“Don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology, don’t know much about science book, don’t know much about the French I took.” Even those of you who are unfamiliar with the works of Sam Cooke or the Levis adverts of the 1980s will probably be guessing that this is not an original Handscombe line. In case you missed it first time and you want to spot the tell-tale signs, here it is again: “Don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology, don’t know much about science book, don’t know much about the French I took.” Not Handscombe but a singer called Sam Cooke. For one thing, much as I love the source poetry and recognise the challenges of finding a rhyme for “French”, I’m not happy with “science book” – especially following on from biology. Is biology not a science in this categorisation? Does it have its own book? We really should be told before engaging with Mr Cooke’s romantic struggles.
Sam Cooke was an American singer-songwriter from the 1950s and 60s. He has been called the King of Soul for his distinctive vocals, pioneering songwriting and contribution to the genre and its role in popular music. He is said to have inspired Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder among others, and if you don’t know much about their music then boy do I have a playlist for you. He was born in 1931 in Clarksdale Mississippi. If we were still in Resilience for a Better Tomorrow then this would be an assembly about the Deep South in the middle decades of the 20thcentury. We would learn about the Great Migration that took cotton labourers from the fields of Mississippi to the streets of Chicago, about the multi-cultural mixture of immigrant merchants, about the 1951 gunpoint rape of two black women and the subsequent acquittal of their assailants, and maybe about Sam Cooke’s death in a motel shooting that the courts ruled to be self-defence. This, though, is not that assembly.
Instead, I’m returning to the list of things that Sam Cooke doesn’t know much about, confessing to you that I have a similarly long list, and expecting to convince you that so do you. Sam Cooke doesn’t claim to be an A-student, he’s very realistic about the deficiencies of his knowledge, but he’s working on it – he’s trying to be an A-student. We might decry his motivation – he says that maybe by being an A-student, baby, he can win love – but we can’t fault his effort. So, a story that starts with me not knowing very much and where that realisation took me.
A few years ago we made headlines because of an assembly in which I invited students to address me as Mr Handscombe, a thin story, you might think, but which, together with the Taylor Swift quotes I’d scattered across the piece was enough to have the world’s papers describing me as the wokest headmaster in all London Town, which is a title that I happily embrace but which challenged me to raise the cultural standards of my next assembly – we’re inclusive round here, highbrow as well as pop. For reasons lost to history, I wanted to talk about violins and decided to start with some Shakespeare. Now, I don’t know much about Shakespeare and I certainly couldn’t have told you where violins appear in his plays and so I reached for the online concordance.
A concordance is a marvellous thing – a reference work that cross-checks all the appearances of a given word in a body of work. You just pop “violin” into the search box and with apparently infinite speed it tells you that Shakespeare never uses the word. Disappointing, but I did find out that one of his plays references a viol, a similar, predecessor instrument and so I ran with that. I’d not come across this particular play, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, before – not terribly surprising as it’s fairly obscure and isn’t even in the first big collection of Shakespeare plays, known as the First Folio. I read a brief precis of the story and was struck by how amazingly mad it was – I ended up having so much to say about the first half of Act 1 Scene 1, that I didn’t get into the rest of the story. Despite the assembly, I didn't know much about Pericles.
Pericles re-entered my life this time last year when I was delivering a CP on Shakespeare plays: having realised that I didn’t know much about them I decided to learn some more and over eight weeks we conducted a whistlestop tour of all 38 canonical plays plus a handful of extras. Those of us in those classes can now say at least one interesting thing about each play. In one of these sessions we swished through the remarkable Pericles and I was able to add to my delight in Act 1 Scene 1 the brilliant moment in Act 4 Scene 1 when the heroine of the piece, Marina, is rescued by pirates. As fans of the Princess Bride, we all know that murdered by pirates is good – rescued by pirates is surely even better.
At that point I still had not read Pericles, but over this February half term I remedied that omission, although I still don’t know much about Shakespeare’s plays: I've now read five out of 38. One of the charms of having read the play, on top of being able to set the two episodes I’ve mentioned in a context they very much deserve, is that the edition I read (it’s the one from the Wigoder Library) has footnotes that are as extensive as the text itself and not only translate the archaic vocabulary but also point out the challenges of working out what Shakespeare actually wrote. Because Pericles isn’t in the First Folio, there isn’t a canonical version and editors have to make best guesses. There’s one line where they say “we know there’s a word missing here, but nobody has been able to make a convincing suggestion so we’ve left it blank”. They don’t invite the reader to write something into the space but they almost do (not that I would, with a library book, of course).
So now I know a bit more about Pericles and you are up to date with my Shakespearean adventures so I’m going to return to Sam Cooke and get to the point – he, like Socrates, recognises the limitations of human knowledge and so should we. No matter how much we think we know about History, Biology, Shakespeare, Pirates, or, indeed, Science Book, this is dwarfed by the huge quantity of things we don’t know. What, then, are we to do? Well, we know that scholarship is the search for knowledge that is both extensive and exact, and that learning is amazing so I guess we go in search of knowledge and spend time learning. But, learning what, and when?
If you’re in year 13 then you are getting to the stage where study for your A-levels is all-consuming, where you need to spend your time gaining the knowledge and understanding you need, testing yourself, marking your answers and then working out what happened with the missing marks. My daughters say that if they came home from a test saying they’d got 92% I’d be asking what happened to the missing 8 marks. They’re wrong, of course, I’d say well done first and then ask about the missing 8 marks – the point is that if you think that way there’s a chance your next paper will be 8 marks better than this one and that wherever you are now there’s enough time that if you improve by 8 marks each time then you’ll certainly be an A student baby by the time the summer comes. Just doing another paper, another essay, won’t help – you need to learn 8 marks worth of content you didn’t know before you go back for another self-testing cycle. In between all that, I hope you’re able fit in some learning simply because it’s amazing but I understand you need to prioritise.
If you’re in year 12 then you need to be taking opportunities for learning beyond just completing your homework or revising what you’ve already learned. Just as the chance coincidence of a musical instrument and the comments of the New York Post have eventually led to my current Pericles fascination, so you need to let the serendipity of your intellectual perambulations lead you into rabbit holes of learning. This is how you get beyond not knowing much, this is how you become an A student baby, this is how you get yourself ready for university, for job interviews, for persuading people to put you on their team. To have a fruitfully serendipitous intellectual perambulation, you need to cultivate serendipity – develop a lifestyle in which interesting people say interesting things to you, and lead you to make a note to follow it up. You need, in short, to be more lab. Lab, you see, is not just an hour on a Tuesday afternoon, it is a lifestyle that embraces serendipity and sparks curiosity – it’s not just Tuesday afternoon, but it is exemplified by Tuesday afternoon and the choices you make then. Every week we have an interesting person saying interesting things, each of which could lead you into a life-changing fascination, or, less ambitiously, lead you to know a bit more about history, biology or the like, and, at a minimum, will give you an hour of exposure to ideas you would otherwise not have. My challenge to you is what else are you doing with this time – almost anything else will benefit you less in the long term, so every week your baseline should be going to the lab lecture and if you do something else you should have a clear reason why what you’re doing is both more valuable and more timely. Most of your other choices, even delightfully serendipitous ones, can be done any time; you can only listen to the speaker when they are talking. Year 13s, this is also an easy opportunity to put some of that amazing learning back into your week – let your perambulations take you into the hall for that hour and then return to the quest for the missing 8 marks.
Sam Cooke didn’t know much about History, but I’m leaving you with the thoughts of one he inspired, Otis Redding, also called King of Soul – it seems that there can be more than one king. In one of his last recordings before dying in a plane crash, he sang “Looks like nothing’s gonna change, everything still remains the same, I can’t do what ten people tell me to do so I guess I’ll remain the same.” You don’t have to remain the same, you don’t have to be content with how little you know, you have the power to change your trajectory, to prepare for an interesting and well-paid life. You don’t even need to do what ten people tell you to do, just one, me, and if you’ve been lost by my intellectual perambulations this morning then this is the moment to concentrate because this is the advice, the instruction, the take-home message. Go to those Tuesday lectures. Court serendipity. Be more lab.
Footnotes
1. One Sam Cooke fact I failed to squeeze into the assembly was that Sam Cooke is his stage name - he was born Sam Cook.
2. The two Clarksdale women mentioned were Leola Tates and Erline Mills.
3. Sam Cooke's death is indeed controversial, but there is little evidence to suggest that it didn't happen according to the official explanation.
4. The assembly that got picked up by the world's media was No More Sir, No More Miss; the one following was Pericles and the Violin.
5. The delight in The Princess Bride that I take to be universal is to be found in several assemblies, most notably Life, Death, Love.
6. My approach to high-brow scholarship via a Shakespeare concordance was indulged in Glee and in Small and Scorching which also contains the idea of following up on serendipity.
7. Otis Redding is known not just for The Dock of the Bay but also Respect which, in its Aretha Franklin cover version forms the basis of Taking out the TCP
8. The idea of testing and then looking to what is next is what we call Response and is explored further in Don't Stop