Who?
Me?
Now?!
When?
Where?
It wasn’t me.
I wasn’t there.
I don’t think so.
I didn’t hear you.
I didn’t see that happen.
It was just a game we play.
You muddled me with someone else.
Why do I always get picked on?
I thought it would be ok.
I wasn’t the only one.
She misunderstood.
It wasn’t like that.
It wasn’t my fault.
I didn’t realise.
It didn’t hurt.
It was a joke.
I didn’t…
Never.
Not.
No.
Oh!
Ok.
Sorry!
Friday, 30 October 2009
Friday, 9 October 2009
a poem to help two 11th graders
Shy She
She…
Suffers no fools, rules the cool,
Shares her cares, wears pairs of
Old rolled gold creole rings in her ears (bling),
Sings ‘Wings’ songs
Longs for the throng’s wrongs to be righted
Far sighted, rarely delighted by the
Noise of boys’ joy in their toys –
But inside she sighs soft cries for ties wise guys would die for.
She knows she could, should indeed would say to him:
‘Please talk to, walk with me, see how I plea; bended knee
Is not beyond me for one smile, stop awhile,
Don’t let my guile rile…’
He…
Walks past fast, hopes at half mast,
Memory still aghast at last laughs
But thinks, ‘She lonely? If only!’
She…
Suffers no fools, rules the cool,
Shares her cares, wears pairs of
Old rolled gold creole rings in her ears (bling),
Sings ‘Wings’ songs
Longs for the throng’s wrongs to be righted
Far sighted, rarely delighted by the
Noise of boys’ joy in their toys –
But inside she sighs soft cries for ties wise guys would die for.
She knows she could, should indeed would say to him:
‘Please talk to, walk with me, see how I plea; bended knee
Is not beyond me for one smile, stop awhile,
Don’t let my guile rile…’
He…
Walks past fast, hopes at half mast,
Memory still aghast at last laughs
But thinks, ‘She lonely? If only!’
Thursday, 8 October 2009
hot chestnut
Dean’s Blog 'Dare I comment on an old chestnut?’
Dare I comment again on an old chestnut, I wonder? Will it cause as much aggravation as reassurance? Who knows? But it is worth drawing your attention to the new, attractive rainbow lockers the students now have, that brighten up the hallways of the Main Building. Maybe you saw them at the Back to School night. They have an internal lock so that you do not have to provide Fort Knox calibre padlocks. There are two keys and the Secondary Office retains one in case of loss by the locker owner. Now, I write ‘loss’ rather than ‘theft’ on purpose. And this is the point of this Blog and the potential area for aggravation. For we do get allegations from students and sometimes from their parents that the key has in fact been stolen from bag or wallet. However, on closer investigation, in the majority of cases the key was later found (in the locker itself, or in a pocket, or underneath something else in the bag, or even at home.)
A sports shirt or pair of trainers
In a previous Blog I have commented on how quickly the word theft will be used to explain a situation of mystery that is actually a situation of ‘Help! I cannot find it.’ Blame shifting third person (‘someone has stolen my key!’) replaces personal responsibility first person (‘I lost it.’) What disturbs me is that the implications of the words theft and stolen are, often, not apparently fully understood. ‘Stolen’ means that another student at ICS or visiting or an adult who works here or was visiting, made a deliberate, antisocial and illegal decision to appropriate what clearly did not belong to them, for their own pleasurable purposes. And then they went ahead and acted out this decision. Put like this, I expect you, too, would question whether we have amongst our constituents, which include your children, as many who fit my definition as keys that go missing. I believe we do not, for the majority of these keys turn up again and some are genuinely mislaid as they fall from a jeans pocket or are swept unnoticed with a sports shirt or pair of trainers from the bag.
Safe necklaces for the key
What shall we do? Well, we are already doing it, a good deal. I went into a registration at 8.35 recently where students were in the process of making safe necklaces for the key to hang on. In Tutorial the issue of property and its security and loss have been discussed and will be again. The need to place valuables, if they must be brought to school, in the lockable rainbow locker or turned in to the Secondary Office for safe keeping or placed in the PE lock boxes: all these ideas are stressed and discussed and explained and revisited. Eye catching notices are put up with this advice, sometimes designed by the students. Assemblies are used for reminders about securing belongings.
And in the Personal Development Programme
Of course, it is not just keys. And so in the Personal Development Programme there are presentations, role-plays, discussions and evaluations on pertinent topics such as the wider context of the meaning of community together with the need for us to respect its members, on responsibility and integrity, value and cost and so on. The idea of removing temptation is broached and the mundane fact that it is often carelessness or laziness that results in something precious being in an unattended coat of bag in the first place.
The management does not accept responsibility
Children learn from adults – we are their role models. And in the society we have prepared for them we have placed policemen and safes and CCTV and bank deposits and lockers at SBB stations and notices that ‘the management does not accept responsibility for items placed on these shelves’ in almost every restaurant. We do this because we acknowledge that some people do steal. At ICS we take very seriously indeed our responsibility to strive to put an end to this as far as our community is concerned. And if we do not succeed this year we will continue to try next year and the year after, too.
Perhaps that wasn’t such a hot chestnut afterall.
Dare I comment again on an old chestnut, I wonder? Will it cause as much aggravation as reassurance? Who knows? But it is worth drawing your attention to the new, attractive rainbow lockers the students now have, that brighten up the hallways of the Main Building. Maybe you saw them at the Back to School night. They have an internal lock so that you do not have to provide Fort Knox calibre padlocks. There are two keys and the Secondary Office retains one in case of loss by the locker owner. Now, I write ‘loss’ rather than ‘theft’ on purpose. And this is the point of this Blog and the potential area for aggravation. For we do get allegations from students and sometimes from their parents that the key has in fact been stolen from bag or wallet. However, on closer investigation, in the majority of cases the key was later found (in the locker itself, or in a pocket, or underneath something else in the bag, or even at home.)
A sports shirt or pair of trainers
In a previous Blog I have commented on how quickly the word theft will be used to explain a situation of mystery that is actually a situation of ‘Help! I cannot find it.’ Blame shifting third person (‘someone has stolen my key!’) replaces personal responsibility first person (‘I lost it.’) What disturbs me is that the implications of the words theft and stolen are, often, not apparently fully understood. ‘Stolen’ means that another student at ICS or visiting or an adult who works here or was visiting, made a deliberate, antisocial and illegal decision to appropriate what clearly did not belong to them, for their own pleasurable purposes. And then they went ahead and acted out this decision. Put like this, I expect you, too, would question whether we have amongst our constituents, which include your children, as many who fit my definition as keys that go missing. I believe we do not, for the majority of these keys turn up again and some are genuinely mislaid as they fall from a jeans pocket or are swept unnoticed with a sports shirt or pair of trainers from the bag.
Safe necklaces for the key
What shall we do? Well, we are already doing it, a good deal. I went into a registration at 8.35 recently where students were in the process of making safe necklaces for the key to hang on. In Tutorial the issue of property and its security and loss have been discussed and will be again. The need to place valuables, if they must be brought to school, in the lockable rainbow locker or turned in to the Secondary Office for safe keeping or placed in the PE lock boxes: all these ideas are stressed and discussed and explained and revisited. Eye catching notices are put up with this advice, sometimes designed by the students. Assemblies are used for reminders about securing belongings.
And in the Personal Development Programme
Of course, it is not just keys. And so in the Personal Development Programme there are presentations, role-plays, discussions and evaluations on pertinent topics such as the wider context of the meaning of community together with the need for us to respect its members, on responsibility and integrity, value and cost and so on. The idea of removing temptation is broached and the mundane fact that it is often carelessness or laziness that results in something precious being in an unattended coat of bag in the first place.
The management does not accept responsibility
Children learn from adults – we are their role models. And in the society we have prepared for them we have placed policemen and safes and CCTV and bank deposits and lockers at SBB stations and notices that ‘the management does not accept responsibility for items placed on these shelves’ in almost every restaurant. We do this because we acknowledge that some people do steal. At ICS we take very seriously indeed our responsibility to strive to put an end to this as far as our community is concerned. And if we do not succeed this year we will continue to try next year and the year after, too.
Perhaps that wasn’t such a hot chestnut afterall.
Tie tying
The Dean’s Blog. ‘Tietying’
Continuing the theme of what they wear, when it’s MUN* time, or there is a final Awards Assembly your children, and our students, look terrific – about five years older and way more sophisticated. Talk to them and they sound better, too. They use a more effective vocabulary. They finish sentences. ‘Duh’, ‘like’, ‘dude’, ‘whoa’ and ‘whatever’ recede into the background of lexical popularity. They look you in the eye. Maybe there is a direct ratio of good conversation to stylish dress (and we are talking about smart not expensive); there will be research out there. I myself have had memorable conversations with kids who dress more smartly on a day when they are asked to look more formal for the occasion.
A misguided act of power sharing
Some studies have indeed shown that behaviour becomes less antisocial when the kids feel smart in their outfits, but not if it is an imposed uniform. Attempts to have kids design their own and then impose the results on the student body are generally unsuccessful; a misguided act of power sharing that ignores the fact that half a dozen students will not satisfy the ideas of hundreds of others. (Strangely, this ratio is precisely what works in the weird world of women’s high fashion.) The girls do this dressing-for-the-occasion especially well. The style and colours they choose to combine create an elegance that is really effective – (even if they should have to pass a driving test to operate those ultra high, thin heels.) But too many boys ignore the advice and just do the jacket and the shirt that hangs out thing. Or it’s a smart suit and shirt and tie with old trainers. Or they turn up baggy and saggy anyway. But those guys could make a formal school uniform in anthracite and silver striped tie, look dishevelled in two moves. They don’t get it or they don’t want to get it, or they are making a statement. I remember greeting a graduating student at the Gemeindehaus just before the Graduation ceremony and commenting on his jeans + T shirt + sun goggles in the hair look. He was hurt. He pointed out that it was a clean white T shirt. We just didn’t get through to them …yet.
Chaps just don’t
As the opening ceremony of the Science Debate approaches, a few boys ask politely if I can help them knot their tie. And I introduce them to the stylish, arcane and endangered world of the Manhattan, the Cross aka Christensen, the Half or Full Windsor and the Prince Albert; and these are not outlandishly priced cocktails at a Zurich in-club with a French name. The knot matters. James Bond once spotted a villain not just because he ordered full bodied Claret with his fish but because he was sporting a Windsor knot and no gentleman would think of tying one of those. Chaps just don’t, so he knew him for a cad. And the choice of knot depends on the tie; extra long tie can take a Windsor, a woven fabric will take a half Windsor, and avoid a Manhattan on a skinny - better to go for the Prince Albert especially if it’s silk(don’t tighten) or light fabric. Being given yet another tie on your birthday becomes interesting as you try various knots at the birthday dinner table.
Impress their elders
And this, at last, is my point. There are occasions when our students’ appearance will count for them, or against them. There are times when dressing up and doing it within current convention is expected by the controlling generation above them – it’s part of personal marketing at, say, interviews for college or job. ICS offers an increasing number of occasions which prepare in many different ways for this expectation, speaking persuasively to an adult audience, maybe an unknown audience, taking questions with assurance from the floor, prepping a formal speech in a limited amount of time with students from other schools. Our recently introduced end of year Award Assemblies have been formalised in this spirit. And if the boys continue to take it seriously someone will have to offer tie tying as an after school activity.
* Model United Nations
nickydarlington.blogspot.com
Continuing the theme of what they wear, when it’s MUN* time, or there is a final Awards Assembly your children, and our students, look terrific – about five years older and way more sophisticated. Talk to them and they sound better, too. They use a more effective vocabulary. They finish sentences. ‘Duh’, ‘like’, ‘dude’, ‘whoa’ and ‘whatever’ recede into the background of lexical popularity. They look you in the eye. Maybe there is a direct ratio of good conversation to stylish dress (and we are talking about smart not expensive); there will be research out there. I myself have had memorable conversations with kids who dress more smartly on a day when they are asked to look more formal for the occasion.
A misguided act of power sharing
Some studies have indeed shown that behaviour becomes less antisocial when the kids feel smart in their outfits, but not if it is an imposed uniform. Attempts to have kids design their own and then impose the results on the student body are generally unsuccessful; a misguided act of power sharing that ignores the fact that half a dozen students will not satisfy the ideas of hundreds of others. (Strangely, this ratio is precisely what works in the weird world of women’s high fashion.) The girls do this dressing-for-the-occasion especially well. The style and colours they choose to combine create an elegance that is really effective – (even if they should have to pass a driving test to operate those ultra high, thin heels.) But too many boys ignore the advice and just do the jacket and the shirt that hangs out thing. Or it’s a smart suit and shirt and tie with old trainers. Or they turn up baggy and saggy anyway. But those guys could make a formal school uniform in anthracite and silver striped tie, look dishevelled in two moves. They don’t get it or they don’t want to get it, or they are making a statement. I remember greeting a graduating student at the Gemeindehaus just before the Graduation ceremony and commenting on his jeans + T shirt + sun goggles in the hair look. He was hurt. He pointed out that it was a clean white T shirt. We just didn’t get through to them …yet.
Chaps just don’t
As the opening ceremony of the Science Debate approaches, a few boys ask politely if I can help them knot their tie. And I introduce them to the stylish, arcane and endangered world of the Manhattan, the Cross aka Christensen, the Half or Full Windsor and the Prince Albert; and these are not outlandishly priced cocktails at a Zurich in-club with a French name. The knot matters. James Bond once spotted a villain not just because he ordered full bodied Claret with his fish but because he was sporting a Windsor knot and no gentleman would think of tying one of those. Chaps just don’t, so he knew him for a cad. And the choice of knot depends on the tie; extra long tie can take a Windsor, a woven fabric will take a half Windsor, and avoid a Manhattan on a skinny - better to go for the Prince Albert especially if it’s silk(don’t tighten) or light fabric. Being given yet another tie on your birthday becomes interesting as you try various knots at the birthday dinner table.
Impress their elders
And this, at last, is my point. There are occasions when our students’ appearance will count for them, or against them. There are times when dressing up and doing it within current convention is expected by the controlling generation above them – it’s part of personal marketing at, say, interviews for college or job. ICS offers an increasing number of occasions which prepare in many different ways for this expectation, speaking persuasively to an adult audience, maybe an unknown audience, taking questions with assurance from the floor, prepping a formal speech in a limited amount of time with students from other schools. Our recently introduced end of year Award Assemblies have been formalised in this spirit. And if the boys continue to take it seriously someone will have to offer tie tying as an after school activity.
* Model United Nations
nickydarlington.blogspot.com
Dullington Diddlington
Deans Blog
“‘That, Mr. Dullington, was in my 40 years experience of teaching Jurisprudence, the most inadequate, immaterial and…ah… insubstantial essay I have had to listen to, exploring as it did, such previously uncharted depths of legal irrelevance and…erm… vacuous pomposity!’
Silence as the antique grandfather clock ticked accusingly in the corner of my tutor’s dusty old room. ‘Oh…Well…Where exactly would you say I went wrong, Professor H---? I thought I had explained fully the legal implications of your unlikely scenario of a storm sweeping away a hunk of my land and adding it to my neighbour’s across the river…’
‘Mr. Diddlington, ‘rather well’ cannot be utilised to describe anything in that essay except, perhaps, your belated use of the…erm… final full stop. Your style is both obtuse and pretentious, your points are obfuscated and random, and your use of legal precedents is…ah… unprecedented.’*
Rumpelstilzkin’s rage
And so on. One pulls oneself together, shrugs off the temporary impasse and switches to ontological bio-metachemistry and gets a first ‘summa cum laude’ in the remaining two years. Or not. Actually this one felt humiliated and very depressed. One tries not to fall to the ground screaming and drumming one’s heels on the floor in a five year old’s hysterical passion of humiliation complete with protruding lower lip. In comparison, Rumpelstilzkin’s rage when the miller’s daughter, now promoted queen consort, refused to give him her first child despite showing her how to spin gold in commercially viable quantities, was sub beginner level.
For five days at a stretch
And on a smaller scale our students meet what they may see as obstacles, pitfalls, hurdles, dreaded events and personal humiliations quite often, as they try to be both what their friends expect and what also the adults in their lives expect without the instructions booklet. ‘Well, it was no different for us and did it do us any harm?’ Maybe. Only, we forget the details over the years or we now re-label all the anxiety as ‘challenge’ and assess our kids’ perseverance skills. But so few of we humans are all-rounders, and so few are they, able to produce our very best in an alien language in eight or nine dissimilar subjects in 50 minute time chunks one after the other for five days at a stretch. They have come from PE or Spanish or mathematics and after my 50 minutes will progress to I.T. or humanities or physics with little chance to adopt the correct mindset for the discipline and the idiosyncratic teacher in the five minute change over time.
Because kids learn.
But most of the time most of them manage this well. Because kids learn. It is what they are for. You cannot stop them. I, myself, tend to forget, caught up in the frenetic rhythm of a school day, that I teach only English and I think and teach in only English all day. I am marinated in my academic expectations and seasoned in the skills and knowledge involved in my next class. What I need to do regularly is to try imagining having to do this in my third language. I do not have a third language. I sometimes even now dream I am in Swiss Gymi and the bell has gone for a double advanced math class in Schriftdeutsch. Fortunately, up to now, I have woken up. What I need to do is to get out of the comfort of my classroom.
Soooooo dull
The classroom, though, is not a natural place to learn with passion. But we use it only for learning. For lively maturing students it can be sooooo dull despite our best efforts to showcase work and pin up posters. (If you look at the original illustrations, the girl Rumpel assists is spinning gold in an old classroom.) And that is why our new facility Mettman is so important. And all our Activity Days and the full Field Week programme and the plethora of sport and training weekends all through the year. And suspended days for the Group 4 Science project and MUN. And the Global Issues conference. And all the other conferences. Yes, they play havoc with the timetable and our schedules and comfortable routines and the life of those who plan and deliver. But thank goodness they do because we teachers need to get out of the classroom, too.
***
DoZ update. Can SUVs, generally recognised to be environmentally iffy, be taught by their owners not to park on the small grassy piece of natural environment to the right of the drive especially when there are plenty of their spaces on the parking lot. It is not a parking lot. This little strip of green is there for us all to enjoy unchurned up by monster tyres and unpolluted by drips of engine oil. Oh, and mini cabrios, you speak to your drivers, too.
*The initial conversation really happened. The full version is at nickydarlington.blogspot.com
“‘That, Mr. Dullington, was in my 40 years experience of teaching Jurisprudence, the most inadequate, immaterial and…ah… insubstantial essay I have had to listen to, exploring as it did, such previously uncharted depths of legal irrelevance and…erm… vacuous pomposity!’
Silence as the antique grandfather clock ticked accusingly in the corner of my tutor’s dusty old room. ‘Oh…Well…Where exactly would you say I went wrong, Professor H---? I thought I had explained fully the legal implications of your unlikely scenario of a storm sweeping away a hunk of my land and adding it to my neighbour’s across the river…’
‘Mr. Diddlington, ‘rather well’ cannot be utilised to describe anything in that essay except, perhaps, your belated use of the…erm… final full stop. Your style is both obtuse and pretentious, your points are obfuscated and random, and your use of legal precedents is…ah… unprecedented.’*
Rumpelstilzkin’s rage
And so on. One pulls oneself together, shrugs off the temporary impasse and switches to ontological bio-metachemistry and gets a first ‘summa cum laude’ in the remaining two years. Or not. Actually this one felt humiliated and very depressed. One tries not to fall to the ground screaming and drumming one’s heels on the floor in a five year old’s hysterical passion of humiliation complete with protruding lower lip. In comparison, Rumpelstilzkin’s rage when the miller’s daughter, now promoted queen consort, refused to give him her first child despite showing her how to spin gold in commercially viable quantities, was sub beginner level.
For five days at a stretch
And on a smaller scale our students meet what they may see as obstacles, pitfalls, hurdles, dreaded events and personal humiliations quite often, as they try to be both what their friends expect and what also the adults in their lives expect without the instructions booklet. ‘Well, it was no different for us and did it do us any harm?’ Maybe. Only, we forget the details over the years or we now re-label all the anxiety as ‘challenge’ and assess our kids’ perseverance skills. But so few of we humans are all-rounders, and so few are they, able to produce our very best in an alien language in eight or nine dissimilar subjects in 50 minute time chunks one after the other for five days at a stretch. They have come from PE or Spanish or mathematics and after my 50 minutes will progress to I.T. or humanities or physics with little chance to adopt the correct mindset for the discipline and the idiosyncratic teacher in the five minute change over time.
Because kids learn.
But most of the time most of them manage this well. Because kids learn. It is what they are for. You cannot stop them. I, myself, tend to forget, caught up in the frenetic rhythm of a school day, that I teach only English and I think and teach in only English all day. I am marinated in my academic expectations and seasoned in the skills and knowledge involved in my next class. What I need to do regularly is to try imagining having to do this in my third language. I do not have a third language. I sometimes even now dream I am in Swiss Gymi and the bell has gone for a double advanced math class in Schriftdeutsch. Fortunately, up to now, I have woken up. What I need to do is to get out of the comfort of my classroom.
Soooooo dull
The classroom, though, is not a natural place to learn with passion. But we use it only for learning. For lively maturing students it can be sooooo dull despite our best efforts to showcase work and pin up posters. (If you look at the original illustrations, the girl Rumpel assists is spinning gold in an old classroom.) And that is why our new facility Mettman is so important. And all our Activity Days and the full Field Week programme and the plethora of sport and training weekends all through the year. And suspended days for the Group 4 Science project and MUN. And the Global Issues conference. And all the other conferences. Yes, they play havoc with the timetable and our schedules and comfortable routines and the life of those who plan and deliver. But thank goodness they do because we teachers need to get out of the classroom, too.
***
DoZ update. Can SUVs, generally recognised to be environmentally iffy, be taught by their owners not to park on the small grassy piece of natural environment to the right of the drive especially when there are plenty of their spaces on the parking lot. It is not a parking lot. This little strip of green is there for us all to enjoy unchurned up by monster tyres and unpolluted by drips of engine oil. Oh, and mini cabrios, you speak to your drivers, too.
*The initial conversation really happened. The full version is at nickydarlington.blogspot.com
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