School Life follows a year in the lives of two inspirational teachers in the only primary-age boarding school in Ireland. Headfort School with its Eighteenth-century buildings, secret doors, and magical woodlands is a revered institution that sees students attend from all over the world, with staff made up of former students, and educators who have stayed there for decades, lending the school their characteristic idiosyncrasies. Married teaching duo John and Amanda Leyden have sat at the front of Headfort's classrooms for 46 years. Shaping thousands of minds for nearly half a century, now the unthinkable looms: what would retirement mean? Who will keep them young if they leave? For John, rock music is just another subject alongside Math, English, Scripture, and Latin, all of which are taught in a collaborative and often hilarious fashion, employing the Socratic method in a way that ensures a continuous learning experience for the teachers as well as their students. Tucked away in a cellar that's home to the school's two rock bands, John nurtures a special kind of youth revolution that teaches responsibility and independence in equal measure as he tells the kids they can play whatever they like in their unique sanctuary space.
|
