Post by Charley Brighty on Mar 17, 2007 12:10:02 GMT -5
“Doom da-da-di-da-di doom da-da-di-da-di…” Charley hummed a catchy little tune he’d heard the previous day to himself as he riffled through a pile of sheet music.
There had been one point in his life where sheet music had scared the bejesus out of him, all those notes and all those lines and symbols and Italian words, his mind had been a befuddled mess as it was without adding all that to it. But in the blink of an eye his problems had gone and he was now perfectly at home with them. It had been just a little less than two years ago when his little problem had cleared itself up and gone away. Apparently he’d grown out of it which had once again amazed the doctors who had been checking up on him every so often. And with a new found ability to concentrate and not be so distracted by the other things inside his mind he had passed his teaching exams with flying colours and ended up at Lockwood Academy teaching the one subject he loved; music. Music had been something that was soothing to him, relaxing and gave him something to do that wasn’t going to confuse him or cause some inner turmoil in his mind. You see when he was six he’d been in a car accident, and as things tend to do when one loses their father to such a thing something had sort of snapped inside his head and he’d ended up with fragmented emotions that to him were like separate identities. It had been a problem for fifteen years that he had learned to live with, it didn’t really affect who he was in any way he just struggled to make decisions and had no definitive personality traits you could pin down because they kept changing. But he’d grown out of it, or got over whatever problems were causing it anyway and he was living a life without having to debate which colour socks to wear in the morning with himself. He’d found himself and he’d found himself in music.
His head was now a very quiet place indeed and after fifteen years it had taken a while to adjust back to normality, but he had done it and it seemed that the personality trait that had stuck was his ineffable sense of humour and energy for life in general. Charley had always been quite a bright and colourful character, but perhaps more so seeing as he was so happy in his job and he enjoyed passing on what he knew to others and seeing what they could make of what he gave them. As a teacher he was very much down on the level of his students, preferring to be able to share a laugh with them than have them groaning about coming to his lessons. He knew that if he could make what he taught fun and yet still manage to teach people something important, even if they didn’t realise it, then his job was successful. He seemed to be doing quite well. Which was more than could be said for the school, it seemed a little…tense at times since they had merged the Lockwood and St.Logans together to form Springbrook, there were a couple of students who vied against each other to be the top of the class and Charley found he was having to be careful with how he made sure some of the students were treated. It wasn’t in his bones to shout and get angry with people, plus he liked to think of his students as young adults rather than children that needed bawling at, it was probably due to the fact that he really wasn’t that far from their age anyway that made him teach in such a fashion and in comparison to a few other teachers he was pretty young. It probably didn’t help that his natural mental age was probably about seven and he had the sort of sense of humour that teenagers could appreciate. To say he enjoyed his job was an understatement. He loved it.
“Where the heck has that gone?” he said out loud to himself and swivelled around on his chair as he sifted through the desk drawers searching out a pile of papers that he was supposed to be marking.
Charley was the sort of teacher who lived in chaos, he had papers all over his desk, notes scrawled from lessons held weeks ago still smudged on the white board and there were always stray musical instruments that seemed to move through his classroom like some portal into another dimension filled with musical instruments of the strangest that could be found. The desks were never in the same place twice in his classroom and quite often they had keyboards piled up on them or extensions leads, or hi-hats or other miscellaneous items that would have to be moved to make way for the students. Not that they sat down very much in Charley’s lessons, he wasn’t the music theory teacher, he was the guy who taught hands on the instruments, he relied on Jayden Kinkade to teach them the really important stuff behind the playing, whereas he himself taught them how to apply all that knowledge to the actual playing of instruments. But every so often it involved them handing in some paper work…trouble was he’d just gone and lost it. He sat at his desk with an expression of thoughtful befuddlement and sat back on the chair with his lips pursed, arms folded, fingers drumming as he retraced what he’d done previously with them. Despite the fact that he lived amongst the chaos of his classroom, the chaos of band practice schedules for the year, who was attending what, plans for the next musical and his own rubbish he had lying around Charley himself fitted into all of this perfectly, it was just a sort of extension of his personality. He was chaotic and energetic, he taught with enthusiasm and genuinely believed in his students and music, he hoped that it was contagious and everyone got a little something out of it. Charley himself was a tall, lanky young man with a mop of curly dark brown hair, a pair of big friendly matching brown eyes and a warm well-mannered smile. Today he was wearing a pair of white trousers with some old sneakers and white shirt complete with a pair of black braces that he currently didn’t actually have on but were hanging loosely down by his legs. He was as the locals here called him, eccentric. His sense of style was a mashed up riot of colours that wouldn’t look right on anyone else but suited him down to the ground, he quite often looked as though he had just rolled out of bed, rolled into whatever was lying on the floor and then appeared in class. He also had a tendency to wear braces and topped with his slightly off-kilter accent that couldn’t be pinned down to any particular place and he got called everything from quirky to downright weird. Every school had one teacher who was a bit…different. Charley was Springbrooks.
He spent a further fifteen minutes going through each and every desk drawer and moved four keyboards to get to another filing cabinet before starting to feel that light butterfly feeling of having lost something you know you really need to have. He couldn’t for the life of him think where he would have put the small pile of papers and wasn’t willing to just admit defeat and give everyone a guessed grade, they were here somewhere. A further half hour later and Charley was totally distracted by the fact that two students were trying to move an upright piano down the corridor outside his room and the wheel had just fallen off it. Dinner hours were always chaotic, for a start there was never enough time in an hour to get everything done you wanted to get done and even if there was, there were countless distractions because other people were trying to get stuff done at the same time. For a start Charley’s classroom was nearly always open, allowing students to come in and use the instruments whenever they wished too, his wasn’t the only one to have musical instruments in it but it usually had some of the more interesting ones in there, and also for anyone who had any questions or just generally wanted to come in and talk. Eventually after a minor panic that he was going to have to admit defeat though, which wouldn’t help the fact that he was aware some of the teachers probably thought him too young and immature to do this job, he found the papers hiding beneath a chunky old music book of the entire opera; Madame Butterfly. With a sigh of relief he placed a long fingered hand onto the papers and picked up a pen with his right hand, sitting back he began to arduous task of marking twenty or so papers before last period, hopefully nobody would distract him from this task but he rarely ever got through an entire lunch period without someone or other popping by to say hello or to ask something.
It wasn’t that he minded either which was really bad, Charley was a chatty individual who could hold a conversation going by himself for ages, and not being that far from his students age he found it easy to just talk to them. But that was possibly because he’d grown up in England and the education system there was so completely different to over here. He certainly had no trouble hanging around in the hallways chatting with students whereas it seemed many of the other teachers tended to stick to themselves and had a very definite line between teacher and student but having said that if some bratty little fourteen year old was going to try and get smart with him he had a tone of voice that he reserved fro trouble makers. There were always some and for all he often find those to be the ones with an appealing character to them he despised them because they ruined everything for the others in his class who were quieter and more interested in getting some work done. That being said, there weren’t many of those sorts at all and Charley was happy to be on an almost first name term with his students, he didn’t like the idea of being Mr Brighty, or Professor Brighty because it made him feel remarkably old and from his own feeling calling someone that made you feel less equal to them and therefore harder to talk to them. Most students seemed to have automatically called him Mr Charley which suited him just fine as it was a nice balance between a relaxed classroom and discipline which meant he wasn’t going to have a bunch of fourteen to eighteen year olds walking all over him.
((Sucky post. They’ll get better, they certainly can’t get worse, lol!
*Nose scrunch*
Anyway, it’s ooopen to anyone who wants to just drop by and have a chat with Charley etc.
*Pats him*))
There had been one point in his life where sheet music had scared the bejesus out of him, all those notes and all those lines and symbols and Italian words, his mind had been a befuddled mess as it was without adding all that to it. But in the blink of an eye his problems had gone and he was now perfectly at home with them. It had been just a little less than two years ago when his little problem had cleared itself up and gone away. Apparently he’d grown out of it which had once again amazed the doctors who had been checking up on him every so often. And with a new found ability to concentrate and not be so distracted by the other things inside his mind he had passed his teaching exams with flying colours and ended up at Lockwood Academy teaching the one subject he loved; music. Music had been something that was soothing to him, relaxing and gave him something to do that wasn’t going to confuse him or cause some inner turmoil in his mind. You see when he was six he’d been in a car accident, and as things tend to do when one loses their father to such a thing something had sort of snapped inside his head and he’d ended up with fragmented emotions that to him were like separate identities. It had been a problem for fifteen years that he had learned to live with, it didn’t really affect who he was in any way he just struggled to make decisions and had no definitive personality traits you could pin down because they kept changing. But he’d grown out of it, or got over whatever problems were causing it anyway and he was living a life without having to debate which colour socks to wear in the morning with himself. He’d found himself and he’d found himself in music.
His head was now a very quiet place indeed and after fifteen years it had taken a while to adjust back to normality, but he had done it and it seemed that the personality trait that had stuck was his ineffable sense of humour and energy for life in general. Charley had always been quite a bright and colourful character, but perhaps more so seeing as he was so happy in his job and he enjoyed passing on what he knew to others and seeing what they could make of what he gave them. As a teacher he was very much down on the level of his students, preferring to be able to share a laugh with them than have them groaning about coming to his lessons. He knew that if he could make what he taught fun and yet still manage to teach people something important, even if they didn’t realise it, then his job was successful. He seemed to be doing quite well. Which was more than could be said for the school, it seemed a little…tense at times since they had merged the Lockwood and St.Logans together to form Springbrook, there were a couple of students who vied against each other to be the top of the class and Charley found he was having to be careful with how he made sure some of the students were treated. It wasn’t in his bones to shout and get angry with people, plus he liked to think of his students as young adults rather than children that needed bawling at, it was probably due to the fact that he really wasn’t that far from their age anyway that made him teach in such a fashion and in comparison to a few other teachers he was pretty young. It probably didn’t help that his natural mental age was probably about seven and he had the sort of sense of humour that teenagers could appreciate. To say he enjoyed his job was an understatement. He loved it.
“Where the heck has that gone?” he said out loud to himself and swivelled around on his chair as he sifted through the desk drawers searching out a pile of papers that he was supposed to be marking.
Charley was the sort of teacher who lived in chaos, he had papers all over his desk, notes scrawled from lessons held weeks ago still smudged on the white board and there were always stray musical instruments that seemed to move through his classroom like some portal into another dimension filled with musical instruments of the strangest that could be found. The desks were never in the same place twice in his classroom and quite often they had keyboards piled up on them or extensions leads, or hi-hats or other miscellaneous items that would have to be moved to make way for the students. Not that they sat down very much in Charley’s lessons, he wasn’t the music theory teacher, he was the guy who taught hands on the instruments, he relied on Jayden Kinkade to teach them the really important stuff behind the playing, whereas he himself taught them how to apply all that knowledge to the actual playing of instruments. But every so often it involved them handing in some paper work…trouble was he’d just gone and lost it. He sat at his desk with an expression of thoughtful befuddlement and sat back on the chair with his lips pursed, arms folded, fingers drumming as he retraced what he’d done previously with them. Despite the fact that he lived amongst the chaos of his classroom, the chaos of band practice schedules for the year, who was attending what, plans for the next musical and his own rubbish he had lying around Charley himself fitted into all of this perfectly, it was just a sort of extension of his personality. He was chaotic and energetic, he taught with enthusiasm and genuinely believed in his students and music, he hoped that it was contagious and everyone got a little something out of it. Charley himself was a tall, lanky young man with a mop of curly dark brown hair, a pair of big friendly matching brown eyes and a warm well-mannered smile. Today he was wearing a pair of white trousers with some old sneakers and white shirt complete with a pair of black braces that he currently didn’t actually have on but were hanging loosely down by his legs. He was as the locals here called him, eccentric. His sense of style was a mashed up riot of colours that wouldn’t look right on anyone else but suited him down to the ground, he quite often looked as though he had just rolled out of bed, rolled into whatever was lying on the floor and then appeared in class. He also had a tendency to wear braces and topped with his slightly off-kilter accent that couldn’t be pinned down to any particular place and he got called everything from quirky to downright weird. Every school had one teacher who was a bit…different. Charley was Springbrooks.
He spent a further fifteen minutes going through each and every desk drawer and moved four keyboards to get to another filing cabinet before starting to feel that light butterfly feeling of having lost something you know you really need to have. He couldn’t for the life of him think where he would have put the small pile of papers and wasn’t willing to just admit defeat and give everyone a guessed grade, they were here somewhere. A further half hour later and Charley was totally distracted by the fact that two students were trying to move an upright piano down the corridor outside his room and the wheel had just fallen off it. Dinner hours were always chaotic, for a start there was never enough time in an hour to get everything done you wanted to get done and even if there was, there were countless distractions because other people were trying to get stuff done at the same time. For a start Charley’s classroom was nearly always open, allowing students to come in and use the instruments whenever they wished too, his wasn’t the only one to have musical instruments in it but it usually had some of the more interesting ones in there, and also for anyone who had any questions or just generally wanted to come in and talk. Eventually after a minor panic that he was going to have to admit defeat though, which wouldn’t help the fact that he was aware some of the teachers probably thought him too young and immature to do this job, he found the papers hiding beneath a chunky old music book of the entire opera; Madame Butterfly. With a sigh of relief he placed a long fingered hand onto the papers and picked up a pen with his right hand, sitting back he began to arduous task of marking twenty or so papers before last period, hopefully nobody would distract him from this task but he rarely ever got through an entire lunch period without someone or other popping by to say hello or to ask something.
It wasn’t that he minded either which was really bad, Charley was a chatty individual who could hold a conversation going by himself for ages, and not being that far from his students age he found it easy to just talk to them. But that was possibly because he’d grown up in England and the education system there was so completely different to over here. He certainly had no trouble hanging around in the hallways chatting with students whereas it seemed many of the other teachers tended to stick to themselves and had a very definite line between teacher and student but having said that if some bratty little fourteen year old was going to try and get smart with him he had a tone of voice that he reserved fro trouble makers. There were always some and for all he often find those to be the ones with an appealing character to them he despised them because they ruined everything for the others in his class who were quieter and more interested in getting some work done. That being said, there weren’t many of those sorts at all and Charley was happy to be on an almost first name term with his students, he didn’t like the idea of being Mr Brighty, or Professor Brighty because it made him feel remarkably old and from his own feeling calling someone that made you feel less equal to them and therefore harder to talk to them. Most students seemed to have automatically called him Mr Charley which suited him just fine as it was a nice balance between a relaxed classroom and discipline which meant he wasn’t going to have a bunch of fourteen to eighteen year olds walking all over him.
((Sucky post. They’ll get better, they certainly can’t get worse, lol!
*Nose scrunch*
Anyway, it’s ooopen to anyone who wants to just drop by and have a chat with Charley etc.
*Pats him*))
