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.

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