy where I was but not where he was, so he saw it and I didn't!
September 1999 to August 2000
This was the year I started sailing - I did a course in October (my birthday present to myself). It was a few years before I carried on (I didn't sail again till 2004!)
The annual staff residential (when we all go to a hotel to learn stuff) was all about Numeracy, and Mr S. Hall and I taught everyone how to count in Klingon. Mr Hall *dressed* as a Klingon, including a scary mask. Some people still have nightmares about him shouting at them!
The Secondary Department Christmas Show this year was "Austin Powers Saves Christmas (A Tragedy)". Peter Armitage was Austin Powers, Danielle Santo was Mother Christmas, and the show also included the Battle of Hastings, the Nativity, Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic, and the murder (by gangsters) of the Teletubbies!
In March 2000 our new ICT room (the Mac one) was finally ready for action.
There were all sorts of events across the country for the Millennium, and the BBC organised loads of live music for the occasion. Our part of this was "Glastonbury@Rydings" (25th May 2000), which was a fantastic all-day-long music festival. We had a marching brass band from Wardle High, a folk group, a jazz group from Chetham's School of Music, a classical mini-orchestra and some opera singers, and a pop group, finishing with Bohemian Rhapsody (Oli played the guitar solo).
September 2000 to August 2001
This was the year that lots of us sent our names into space! We helped NAS by polishing a mirror that went up on the Starshine satellite. The satellite also carried a CD with the names (and signatures) of everyone who worked on it.
The Secondary Department Christmas Show this year was an instrumental one - we had some traditional Christmas carols and some Christmas songs, plus a blues song that Year 11 wrote themselves. We had students playing solos on glockenspiels and electronic keyboards and even guitars!
Red Nose Day this year was the one when Mr Owen invented the Rydings version of Quidditch!
In July we were very privileged to have a free private concert at school by Andrew Nicholson, principal flute player of the Hallé Orchestra. (He's since moved to London to play for the RPO.)
September 2001 to August 2002
The highlight of this year for me (and, in fact, my whole time at Rydings) was the Harry Potter Show, in December 2001. Originally we were going to do this a year earlier with the whole school, but it got delayed and then the primary department decided to do something else, so we ended up doing the whole story of the first Harry Potter book in an hour. The idea came about because I had three people in my class - Sean Oldham, David Birch and Natalie Mamwell - who really reminded me of Harry, Ron and Hermione! We made up the script as we went along (we started practising at Easter, at lunchtimes). There was a printed script in the end, but most of it was words that people had learned from memory beforehand. Lots of people kept telling me that Sean would chicken out at the last minute, because he'd always refused to be in Christmas shows before - but he didn't, and he was great! In fact, everyone was great. I still have all the photos on my wall at home!
This was also the year that we sang on a song that went to number 1 in the charts - we recorded the chorus of "Have You Ever?" for S Club 7 (this was the Children in Need song).
It was Mr Jazwinski's 50th birthday in October, and there were loads of celebrations. I remember doing two different copies of the newspaper so that he didn't see the birthday edition too early!
There's a World Book Day every year, but this was the year that I dressed up as Miss Trunchbull and Sarah Ward dressed up as Matilda!
It was the World Cup this year, and since it was in Japan, most of the games were very early in the morning (our time), so there were a couple of memorable occasions when loads of people came into school at 8 a.m. to watch the matches together in the hall.
It was also the Rydings Jubilee - 25 years since the school opened. There was a big photo taken, and everyone got a colour laminated copy, but I wasn't on it because I was off school for three weeks with a sore throat!
September 2002 to August 2003
The Secondary Department Christmas Show this year was all-singing - the theme was Showtunes. We had the Seven Dwarves (singing "Heigh Ho"), and the Sound of Music ("So Long, Farewell", with lots of soloists including Suzannah as the little girl who sings the last line), and Joseph (Hayley sang "Close Every Door" and John-Paul sang "Any Dream Will Do"), and lots of others - but the one everyone remembers is Mr Wood singing "If I Were A Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof.
This was the year when Mr Wood got really poorly, and as a result I ended up going on the French trip in his place. It was sad that he couldn't go, but we had a great time. Well, except for when Jason Jones demonstrated his projectile vomiting skills on the ferry!
Red Nose Day featured new and improved Quidditch, and also a Quake tournament in the IT room. (This was not the only Quake tournament we had over the years, but I think it was the first one.)
June was very memorable to me because a boy from my class (James) ran away from home, and after the police had been searching for him for hours, I found him, in Manchester city centre of all places, when I wasn't even looking for him and didn't know he was missing!
September 2003 to August 2004
This year was most memorable for a very sad reason, which is that Mr Wood died on 8th December 2003. We had a lovely memorial service at school, and there was a lovely funeral (attended by more people than I've ever seen at a funeral), to which I brought some friends to sing the last movement of Fauré's Requiem.
The Secondary Department Christmas Show was back to being an epic extravaganza, and since the previous two years had concentrated on acting and then singing, this time I was determined to have lots of dancing. So we did Lord of the Dance Rings - I hope we didn't spoil the story for anyone, because we did all three stories in an hour, a few days before the final film came out! There were all sorts of highlights, but they included: Anthony Tkacz's scene-stealing performance as Gollum; Robert Reilly as Frodo, being the perfect leading actor and holding the whole show together; Asim's death scene (so dramatic I think he died twice just for extra applause!); Matthew Kidger's extreme heroism as Aragorn; the headbanging orcs (this was the year 11 girls - Corrie, Lauren, Hayley and Sam - all orcs should be like them!)... and the whole cast standing in a line doing the Hot Stuff dance :-)
We had two fabulous assemblies for the Oscars (when everyone dressed up in posh outfits and lots of awards were voted on and presented) and the Grand National (including several races, with a jockey from each class and Mr Owen running the betting).
This was also the year that I spent hours and hours doing extra maths with Sean Oldham, who was doing the Higher Tier maths GCSE. He didn't quite do well enough to pass the exam in the end, but you wouldn't believe how much work he did that year!
September 2004 to August 2005
I felt really old this year, because it was my 40th birthday in October, and I got lots of lovely cards and presents from people at school.
This was the first year that we didn't have primary and secondary departments, so the Christmas Show involved the whole school, and we did King Arthur. The main reason for this was that Calum Oldham had built a career out of playing wizards, and he'd been the Wizard of Oz, and Voldemort, and Gandalf... so the only one left was Merlin, and we had to do that before Calum left! Also Anthony was desperate to be a dragon, so we had to make sure we put one in the story... Suzannah was a wonderfully evil Morgan le Fay, and Asim was King Arthur. Shahzad did brilliantly - he'd never had a proper part in a show before - as the young King Arthur, Callum died very dramatically (as one of the knights) after eating a poisoned apple, Matthew Kidger was a brilliantly swashbuckling Sir Lancelot, with Danny Hay as his heroic squire Percival, and Jamie was a very nasty Mordred. But the highlight for me was at the start. There's a famous scene in which lots of knights try to pull Excalibur out of the stone, but no-one can do it except Arthur. Well, this worked fine in rehearsal, but on the day, the backstage people sent a load of knights onstage who shouldn't have been in that scene, and lots of them decided to prove that they had no trouble pulling a sword out of a stone! (The prompters kept whispering "Put it back... put it back....")
In June I had a day off school to go down to Portsmouth for the start of the Trafalgar celebrations. I had a fabulous time and took loads of photos, and I'd promised to tell everyone about it in assembly when I got back, but unfortunately there was never time. (You know how busy it gets at the end of the summer term!)
In August I spent a few days in Glasgow for the World Science Fiction Convention. This is where I got all the dragon T-shirts that people kept asking me about for the next year!
September 2005 to August 2006
This was to be my last year at Rydings, but I didn't know that at the start of the year. (I only started looking for a new job after Christmas.) It was made all the nicer by me having the Best Class Ever (Andrew, Claire, Kashif, Daniel, Cheryl, Dominic, Kosru, Shawar, Shane and Sarah). Some of my strongest memories of Rydings will be of time spent with them - sorting out huge mounds of recycling; reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix every day (and being interrupted every time! It's a long book and it took us all year to read it, but we finished it in the end); the "perfect day" that we spent sailing at Hollingworth Lake; watching Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean 2.
And of course there are individual memories of my class too: Kashif checking the weather several times a day; Shane giggling at German words; Shawar with his clipboard, collecting the news; Sarah saying "I'm a bit confused!" and dancing to "Big Spender"; Andrew and Dominic following me round everywhere ; Cheryl breaking the whiteboard pen; Kosru singing "underneath the mango tree!" and calling everyone an "old granny"; Claire's pink and orange writing; Daniel asking questions and then immediately saying "no, that's daft!"
21st October 2005 was of course the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, and we had a big assembly to celebrate.
The Christmas Show was Mr Humbug, starring the fabulous Danny Hay, who had more lines to learn than everyone else put together, but knew them all. We finished the day by getting ourselves into the Guinness Book of Records while singing "Lean On Me" at the same time as hundreds of thousands of other people round the country. But my two best memories of the day are the forged note Danny brought me saying he was too poorly to act (that made me laugh for days!) and Naveed's trousers falling down when he stood up to be Father Christmas at the end :-)
Then, of course, in June and July we had the World Cup, with all sorts of contests, including the Fantasy League and the daily predictions contest, plus lots of heartache... Even Mrs Friel was a football fan by the end of it!
And finally, in July 2006, I left Rydings. This involved several weeks of clearing out my classroom and having meetings with people about how to do all the stuff I do. (Actually I haven't finished that yet - I still need to email a few people!) And on the last day I got loads of cards and presents, and lots of people cried (me most of all!) But the thing that made my day perfect was the "Irreplaceable" backdrop that Laura and some of the 3AT students had put up in the hall. It must have taken ages, but it was a lovely surprise, and I liked it so much that I asked Laura to take it down and give me the letters! I'll be putting them up on my wall at home - probably next to the Harry Potter Show pictures :-)
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