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No Name tags required

Driv­ing famil­iar streets of Adelaide on Sat­urday; the names and the faces on build­ings have changed — yet the roads still head in the same dir­ec­tions. Names are tags, that some­times attempt to label, but are gen­er­ally used to rep­res­ent “things”, but they are not who we are nor indic­ate dir­ec­tions we choose in life.

At my first school reunion, name tags were man­dat­ory even as we recog­nised faces, phys­ical expres­sions and pos­tures, voices and group­ings. Old school nick names that once soun­ded edgy were now embar­ras­ing and dif­fi­cult to explain to non-old scholar part­ners — and the girls who chose to change their maiden names to unknown sur­names have only changed in name; not dra­mat­ic­ally in personality.

A reunion of this nature is unique life exper­i­ence. Not one to be missed. It is sur­pris­ing that it is rarely explored by art; and where nos­tal­gia is them­atic, it seems com­ical rather than cathartic.

It was dif­fi­cult to tell: was Kevin Richard­son, the cur­rent Head­mas­ter of Immanuel Col­lege, jok­ing when he said he “had checked around” on the class of 1985? I am sure the uncovered opin­ions of our group would have been mixed. The pride of this school, and any private school, is it facil­it­ies. These are para­mount in attract­ing a steady stream of rev­enue — and they express the edu­ca­tional will of the teach­ing com­munity. Kevin, com­ing from a tech­no­logy back­ground in teach­ing; seems to have swung Immanuel down the road of mod­ern teach­ing tech­niques — a les­son my son’s techno-phobic school could learn.

In the tour of the school grounds, ably spruiked by Kevin with doors unlocked by the fam­ous non-mirrored sunglassed Mr Dawes; one of the few mem­bers of admin­is­tra­tion staff we recog­nised with some mixed fond­ness; we all real­ised that the scale of the oper­a­tion has changed. As has the method of deliv­ery of classes from our day. Old school: White­boards were the mod-device in 1985. New school: 1024×768 LCD pro­ject­ors. Chalk dust is as ancient as slate boards and wooden hinged desks. The num­ber of voca­tional classes, and seem­ingly focus, out weighs the pure aca­demic classes.

Our class of 1985 was sand­wiched between the swot-heavy classes of 1983/4 and the act­ive and engaged class of 1986. Our year was the class that exper­i­mented with the applic­a­tion of the Pareto prin­ciple as it came to high school edu­ca­tion. For 80% of the class, 20% of the effort was applied to school­work. The other 80% of the time was spent in other activ­it­ies which ulti­mately had a greater pos­it­ive out­come on who they became.

The attend­ence rate dir­ectly reflec­ted the class Pareto prin­ciple. Roughly 80% of the class turned up. For a minor­ity, it was the first time they were drink­ing alco­hol on school grounds in the shadow of the former board­ing houses. Those who were not there were remembered in words and stor­ies. Clas­sic events, bus­tups, inad­vert­ent animal sac­ri­fice and pair­ings rean­im­ated per­son­al­it­ies. Many stor­ies, left unsaid and untouched, remain in the col­lect­ive experiences.

“So what have you been up to?”, when first asked, is a fright­en­ing ques­tion. Stu­pidly and strangely, I had not pre­pared a PR talk track and 15 second elev­ator pitch to intel­li­gently answer this ques­tion; to achieve any formal goals of com­par­ison. Mum­bling some words; attempt­ing not to be a bloke and focus only on the work and provide an ele­ment of fam­ily col­our; yet know­ing that this aspect provides the shapes that explains who you have evolved into.

Twenty years is a per­fect inter­val to recon­nect with old school acquaint­ances. There has been more “after school life” that out­weighs the ack­ward­ness of of the teen­ager that lives inside us all. Fam­ily, exper­i­ences, rela­tion­ships, travel and raw matur­ity provides an abil­ity to shroud the embar­rass­ment with intruiging small talk to fill 6–7 hours.

Yes, Immanuel is the school that Lleyton Hewitt atten­ded; the sheer num­ber of ten­nis courts is prob­ably the core reason he chose the school. Yes, this class sprouted a Miss Aus­tralia. res­taur­anteurs, respec­ted trades­men, veget­able based pro­tein man­u­fac­tur­ers, stand­ard grey-haired business-types, two PhDs and a bevy of ded­ic­ated moth­ers of lar­gish broods. Suc­cess, if gauged only by an abil­ity for self-support and an abil­ity to not be a bur­den on oth­ers — has been kind to this class.

Accord­ing to Dawkin’s, “The Selfish Gene”, the mean­ing of life is to re-spawn more life and per­petu­ate DNA. There­fore, the topic par­ent­hood was usu­ally an imme­di­ate ques­tion to assist in gen­er­at­ing con­ver­sa­tion. Many had braved three chil­dren; oth­ers speak of stay­ing at home with their chil­dren, and work­ing “0.8″ weeks. Adelaide, in com­par­ison to Sydney, is the per­fect loc­a­tion for detun­ing from a pure career lad­der of a eco­nom­ic­ally ful­filling yet soul drain­ing lifestyle.

Put­ting it sci­en­tific­ally, the desire to repro­duce, part­ner and per­petu­ate DNA is a driver close to the sur­face of all teen­agers. Another unspoken activ­ity at reunions is the eval­uta­tion of our teen­age crushes/hormones/pairings to determ­ine if our men­tal wir­ing had chosen an appro­pri­ate poten­tial mate. A few had made very appro­pri­ate choices of part­ners early. A sur­pris­ing few were single.

Many of the class have star­ted to spawn their own future stu­dents. There is a sur­pris­ingly large num­ber of the group who have chosen to live in the Immanuel side of town, and send their chil­dren to the school. There is some busi­ness plan­ner at the Immanuel that must model these fig­ures with an eye to future rev­enue from old scholar par­ents. As a par­ent, it’s dif­fi­cult enough to con­verse with your child’s teach­ers, let alone in send your chil­dren to a school you atten­ded in your dis­tant youth.

Another meas­ure­ment of suc­cess is liv­ing up to the spark of poten­tial first shown at school. I have always wondered if teach­ers can fore­tell the poten­tial of the stu­dents in their class; and live in won­der of their res­ults. Not enough teach­ers from our time arrived to ask this ques­tion and test the hypothesis.

Mr Volk, or should I say “Noel”, popped over to say hello. His first ques­tion is a ques­tion that will echo for some time: so are you a journ­al­ist or in IT? There was an air of inferi­or­ity on “IT”, or at least I wasn’t liv­ing up to a pre­vi­ously unforseen poten­tial. Per­son­ally, I never viewed doing the school’s magazine as a journ­al­istic job; nor as it as a path to future career suc­cess. Eng­lish wasn’t a sub­ject I felt pas­sion­ately about to com­plete in Year 12/Matric, but it was a small moment of pride see­ing people read­ing a 1985 Echo that con­tains your fin­ger­prints. I sort of fell into the magazine job in an vain-glorious effort towards self-promotion. Every­one else on the team did the hard yards. That is why IT is the per­fect home for me; stand­ing on the shoulders of giants.

The age from 12 to 17 is dif­fi­cult for all. Apart from the obvi­ous phys­ical changes, our world­view emerges yet it seems the fun­da­mental nature of people is there to see. Look at a 16/17 year old, and you will see 80% of their future self. Yes, there are many exper­i­ences and more edu­ca­tion to come — but the adult they are to become is just there. There are more than just shad­ows and echoes of their school self in the adults I met.

This class reunion, for me, was more than a mech­an­ism for meas­ur­ing our per­sonal life choices against our peers — it was a good cath­artic mech­an­ism for extin­guish­ing regret. Rather than dwell­ing on the past, it per­mits us to refind old friends and let the inter­ven­ing years of dis­con­nect fall away. These are clas­sic pure friends that are untain­ted by the mud of a work­ing rela­tion­ship and the shared age group of our col­lect­ive children.

If any­thing was to be learnt from this weekend’s exper­i­ence, is that I will become a bet­ter par­ent of a teen­ager — and see the future poten­tial in the sparks of the next few years; the mir­ror of oth­ers and the memor­ies of life blurred by time has been cleared a little — and I am able to lay a col­lec­tion of per­sonal mne­nomic demons to rest.