Hot on the heels of tirades about senior students not clearing up their own mess and harangues about the same age group spreading coffee like rumours, comes a moment of calm explanation. I was asked recently to write up the new prototype grade nine Civic Responsibility Scheme (‘CRS’ - see last blog of year 09/10) for ELMLE’s (European League of Middle Level Education) Tips for Teachers ( target audience is Middle School teachers) for their forthcoming conference in Amsterdam.
The questions to be addressed were:
1. What essential understandings do you think students should have about service in their schools?
2. Could you briefly explain the idea behind the programme of allocating students to spend time with teachers who are on duty?
3. What changes do you hope to see with this programme?
4. Could you write 5 simple steps for middle school teachers to get a programme like this up and running in their school?
The answers follow but I prefaced them with the statement that our beginning is not ambitious; I don’t want it to be seen as a bigger social intervention training than it currently is (mighty oaks from mini acorns…). Here’s the acorn, then:
1. The selection of role-plays I wrote, from both Deanish and from the teaching of English experience, outline the specific situations I hope the grade can begin to help obviate by developing their understanding of the possible causes and issues within these specific areas. The role plays were:
1. Kid A is told by kid B, ‘You can’t sit there. It’s for our friend. Go away!’ (This was to be modelled in English 9 classes to kick off CRS, being relevant to the theme of The Outsider for our study of William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’)
2. A kid is sitting on the stairs up to the Science floor eating lunch all alone and this is not the first time.
3. Two kids claim another boy took their football and then kicked it into the car park and won’t go and get it back and they can’t find it anyway.
4. A bunch of grade 6 boys say that they had the goal on the Red Top first and then another bunch of grade 9s told them to go away and when they didn’t they kicked their ball away (probably into the car park again.)
5. The Librarians report that some grade 8 students, boys and girls both, are being ridiculously noisy and chasing around in the library.
6. A girl is crying because she can’t find her bag and it has her PE things and all her books and her phone in it.
7. Some girls say there is absolutely nowhere for them to play without being run over by shouting boys.
8. A student reports that several kids are playing games on the computers in the computer lab and eating food there.
These – all real situations from the past year - were sent to all secondary staff in a document explaining the scheme.
2. The role-plays and the discussions that prefaced and that follow in the Personal Development Programme prepare the students actively to patrol with a member of the secondary teaching staff in and around the Main Building. It is hoped that they will now be more able to notice isolation or other forms of unhappiness and have ideas and possible strategies ready to discuss or even implement. They will also be able to exchange views with the teacher more effectively as they have some prior knowledge. Thus they can also ask pertinent questions about what the adults do and think, and why.
3. The change being sought is a less isolated and egocentric set of behaviours by the senior grade at lunchtime as they recognise conflict and take active steps to combat it even if it is to ask an adult for help, rather than belong to that large and dangerous group of called onlookers who by their presence and numbers imply support for that behaviour.
4. step 1 define the problems
step 2 discuss with tutors/PDP coordinator to get them on board and get their ideas
step 3 write role plays; the first - must be a common experience witnessed or suffered or understood by the grade - directed by the English teachers as a demo. Tutors/PDP team role play the others.
step 4 student feedback/discussion
step 5 set up the duty tours with the staff and students with a tutor/PDP debrief before the second tour and then an evaluation.
And parents, you can join in, too, with a vital role here and get a conversation going about their experience and thoughts, and indeed the whole issue, around the dinner table at home. I would be delighted to read your further comments and suggestions. Just go to nickydarlington.blogspot.com and click on the reply button.
Wednesday, 3 November 2010
The Dean’s ‘Number 50 Jubilee’ Blog – ‘Kaffipause!’
23, 24, 25, 26, 27…31, 32…“STOP! KEEP TO THE SIDE! CAN’T YOU SEE THE COFFEE? YOU’RE STEPPING IN IT! WHY DOESN’T ANYONE AT LEAST PICK UP THE CUP?” Pretty loud this, odd noises crescendo con brio growing to fortississimo grandioso. As I remarked in my last blog.
The maths was me counting the senior students walking up and down the stairs at lesson change through a dripping lake of cafe latte that was making its own independent way down the narrow stair case in the DSC. It was still warm. It was a full plastic cup, well had been a full one. Now it was on its side, a bit stepped on, with the lid on the next step down.
Of course, they looked at me as if I was from a parallel and frankly far less developed universe. Get off the stairs they did not. Walk to one side they tried but as there were four classes of our gigantic teenagers on the deck above out of sight (out of earshot I do not entirely think) they kept turning the corner and pushed from behind came down into the mess.
A teacher had discovered this event a minute or two earlier and grumbled, rightly, about the lack of clearing up responsibility by the coffee dropper. So I went to see. I was actually rather shocked (see a previous blog at the end of last year on nickydarlington.blogspot.com, again about senior kids busy not clearing up their lunch mess as it was not their job, and again my proto-apoplectic reaction.) Trouble is that they are so big they eat huge amounts all the time and leave tons of evidence in the form of crumbs and spillage, packets and boxes, cups and cartons, plastic forks and teaspoons, tissues and wrappers everywhere!
Ok, there’s some hyperbole there – maybe – a bit. But you want to know what happened back at the stairs. Well…
I pushed through hundreds of vast adolescents carrying jumbo sized bags full of bulky packs of teenage stuff, to get to the bathroom and grab handfuls of paper towels. These I dumped in the brown lake, having pushed through the ever increasing throngs of big kids anxious to get up or down that staircase in order, obviously, to help it in its endeavour to get an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for the greatest surface area AND number of stairs ever covered by a one half litre of cafe latte. (They have such stupid entries now.) The paper disappeared sadly into the thick gluey beige morass and Mr Schlehuber and Mr Malcolm gallantly and energetically helped contain the spillage that started to look like a recent ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Bits of us got stepped on but eventually paper vs. coffee was won 1:0 by us, the paper wielders. The combined skills of the coffee, the staircase and the kids lost. We teachers, battered, exhausted, bespotted and bespeckled in Migro’s finest, moved on in triumph to our next class.
But I do have a serious point. We teachers felt very depressed for a moment after this incident because of the reaction of the students – nonchalance. And only one student stopped and offered to help. It was a girl. The Co-Chairperson of the Student Council. Bravo to her, I say!
nickydarlington.blogspot.com
The maths was me counting the senior students walking up and down the stairs at lesson change through a dripping lake of cafe latte that was making its own independent way down the narrow stair case in the DSC. It was still warm. It was a full plastic cup, well had been a full one. Now it was on its side, a bit stepped on, with the lid on the next step down.
Of course, they looked at me as if I was from a parallel and frankly far less developed universe. Get off the stairs they did not. Walk to one side they tried but as there were four classes of our gigantic teenagers on the deck above out of sight (out of earshot I do not entirely think) they kept turning the corner and pushed from behind came down into the mess.
A teacher had discovered this event a minute or two earlier and grumbled, rightly, about the lack of clearing up responsibility by the coffee dropper. So I went to see. I was actually rather shocked (see a previous blog at the end of last year on nickydarlington.blogspot.com, again about senior kids busy not clearing up their lunch mess as it was not their job, and again my proto-apoplectic reaction.) Trouble is that they are so big they eat huge amounts all the time and leave tons of evidence in the form of crumbs and spillage, packets and boxes, cups and cartons, plastic forks and teaspoons, tissues and wrappers everywhere!
Ok, there’s some hyperbole there – maybe – a bit. But you want to know what happened back at the stairs. Well…
I pushed through hundreds of vast adolescents carrying jumbo sized bags full of bulky packs of teenage stuff, to get to the bathroom and grab handfuls of paper towels. These I dumped in the brown lake, having pushed through the ever increasing throngs of big kids anxious to get up or down that staircase in order, obviously, to help it in its endeavour to get an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for the greatest surface area AND number of stairs ever covered by a one half litre of cafe latte. (They have such stupid entries now.) The paper disappeared sadly into the thick gluey beige morass and Mr Schlehuber and Mr Malcolm gallantly and energetically helped contain the spillage that started to look like a recent ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Bits of us got stepped on but eventually paper vs. coffee was won 1:0 by us, the paper wielders. The combined skills of the coffee, the staircase and the kids lost. We teachers, battered, exhausted, bespotted and bespeckled in Migro’s finest, moved on in triumph to our next class.
But I do have a serious point. We teachers felt very depressed for a moment after this incident because of the reaction of the students – nonchalance. And only one student stopped and offered to help. It was a girl. The Co-Chairperson of the Student Council. Bravo to her, I say!
nickydarlington.blogspot.com
Wednesday, 15 September 2010
Birth of a Blog (by email)
(Me) ‘I need to write a Blog for the next Newsletter but I haven’t been provoked into purple prose by student decisions this week. So over the weekend, maybe something about gardening as a metaphor for tending children.’
(Editor of Newsletter) ‘There’s a great extended metaphor in ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Othello’ about gardening. Doesn’t Iago tell us if we plant weeds, we will reap weeds or something? It will be a great topic for a Blog.’
‘Yes and Ophelia witters on in her scary, pastoral way about, ‘There's rosemary, that's for remembrance…and there is pansies, that's for thoughts.’
‘Drippy Ophelia goes to DEFCON 5 when Hamlet has a little joke with her about a nunnery. The fact that she gets upset with loser Hamlet enough to drown herself tells you something about her inherent lack of nous.’
‘IMHO, some Shakespearean heroines just have no sense of humour – they go all feminist on you just when you are deciding on important male things like whether to kill your Royal Scottish Banker, burn the Turkish fleet, perform invasive surgery to reclaim 0.453592 kilos of flesh or divide your kingdom into three Kantons. But as Shakespeare could only write about flowers, toads and weeds and not, say, about garden strimmers going melt down I might have a small advantage.’
‘Contemplating strimmers is far more exciting than contemplating life and death.’
Ok, I’ll start with something like…
Cutting the grass was a job I had put off because it was so hot, around 34 degrees C at about 5.30 in the afternoon and it now seemed almost knee high to my English ‘lawn-as-liquid-emerald’ eye. I started to strim an area somehow full of ‘noisome weeds…things rank and gross in nature’ (but here young Will was, I’m afraid, talking about Denmark) ‘…which without profit suck The soil's fertility from wholesome flowers.’ Until, that is, I noticed that the strimmer I had bought last year to suck the noisome weeds from our soil's fertility, on the advice of a professional I might add, had become totally ineffective. It was getting meltdown hot. It was starting to make odd noises. And it was issuing acrid, dark grey smoke. Like me last week in class. Let me explain…
An assessed assignment was due in to me at the start of class after a two week lead-in, and so, again, the owners of a chorus of waving hands (and some not bothering to do that traditional classroom semiotic cue) told me, with authoritative finality, that they couldn’t hand it in ‘because the school printer has jammed’/ ‘our printer ran out of ink’/ ‘the school’s email system bounces my mail’/ ‘the disc got wiped’/ ‘I can’t access my account’/ ‘there wasn’t a free computer at break time’/ ‘my computer crashed’/ ‘the document’s been corrupted’/ ‘it’s here on my memory stick’/ it's the browser'/'there’s a fault with Windows 7’ - all ending with ‘ok?’ stated not really as a question but a fact to be accepted, ok?
‘No!’ I replied. ‘It is not ‘ok’! It is definitely not ‘OK’! NOT!!! ... OK?!?? The IB, the ICS, I, the known universe, simply do not accept lame IT malfunction statements as excuses for failing to…etc.’’ Pretty loud this, odd noises crescendo con brio growing to fortississimo grandioso. And then melt down with acrid, dark grey smoke …’
(Editor of Newsletter) ‘There’s a great extended metaphor in ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Othello’ about gardening. Doesn’t Iago tell us if we plant weeds, we will reap weeds or something? It will be a great topic for a Blog.’
‘Yes and Ophelia witters on in her scary, pastoral way about, ‘There's rosemary, that's for remembrance…and there is pansies, that's for thoughts.’
‘Drippy Ophelia goes to DEFCON 5 when Hamlet has a little joke with her about a nunnery. The fact that she gets upset with loser Hamlet enough to drown herself tells you something about her inherent lack of nous.’
‘IMHO, some Shakespearean heroines just have no sense of humour – they go all feminist on you just when you are deciding on important male things like whether to kill your Royal Scottish Banker, burn the Turkish fleet, perform invasive surgery to reclaim 0.453592 kilos of flesh or divide your kingdom into three Kantons. But as Shakespeare could only write about flowers, toads and weeds and not, say, about garden strimmers going melt down I might have a small advantage.’
‘Contemplating strimmers is far more exciting than contemplating life and death.’
Ok, I’ll start with something like…
Cutting the grass was a job I had put off because it was so hot, around 34 degrees C at about 5.30 in the afternoon and it now seemed almost knee high to my English ‘lawn-as-liquid-emerald’ eye. I started to strim an area somehow full of ‘noisome weeds…things rank and gross in nature’ (but here young Will was, I’m afraid, talking about Denmark) ‘…which without profit suck The soil's fertility from wholesome flowers.’ Until, that is, I noticed that the strimmer I had bought last year to suck the noisome weeds from our soil's fertility, on the advice of a professional I might add, had become totally ineffective. It was getting meltdown hot. It was starting to make odd noises. And it was issuing acrid, dark grey smoke. Like me last week in class. Let me explain…
An assessed assignment was due in to me at the start of class after a two week lead-in, and so, again, the owners of a chorus of waving hands (and some not bothering to do that traditional classroom semiotic cue) told me, with authoritative finality, that they couldn’t hand it in ‘because the school printer has jammed’/ ‘our printer ran out of ink’/ ‘the school’s email system bounces my mail’/ ‘the disc got wiped’/ ‘I can’t access my account’/ ‘there wasn’t a free computer at break time’/ ‘my computer crashed’/ ‘the document’s been corrupted’/ ‘it’s here on my memory stick’/ it's the browser'/'there’s a fault with Windows 7’ - all ending with ‘ok?’ stated not really as a question but a fact to be accepted, ok?
‘No!’ I replied. ‘It is not ‘ok’! It is definitely not ‘OK’! NOT!!! ... OK?!?? The IB, the ICS, I, the known universe, simply do not accept lame IT malfunction statements as excuses for failing to…etc.’’ Pretty loud this, odd noises crescendo con brio growing to fortississimo grandioso. And then melt down with acrid, dark grey smoke …’
Number 49
Dean’s Blog Number 49.
Many of you have been generous enough to tell me you welcome the chance once a fortnight to peek through the window of ICS and see what your kids get up to during an average day, through the Dean’s Blog. You comment on the humour that the Dean seems to find when he talks to students about decisions made on a shaky basis. Was it the result of hyperbole? I was asked and the truthful answer is, No, it really happens – just as it says on the tin. But you have to listen. You have to signal very clearly, ‘I am listening with enormous interest and undivided attention and I will take what I hear very seriously indeed and reflect on it and join in a dialogue,’ even if you know the printer just destroyed your IB English A1 Standard Level criteria rubric for examination paper 1 commentary that you need to get over to a class in the DSC null comma ploetzlich as we Swiss like to say.
Do all critical nouns start with the Dean’s ‘D’?
I am constantly charmed (whilst simultaneously driven to distraction, dismay, despair, disappointment or mere disbelief – do all critical nouns start with the Dean’s ‘D’?) by a student’s confident expression of a candid point of view where a totally different take on the reality of a situation contradicts mine with something approaching the finality of a check mate. Of course they are right; it is their reality so it is their (cliché) truth. The charm almost always continues to the next stage when I introduce my reality which is the ICS’s truth, which nearly always has to take precedence as the one to be believed if a harmonious and safe society is to be enjoyed on (and off) campus. They listen wide eyed giving me the attention I gave them and neither of us is condescending nor patronising as we do this routine. They read the cues, offer the apology, look contrite, and accept their punishment like a woman (gender thing there). Of course, we do not speak of punishment, that is P.I.. Instead, it is what I call ‘a community act of restitution offering time for reflection’.
Unfeigned enthusiasm
And so they wander around the Red Top for 20 minutes at lunchtime if it isn’t pouring cats n’dogs, after eating their lunch for the supplementary energy soon to be needed, collecting the community’s litter into a large black plastic refuse bag - with an admirable, reflective, penitent and unfeigned enthusiasm.
I am pretty sure about this last point… I think.
nickydarlington.blogspot.com
Many of you have been generous enough to tell me you welcome the chance once a fortnight to peek through the window of ICS and see what your kids get up to during an average day, through the Dean’s Blog. You comment on the humour that the Dean seems to find when he talks to students about decisions made on a shaky basis. Was it the result of hyperbole? I was asked and the truthful answer is, No, it really happens – just as it says on the tin. But you have to listen. You have to signal very clearly, ‘I am listening with enormous interest and undivided attention and I will take what I hear very seriously indeed and reflect on it and join in a dialogue,’ even if you know the printer just destroyed your IB English A1 Standard Level criteria rubric for examination paper 1 commentary that you need to get over to a class in the DSC null comma ploetzlich as we Swiss like to say.
Do all critical nouns start with the Dean’s ‘D’?
I am constantly charmed (whilst simultaneously driven to distraction, dismay, despair, disappointment or mere disbelief – do all critical nouns start with the Dean’s ‘D’?) by a student’s confident expression of a candid point of view where a totally different take on the reality of a situation contradicts mine with something approaching the finality of a check mate. Of course they are right; it is their reality so it is their (cliché) truth. The charm almost always continues to the next stage when I introduce my reality which is the ICS’s truth, which nearly always has to take precedence as the one to be believed if a harmonious and safe society is to be enjoyed on (and off) campus. They listen wide eyed giving me the attention I gave them and neither of us is condescending nor patronising as we do this routine. They read the cues, offer the apology, look contrite, and accept their punishment like a woman (gender thing there). Of course, we do not speak of punishment, that is P.I.. Instead, it is what I call ‘a community act of restitution offering time for reflection’.
Unfeigned enthusiasm
And so they wander around the Red Top for 20 minutes at lunchtime if it isn’t pouring cats n’dogs, after eating their lunch for the supplementary energy soon to be needed, collecting the community’s litter into a large black plastic refuse bag - with an admirable, reflective, penitent and unfeigned enthusiasm.
I am pretty sure about this last point… I think.
nickydarlington.blogspot.com
Higgs Particles
The Dean’s Blog
Welcome back – of course. Everyone here says this but everyone also really means it. And if all the kids think twice before doing something they have not been asked to do and all parents think twice before parking and leaving their car on the drop off zone then that small part of the ICS experience I work in will be quietly successful.
Over the vacation I reflected on Deanish experiences over the past year and selected one that catches for me the fascinating flavour of much of my job. Here it is:
There are days when nothing happens. Well, things do of course happen but they don’t bear relating. Not in a Deanish sense. Nor to a large readership. They’re not funny or serious or new, or proof that history repeats itself, that the universe is somehow curved, that Higgs particles do actually exist or that those the gods wish to destroy they first drive mad or have them decide to train as teachers. Just a small, apparently random selection of not severely poor but not optimal decision making continues about the timing of arriving to school or about paying attention in class or ‘borrowing’ another’s property or about milk or computer games or using the lift or personal entertainment centres or shorts that are a little too – that sort of a thing. Quotidian.
The Dean’s best customers
It cannot be because the G12 students have gone because they are never the Dean’s best customers. Nor because G10 have gone on their PDM - well, actually, maybe a little bit as they have been known to cross my threshold occasionally. But generally there is a spirit of cooperation as students get on with their studies inside in class or with their friends outside in free time. Wait. Outside. There! That’s it! It is not cold. There is no howling wind with ‘Sturmboen’ gusting at 115kph. It is not actually snowing here at 700 metres in the summer and nor is there hail. The rain and sleet and Scotch mist (so called because after an extended period that is the only possible remedy) have moved east. And so, in the absence of meteorological obstruction, the SUN IS OUT and it is warm and the kids can play outside, at lunchtime. These things so rarely coincide. It is a treat to be celebrated. So, obviously, the whole idea of a mass inter-grade water fight becomes the thing to decide to do.
300 screaming with fun teenagers drenched to the skin
So why, you might ask if you haven’t moved on to read about the new updates to the terminology of MYP assessment procedures as a more lively option, did I not write about that? Because, you see, the kids are canny and they took my advice and, so, took the trouble to check with me if it was ok to do this before they started. I wish they hadn’t. ‘No’ is so grumpy-old-man, spoiling as it does in one’s apparent out-of-touch and even out-to-lunch way the innocent play of many, many children with the natural green elements in a safe environment. ‘Yes’, on the other hand conjures up the image of three hundred screaming with fun teenagers drenched to the skin, deliriously happy wasting said precious green element and arriving to period 6 unfit to be taught or to learn from every conceivable point of view saying triumphantly in the face of a couple of dozen disbelieving and disapproving teachers, ‘Mr. D said we could!’
The best Hollywood Federal interrogators
Boy, did I choose my words carefully…and slowly. The three boys scrutinised me from my door way like the best Hollywood Federal interrogators, hanging onto my every word. The International Diplomatic Corps could have learned a thing or two from me, though. No room for double-entendres or sub text here. No space for misinterpretation or implication. Nuance was banished and so were connotation, puns, asides and irony. Body language and facial expression needed to be locked down as even the raising of a single eyebrow could be interpreted as hinting at a wry affirmation. And so, finally, at last, by my desk clock there were only four minutes to go to the end-of-lunch-time bell and the situation had solved itself. This time.
I hope it rains tomorrow.
nickydarlington.blogspot.com
Welcome back – of course. Everyone here says this but everyone also really means it. And if all the kids think twice before doing something they have not been asked to do and all parents think twice before parking and leaving their car on the drop off zone then that small part of the ICS experience I work in will be quietly successful.
Over the vacation I reflected on Deanish experiences over the past year and selected one that catches for me the fascinating flavour of much of my job. Here it is:
There are days when nothing happens. Well, things do of course happen but they don’t bear relating. Not in a Deanish sense. Nor to a large readership. They’re not funny or serious or new, or proof that history repeats itself, that the universe is somehow curved, that Higgs particles do actually exist or that those the gods wish to destroy they first drive mad or have them decide to train as teachers. Just a small, apparently random selection of not severely poor but not optimal decision making continues about the timing of arriving to school or about paying attention in class or ‘borrowing’ another’s property or about milk or computer games or using the lift or personal entertainment centres or shorts that are a little too – that sort of a thing. Quotidian.
The Dean’s best customers
It cannot be because the G12 students have gone because they are never the Dean’s best customers. Nor because G10 have gone on their PDM - well, actually, maybe a little bit as they have been known to cross my threshold occasionally. But generally there is a spirit of cooperation as students get on with their studies inside in class or with their friends outside in free time. Wait. Outside. There! That’s it! It is not cold. There is no howling wind with ‘Sturmboen’ gusting at 115kph. It is not actually snowing here at 700 metres in the summer and nor is there hail. The rain and sleet and Scotch mist (so called because after an extended period that is the only possible remedy) have moved east. And so, in the absence of meteorological obstruction, the SUN IS OUT and it is warm and the kids can play outside, at lunchtime. These things so rarely coincide. It is a treat to be celebrated. So, obviously, the whole idea of a mass inter-grade water fight becomes the thing to decide to do.
300 screaming with fun teenagers drenched to the skin
So why, you might ask if you haven’t moved on to read about the new updates to the terminology of MYP assessment procedures as a more lively option, did I not write about that? Because, you see, the kids are canny and they took my advice and, so, took the trouble to check with me if it was ok to do this before they started. I wish they hadn’t. ‘No’ is so grumpy-old-man, spoiling as it does in one’s apparent out-of-touch and even out-to-lunch way the innocent play of many, many children with the natural green elements in a safe environment. ‘Yes’, on the other hand conjures up the image of three hundred screaming with fun teenagers drenched to the skin, deliriously happy wasting said precious green element and arriving to period 6 unfit to be taught or to learn from every conceivable point of view saying triumphantly in the face of a couple of dozen disbelieving and disapproving teachers, ‘Mr. D said we could!’
The best Hollywood Federal interrogators
Boy, did I choose my words carefully…and slowly. The three boys scrutinised me from my door way like the best Hollywood Federal interrogators, hanging onto my every word. The International Diplomatic Corps could have learned a thing or two from me, though. No room for double-entendres or sub text here. No space for misinterpretation or implication. Nuance was banished and so were connotation, puns, asides and irony. Body language and facial expression needed to be locked down as even the raising of a single eyebrow could be interpreted as hinting at a wry affirmation. And so, finally, at last, by my desk clock there were only four minutes to go to the end-of-lunch-time bell and the situation had solved itself. This time.
I hope it rains tomorrow.
nickydarlington.blogspot.com
Thursday, 10 June 2010
'Homo Economicus'
The Dean’s Blog: ‘Homo Economicus’
It was a joke. Well, they were all laughing. And even Inspector Clouseau could have worked out that they had eaten food and drunk drinks because they had left wrappers, plastic bags, little plastic forks, silver foil, cans, pet bottles, paper towels, leftovers and crumbs all over the table and on the nearby floor. As they do. Some of them. Sometimes. Too often. Ouch - that was my first deanish word of criticism, well two actually. And it was here, in the DSC, that I became deanish with members of a pretty senior grade. I had approached the noisy and good humoured group and reminded them to clear it all away before they left because no one was paid to clear up after them. I could have omitted the mildly provocative subordinate clause starting ‘because’. Maybe I would have if it had not been 3.30 pm after a particularly busy day. I should have, I thought, when they started to play that game of ‘Provoke the Teacher’ by listing, on a scale of wildly increasing irritation-potential, the adults currently employed at ICS who could now match the job description of litter-clearer-upper post that, according to me, needed filling. Hence the laughing. I won - of course - as after the laughter they cleared it up. A little reluctantly. After a seemly, dilatory pause to restore their sense of honour and their dignity. It was, after all, a kind of public climb down before a peer group audience.
Ritual and badinage
Underneath all of this ritual and badinage is, however, a serious thread and it is to do with civic duty. Or a lack of it amongst some of our students. In the past I have been told it is the cleaners’ job, or the janitors’ or the teachers’ who are on duty, in similar situations; and on the occasion when this is meant sincerely then I am shocked. It is this sense of entitlement, misguided because it is not remotely earned at such a young age, that I have in mind when I refer to civic duty or civic responsibility. It is imagined that a position is currently occupied that exempts the young holder from needing a wider view of transactions and their implications for all the personnel involved. It is another example of homo economicus (‘I have more important things to do than you do.’)
Harmony and happiness.
In a recent blog I wrote in a pastiche about the sad, frustrating situation of a child being rejected by its peers at lunchtime, another instance of a lack of civic responsibility. And one of you kindly wrote to me expressing interest and support, modestly, somewhat hesitantly suggesting a scheme designed to obviate such behaviours by involving everyone in a system to eliminate it. It was a good idea that I shared with relevant colleagues. I want to go further now with a scheme next year to help develop this sense of civic responsibility. It will involve, initially, the senior grade in the Main Building at lunchtime. After some training and some modelling they will help patrol and will intervene in unsatisfactory situations within their capability, supported by the teachers on duty, in order to bring increased student harmony and happiness.
‘Wzzup, dude?’
It’s not world peace but it will be a measure to increase empathy, a step that will enable our kids actively to improve the atmosphere for all its inhabitants.
‘Wzzup, dude? Want to talk?’
‘Yeah, you can sit down here.’
‘Let the grade 6 kids have the goal now – it’s their turn!’
‘We’ll find a teacher.’
‘Let’s go see if you left it in a classroom you were in.’
‘Don’t chase about in the library, you’re disturbing other people here.’
And so on. It is not a system of monitors as the whole grade will get involved. It’s not a system of peer counselling. It won’t be done because it gets Community Service credits or count towards Graduation. It’ll get done because it will be blindingly obvious it’s the right thing to do. And I know our/your kids will rise to the challenge magnificently, once again. And it will start with the courage, backed by adults’ support, to say, ‘Please don’t leave your lunch mess here as other IB students will want to study at this table.’ The explanation softens the ‘command’ register to one of ‘reasonable request’ to which no one who is a member of our unique ICS society can fail to respond positively.
It was a joke. Well, they were all laughing. And even Inspector Clouseau could have worked out that they had eaten food and drunk drinks because they had left wrappers, plastic bags, little plastic forks, silver foil, cans, pet bottles, paper towels, leftovers and crumbs all over the table and on the nearby floor. As they do. Some of them. Sometimes. Too often. Ouch - that was my first deanish word of criticism, well two actually. And it was here, in the DSC, that I became deanish with members of a pretty senior grade. I had approached the noisy and good humoured group and reminded them to clear it all away before they left because no one was paid to clear up after them. I could have omitted the mildly provocative subordinate clause starting ‘because’. Maybe I would have if it had not been 3.30 pm after a particularly busy day. I should have, I thought, when they started to play that game of ‘Provoke the Teacher’ by listing, on a scale of wildly increasing irritation-potential, the adults currently employed at ICS who could now match the job description of litter-clearer-upper post that, according to me, needed filling. Hence the laughing. I won - of course - as after the laughter they cleared it up. A little reluctantly. After a seemly, dilatory pause to restore their sense of honour and their dignity. It was, after all, a kind of public climb down before a peer group audience.
Ritual and badinage
Underneath all of this ritual and badinage is, however, a serious thread and it is to do with civic duty. Or a lack of it amongst some of our students. In the past I have been told it is the cleaners’ job, or the janitors’ or the teachers’ who are on duty, in similar situations; and on the occasion when this is meant sincerely then I am shocked. It is this sense of entitlement, misguided because it is not remotely earned at such a young age, that I have in mind when I refer to civic duty or civic responsibility. It is imagined that a position is currently occupied that exempts the young holder from needing a wider view of transactions and their implications for all the personnel involved. It is another example of homo economicus (‘I have more important things to do than you do.’)
Harmony and happiness.
In a recent blog I wrote in a pastiche about the sad, frustrating situation of a child being rejected by its peers at lunchtime, another instance of a lack of civic responsibility. And one of you kindly wrote to me expressing interest and support, modestly, somewhat hesitantly suggesting a scheme designed to obviate such behaviours by involving everyone in a system to eliminate it. It was a good idea that I shared with relevant colleagues. I want to go further now with a scheme next year to help develop this sense of civic responsibility. It will involve, initially, the senior grade in the Main Building at lunchtime. After some training and some modelling they will help patrol and will intervene in unsatisfactory situations within their capability, supported by the teachers on duty, in order to bring increased student harmony and happiness.
‘Wzzup, dude?’
It’s not world peace but it will be a measure to increase empathy, a step that will enable our kids actively to improve the atmosphere for all its inhabitants.
‘Wzzup, dude? Want to talk?’
‘Yeah, you can sit down here.’
‘Let the grade 6 kids have the goal now – it’s their turn!’
‘We’ll find a teacher.’
‘Let’s go see if you left it in a classroom you were in.’
‘Don’t chase about in the library, you’re disturbing other people here.’
And so on. It is not a system of monitors as the whole grade will get involved. It’s not a system of peer counselling. It won’t be done because it gets Community Service credits or count towards Graduation. It’ll get done because it will be blindingly obvious it’s the right thing to do. And I know our/your kids will rise to the challenge magnificently, once again. And it will start with the courage, backed by adults’ support, to say, ‘Please don’t leave your lunch mess here as other IB students will want to study at this table.’ The explanation softens the ‘command’ register to one of ‘reasonable request’ to which no one who is a member of our unique ICS society can fail to respond positively.
'Higgs Particles'
The Dean’s Blog – ‘Higgs Particles’
There are days when nothing happens. Well, things do of course happen but they don’t bear relating. Not in a Deanish sense. Nor to a large readership. They’re not funny or serious or new, or proof that history repeats itself or that the universe is somehow curved or that Higgs particles do actually exist or that those the gods wish to destroy they first drive mad or have them decide to train as teachers. Just a small, apparently random selection of not severely poor but not optimal decision making continues about the timing of arriving to school or about paying attention in class or ‘borrowing’ another’s property or about milk or computer games or using the lift or personal entertainment centres or shorts that are a little too – that sort of a thing. Quotidian.
The Dean’s best customers
It cannot be because the G12 students have gone because they are never the Dean’s best customers. Nor because G10 have gone on their PDM - well, actually, maybe a little bit as they have been known to cross my threshold occasionally. But generally there is a spirit of cooperation as students get on with their studies inside in class or with their friends outside in free time. Wait. Outside! There! That’s it! It is not cold. There is no howling wind with ‘Sturmboen’ gusting at 115kph. It is not actually snowing here at 700 metres in early June and nor is there hail. The rain and sleet and Scotch mist (so called because after an extended period that is the only possible remedy) have moved east. And so, in the absence of meteorological obstruction, the SUN IS OUT and it is warm and the kids can play outside, at lunchtime. These things so rarely coincide. It is a treat to be celebrated. So, obviously, the whole idea of a mass inter-grade water fight becomes the thing to decide to do.
300 screaming with fun teenagers drenched to the skin
So why, you might ask if you haven’t moved on to read about the new updates to the terminology of MYP assessment procedures as a more lively option, did I not write about that? Because, you see, the kids are canny and they took my advice and, so, took the trouble before they started to check with me if it was ok to do this. I wish they hadn’t. ‘No’ is so grumpy-old-man, spoiling as it does in one’s apparent out-of-touch and even out-to-lunch way the innocent play of many, many children with the natural green elements in a safe environment. ‘Yes’, on the other hand conjures up the image of three hundred screaming with fun teenagers drenched to the skin, deliriously happy wasting said precious green element and arriving to period 6 unfit to be taught or to learn from every conceivable point of view saying triumphantly in the face of a couple of dozen disbelieving and disapproving teachers, ‘Mr. D said we could!’
The best Hollywood Federal interrogators
Boy, did I choose my words carefully…and slowly. The three boys scrutinised me from my door way like the best Hollywood Federal interrogators, hanging onto my every word. The International Diplomatic Corps could have learned a thing or two from me, though. No room for double-entendres or sub text here. No space for misinterpretation or implication. Nuance was banished and so were connotation, puns, asides and irony. Body language and facial expression needed to be locked down as even the raising of a single eyebrow could be interpreted as hinting at a wry affirmation. And so, finally, at last, by my desk clock there were only four minutes to go to the end-of-lunch-time bell and the situation had solved itself. This time.
I hope it rains tomorrow.
nickydarlington.blogspot.com
There are days when nothing happens. Well, things do of course happen but they don’t bear relating. Not in a Deanish sense. Nor to a large readership. They’re not funny or serious or new, or proof that history repeats itself or that the universe is somehow curved or that Higgs particles do actually exist or that those the gods wish to destroy they first drive mad or have them decide to train as teachers. Just a small, apparently random selection of not severely poor but not optimal decision making continues about the timing of arriving to school or about paying attention in class or ‘borrowing’ another’s property or about milk or computer games or using the lift or personal entertainment centres or shorts that are a little too – that sort of a thing. Quotidian.
The Dean’s best customers
It cannot be because the G12 students have gone because they are never the Dean’s best customers. Nor because G10 have gone on their PDM - well, actually, maybe a little bit as they have been known to cross my threshold occasionally. But generally there is a spirit of cooperation as students get on with their studies inside in class or with their friends outside in free time. Wait. Outside! There! That’s it! It is not cold. There is no howling wind with ‘Sturmboen’ gusting at 115kph. It is not actually snowing here at 700 metres in early June and nor is there hail. The rain and sleet and Scotch mist (so called because after an extended period that is the only possible remedy) have moved east. And so, in the absence of meteorological obstruction, the SUN IS OUT and it is warm and the kids can play outside, at lunchtime. These things so rarely coincide. It is a treat to be celebrated. So, obviously, the whole idea of a mass inter-grade water fight becomes the thing to decide to do.
300 screaming with fun teenagers drenched to the skin
So why, you might ask if you haven’t moved on to read about the new updates to the terminology of MYP assessment procedures as a more lively option, did I not write about that? Because, you see, the kids are canny and they took my advice and, so, took the trouble before they started to check with me if it was ok to do this. I wish they hadn’t. ‘No’ is so grumpy-old-man, spoiling as it does in one’s apparent out-of-touch and even out-to-lunch way the innocent play of many, many children with the natural green elements in a safe environment. ‘Yes’, on the other hand conjures up the image of three hundred screaming with fun teenagers drenched to the skin, deliriously happy wasting said precious green element and arriving to period 6 unfit to be taught or to learn from every conceivable point of view saying triumphantly in the face of a couple of dozen disbelieving and disapproving teachers, ‘Mr. D said we could!’
The best Hollywood Federal interrogators
Boy, did I choose my words carefully…and slowly. The three boys scrutinised me from my door way like the best Hollywood Federal interrogators, hanging onto my every word. The International Diplomatic Corps could have learned a thing or two from me, though. No room for double-entendres or sub text here. No space for misinterpretation or implication. Nuance was banished and so were connotation, puns, asides and irony. Body language and facial expression needed to be locked down as even the raising of a single eyebrow could be interpreted as hinting at a wry affirmation. And so, finally, at last, by my desk clock there were only four minutes to go to the end-of-lunch-time bell and the situation had solved itself. This time.
I hope it rains tomorrow.
nickydarlington.blogspot.com
Thursday, 6 May 2010
Dean’s Blog: ‘Cool or sad?’
Having been amazingly immature and, in addition, startlingly nerdy as a kid, I was, of course, never considered to be cool. I distinctly remember the nearest I ever got at my prestigious and brutal English public school was that St Valentine’s Day, in grade 8 when the Head Prefect, publicly distributing the post at breakfast, handed me a huge and multicoloured envelope drenched to saturation point in a girl’s perfume that polluted the olfactory perception of everyone in a five mile radius. And I was plunged into that past when one of you talked to me about middle aged teachers being considered cool by adolescents. ‘Sad’, I said. ‘In touch,’ you said.
Sever the umbilical
The whole ‘cool’ issue is complex yet simple, important yet trivial, reassuring yet divisive, a statement of individuality in the growing child and yet provocative of a set of actions targeting conformism. It is obvious why when we consider the psychology and biology of puberty where contradiction makes sense, random is logical and the need to sever the umbilical from adult restraint so ‘I’ can express individuality hits a bunch of peer groupers in the same social environment at the same time inevitably, therefore, doing the same thing. And, it is, of course, if allowed to spread uncontrolled like a pandemic, vastly expensive for parents.
‘No!’ is amazingly effective
For cool requires without question next model consoles, iphones, ipods, nanospeakers of the latest capacity and design, trainers, jeans, bags and T shirts with the correct (and genuine - don’t even think about replicas) designer label despite their wearers apparently growing four centimetres a day. A well known electronic retailer holds spares for as little as four years now on expensive micro electronic gadgets and then advises distraught customers to throw it away and buy cheaper for the next three years or maybe it will only be two. Post adolescence, this conformism morphs into membership of correct and astronomically bad value for money clubs and bars with the correct set of oversized, overpowered and overpriced wheels in that year’s hue parked outside. But then at least they, not you, are financing. ‘No!’ is amazingly effective and one can repeat it pretty often without fatigue. Of course, you have to take some antidote against the huge guilt trip they then try to send you on, threatening that major parental nightmare of their being alone, rejected, invisible and derided. After a short time of retreat in Fortress Parents we can reach a reasonably sane compromise that is nearly always accepted when placed with finality on the table.
Budget line
A couple of years ago at ICS there was a refreshing reaction to cool by the students themselves which led them to analyse all that was currently de rigueur. They were then seen not dressed in or attached to or communicating through or carrying or walking on anything remotely fashionable. Migros’ Budget Line was in and its carrier bags replaced over styled backpacks that shout form over function designer statement. I encouraged this movement wholeheartedly and I would again. Indeed, for a while, membership of this group was cool.
Sever the umbilical
The whole ‘cool’ issue is complex yet simple, important yet trivial, reassuring yet divisive, a statement of individuality in the growing child and yet provocative of a set of actions targeting conformism. It is obvious why when we consider the psychology and biology of puberty where contradiction makes sense, random is logical and the need to sever the umbilical from adult restraint so ‘I’ can express individuality hits a bunch of peer groupers in the same social environment at the same time inevitably, therefore, doing the same thing. And, it is, of course, if allowed to spread uncontrolled like a pandemic, vastly expensive for parents.
‘No!’ is amazingly effective
For cool requires without question next model consoles, iphones, ipods, nanospeakers of the latest capacity and design, trainers, jeans, bags and T shirts with the correct (and genuine - don’t even think about replicas) designer label despite their wearers apparently growing four centimetres a day. A well known electronic retailer holds spares for as little as four years now on expensive micro electronic gadgets and then advises distraught customers to throw it away and buy cheaper for the next three years or maybe it will only be two. Post adolescence, this conformism morphs into membership of correct and astronomically bad value for money clubs and bars with the correct set of oversized, overpowered and overpriced wheels in that year’s hue parked outside. But then at least they, not you, are financing. ‘No!’ is amazingly effective and one can repeat it pretty often without fatigue. Of course, you have to take some antidote against the huge guilt trip they then try to send you on, threatening that major parental nightmare of their being alone, rejected, invisible and derided. After a short time of retreat in Fortress Parents we can reach a reasonably sane compromise that is nearly always accepted when placed with finality on the table.
Budget line
A couple of years ago at ICS there was a refreshing reaction to cool by the students themselves which led them to analyse all that was currently de rigueur. They were then seen not dressed in or attached to or communicating through or carrying or walking on anything remotely fashionable. Migros’ Budget Line was in and its carrier bags replaced over styled backpacks that shout form over function designer statement. I encouraged this movement wholeheartedly and I would again. Indeed, for a while, membership of this group was cool.
Thursday, 29 April 2010
The Dean’s Blog: Hippos and things …
I was becoming reluctantly somewhat of an expert on ‘Big 5’ poo. This was esoteric and not what I expected. The trouble was it was sun-up, say 6.15, in a piece of the Kalahari Desert in northern Botswana rampant with elephants and hippos and things but no-one had told them. So we tracked them on foot for four and a half hours getting closer quite often as the guide could tell from the shape, texture, colour and heat of the aforementioned poo we kept passing or in the case of elephants falling over. By 09.00 I could differentiate old baboon from fresh impala; by 10.30 I could locate elephants’ movements on a timetable down to half an hour just by the… well there’s no need to go into further detail.
‘Shhhhhhhh!!!’ hissed the large guide at me as I aired my views on just getting my boot and my dignity stuck into a hippo’s under swamp foot print (it must have been executing a single footed pirouette at the time to get that deep). ‘There are probably elephants behind that bush!’ he exclaimed agitatedly, ‘and they can hear a voice at a kilometre!’ That impressed me. The danger potential did not as the bush was close but small and it was obvious, again, that no one had told an elephant to go and hide behind it. The sun rose in the burnished blue sky, the steam rose from the rainy season soaked desert and disgruntlement rose in me as we plunged yet again up to mid calf in smelly water and reeds and micro frogs and bugs and underwater slimy things. Later we saw a small splodge on the horizon that we were told was either an elephant or a termite heap – through my bins I think I saw it move but I cannot swear to it so that could rule out the termite heap.
But the following day, a Wednesday, I saw hippos and elephants and giraffes respectively playing submerged submarines, frolicking flirtatiously in the shallows and laboriously folding up legs and cranking wide their stance just to get a drink, from a small and dilapidated motor boat from a distance of less than 30 meters on the Namibian side of the Chobe river. So there you go…
‘And that is a swimming black mamba, very deadly poisonous!’ the guide told us as a dead branch apparently floated by at arm’s reach of the side of the boat.
Earlier, as I hovered in an arthritic little helicopter over the two kilometres of raw power and blunt noise of the Victoria Falls, and later tumbling about in clear air turbulence, approached a grass landing strip about the length of a cricket pitch in a rusty, single-engine plane that had far more people in it than space or oxygen, I was struck by the truism of how different this all was in every conceivable way from teaching the use of the possessive apostrophe on singular collectives to grade 9 at ICS in Zumikon. The plane landed as the extended family of baboons which were lined up like Russian dolls, applauded and I wondered how much of the zillion experiences quite new to me I could relevantly bring back to the classroom. I wondered how much the 360o horizons uninterrupted by anything remotely to do with mankind, and vast, semi-dome skies unsullied by the ubiquitous vapour trails of jets that clog up European skies, would simply fill me with new ideas. I talked to Zimbabweans at the Safari Lodge on the election Saturday and again on Sunday and Monday and they told me that for the opposition ‘no news was bad news. I failed to buy a beer with a 10 million Zimbabwean dollar note. And I studied the profoundly moving Hector Pieterson Memorial in Orlando just outside Jo’burg.
And the following week I spent an intensely professional six and a half busy days on a CIS/NEASC accreditation team in an international school nearby in Gaberone and that was concentrated, relevant, eye opening professional development unavailable in any other medium anywhere. There were different ideas, different methods, a happy and polite bunch of different students with a respectful and open relationship with the teaching staff. And period 1 started at 07.05. Hundreds of international teachers all over the world acquire similar or more profound experiences every year before returning to their teaching and administration duties. And when they return to their own schools the benefit goes to the kids even if at a subliminal level, ohne Zweifel.
‘Shhhhhhhh!!!’ hissed the large guide at me as I aired my views on just getting my boot and my dignity stuck into a hippo’s under swamp foot print (it must have been executing a single footed pirouette at the time to get that deep). ‘There are probably elephants behind that bush!’ he exclaimed agitatedly, ‘and they can hear a voice at a kilometre!’ That impressed me. The danger potential did not as the bush was close but small and it was obvious, again, that no one had told an elephant to go and hide behind it. The sun rose in the burnished blue sky, the steam rose from the rainy season soaked desert and disgruntlement rose in me as we plunged yet again up to mid calf in smelly water and reeds and micro frogs and bugs and underwater slimy things. Later we saw a small splodge on the horizon that we were told was either an elephant or a termite heap – through my bins I think I saw it move but I cannot swear to it so that could rule out the termite heap.
But the following day, a Wednesday, I saw hippos and elephants and giraffes respectively playing submerged submarines, frolicking flirtatiously in the shallows and laboriously folding up legs and cranking wide their stance just to get a drink, from a small and dilapidated motor boat from a distance of less than 30 meters on the Namibian side of the Chobe river. So there you go…
‘And that is a swimming black mamba, very deadly poisonous!’ the guide told us as a dead branch apparently floated by at arm’s reach of the side of the boat.
Earlier, as I hovered in an arthritic little helicopter over the two kilometres of raw power and blunt noise of the Victoria Falls, and later tumbling about in clear air turbulence, approached a grass landing strip about the length of a cricket pitch in a rusty, single-engine plane that had far more people in it than space or oxygen, I was struck by the truism of how different this all was in every conceivable way from teaching the use of the possessive apostrophe on singular collectives to grade 9 at ICS in Zumikon. The plane landed as the extended family of baboons which were lined up like Russian dolls, applauded and I wondered how much of the zillion experiences quite new to me I could relevantly bring back to the classroom. I wondered how much the 360o horizons uninterrupted by anything remotely to do with mankind, and vast, semi-dome skies unsullied by the ubiquitous vapour trails of jets that clog up European skies, would simply fill me with new ideas. I talked to Zimbabweans at the Safari Lodge on the election Saturday and again on Sunday and Monday and they told me that for the opposition ‘no news was bad news. I failed to buy a beer with a 10 million Zimbabwean dollar note. And I studied the profoundly moving Hector Pieterson Memorial in Orlando just outside Jo’burg.
And the following week I spent an intensely professional six and a half busy days on a CIS/NEASC accreditation team in an international school nearby in Gaberone and that was concentrated, relevant, eye opening professional development unavailable in any other medium anywhere. There were different ideas, different methods, a happy and polite bunch of different students with a respectful and open relationship with the teaching staff. And period 1 started at 07.05. Hundreds of international teachers all over the world acquire similar or more profound experiences every year before returning to their teaching and administration duties. And when they return to their own schools the benefit goes to the kids even if at a subliminal level, ohne Zweifel.
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
The Dean’s Blog: ‘Warm and Sunny’.
You are probably going to think, ‘Wow! Has he got post Easter vacation blues to start off with a nineteenth century topic like this when all was warm and sunny!’ But it is actually all the fault of the warm and sunny. Warm and sunny, you see, makes kids select lighter, thinner, shorter, briefer, flimsy clothes in the early morning for the day ahead. Lighter thinner shorter briefer flimsy is fine for the lido, disco and other social treffs. But Monday to Friday when school is in session it is not so fine. We are a place of learning where many different cultures squeeze together for around seven hours a day. Learning in a classroom over five days is not always the easiest thing to stay focussed for and so we need to reduce unnecessary distractions that get in the way of equipping our kids to be innovative and influential members of society.
You and us
So your children need reminders from us and especially from you about what they think and what we think is suitable to wear on their bodies for those seven hours. And if in doubt they need to know it is what we think, you and ICS, that counts. (The good news for parents, as I observed in a previous blog, is that they get to own some clothes that you, when they wear them, are happy to be seen next to in public.) But what do we think? To be blunt, too much flesh on display is not acceptable is what we think. Any visible underwear at all is not acceptable. Short shorts and tops that do not meet the lower garment are not acceptable. Saggy baggy jeans worn without a belt that droop towards the knees are not suitable. And these concepts need firmly to be born in mind before new items of leisure wear are selected for purchase with a view to wearing them at ICS.
An opportunity to reflect
We at school reserve the right to make a judgement on sartorial suitability. The students have all been advised. If they decide to ignore our guide lines then, after a warning, they will meet with the Dean for a lunchtime detention to provide an opportunity to reflect on the matter and on the fact that in real life there are times when we just have to do what other people ask us to do. And I will contact you as you will surely want to know that your rules, too, are being flouted. It is not impossible that a child might be sent home to change in an extreme case.
Our community atmosphere of learning
None of this is new. It is not a radical departure from our philosophy or our previous practice. It is merely opportune to raise awareness of the issue now, in the spring, and by being proactive we will prevent unnecessary conflict which, in itself, would damage our community atmosphere of learning.
nickydarlington.blogspot.com
You and us
So your children need reminders from us and especially from you about what they think and what we think is suitable to wear on their bodies for those seven hours. And if in doubt they need to know it is what we think, you and ICS, that counts. (The good news for parents, as I observed in a previous blog, is that they get to own some clothes that you, when they wear them, are happy to be seen next to in public.) But what do we think? To be blunt, too much flesh on display is not acceptable is what we think. Any visible underwear at all is not acceptable. Short shorts and tops that do not meet the lower garment are not acceptable. Saggy baggy jeans worn without a belt that droop towards the knees are not suitable. And these concepts need firmly to be born in mind before new items of leisure wear are selected for purchase with a view to wearing them at ICS.
An opportunity to reflect
We at school reserve the right to make a judgement on sartorial suitability. The students have all been advised. If they decide to ignore our guide lines then, after a warning, they will meet with the Dean for a lunchtime detention to provide an opportunity to reflect on the matter and on the fact that in real life there are times when we just have to do what other people ask us to do. And I will contact you as you will surely want to know that your rules, too, are being flouted. It is not impossible that a child might be sent home to change in an extreme case.
Our community atmosphere of learning
None of this is new. It is not a radical departure from our philosophy or our previous practice. It is merely opportune to raise awareness of the issue now, in the spring, and by being proactive we will prevent unnecessary conflict which, in itself, would damage our community atmosphere of learning.
nickydarlington.blogspot.com
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