Month: June 2016

Last month I wrote a blog on perseverance, as part of a series of five short blogs, each one looking at one of our tenets of Taekwon-Do.

http://madhousemum.com/2016/05/18/perseverance/

I opened the blog by saying that as parents we are sometimes to blame for a child’s lack of perseverance, because we set them high standards to achieve, but if the child feels unable to reach this high standard, it can make them anxious. The easiest route for them to then take, in order to stop this anxiety, is to give up.

Today it dawned on me that sometimes, it is actually really important to give up.

My thought was in relation to a child whom I taught Taekwon-Do. A child who I taught for nearly a year. During that year, I did everything I could to help him achieve. I gave him my energy, my patience and my expertise. After a few weeks, I started not looking forward to teaching his class. He was a constant disruption. He did the complete opposite of everything that I asked him to do. He made inappropriate noises and was boisterous with other children. I have taught for 25 years and I drew on everything I had learned during my teacher training course, knowledge of every previous difficult child I had taught and sought advice from other professional teachers. In other words, I was doing exactly as we teach our children to do: to persevere.

After a few months, I spoke to his mum. She suggested to me that she removed him from the class. I, however, refused to give up. I wanted to persevere. I knew that Taekwon-Do was the very thing that could help him. It develops self esteem, builds confidence, promotes team work and provides structure and discipline. The very last thing I wanted to do was to prevent this child from having access to the environment he seemed to so desperately need.

So I persevered.

His behaviour began to get worse. One day when I went into the class, this child wasn’t there. I was told that his mum had decided to remove him due to his bad behaviour.

Part of me felt that I had let him down, however the decision had been taken out of my hands and the classes continued without him. Suddenly, I had a class that was responsive. I had a class who worked as a team and who focused. The children in the class interacted with each other in many positive ways. The class had a new energy and took on a new life. We were able to engage with one another and have fun.

What this experience taught me is that sometimes it is important to give up. Sometimes it is absolutely the right thing to do.

In classrooms all over the country, teachers are struggling with one disruptive child in classes of well over 30 students. This is their dilemma: do you persevere with that one child at the expense of 30? Do you allow 30 children to experience a totally compromised education to help one?

We must continue to teach our children to persevere, but as parents and teachers, we should also be mindful that it is also sometimes the right decision to give up.

 

I heard it said on Radio 4: everyone’s surprised that we left Europe before the England football team. Well, we only had to wait the weekend for Roy Hodgson’s team to follow suit. Brexit 2, people were calling it. Except that Wales are still in the Euros, so it isn’t really fair to lump them in. I’m a quarter Welsh, so I’ve still got something to cheer for this week. For an awful lot of people though, it’s all a bit depressing.

Dave Verified account ‏@Join_Dave Once again the Over-65’s being blamed for England leaving Europe. #ENGICE

A conversation overheard in a bar in Westminster:

So, Boris, what’s the plan?
Plan…? What plan?
The plan now we’ve left and now we know that Dave doesn’t have a plan.
Ah, yes, that plan. Well, erm, the plan is to plan a plan.
Yes, we must. The people are asking us what the plan is.
I know and I keep getting asked that too. It’s bloody annoying.
We need to get the civil servants to work their arses off, sorting all this shit out. They know what to do.
Boris, I think they need someone to give them some direction, like a plan or something.
We’ll sweet talk Dave. He’ll arrange all the meetings. We’ll do the touchy feely stuff. It’s what I can do. I’ll call on my public school boy good looks and foppishness – gets them every time. You never know, it might make me Prime Minister when Dave buggers off. After all, I have fuck all else.
What about the immigration issue, Boris? People are worried about the racism that’s been escalating since Friday. They’re also worried about share prices and a shed load of other things. We need to reassure them.
Well, Dave’s still in charge, not me. No rush. Mañana, mañana. George can sort out the money side of things. We can jump on Nige’s bus – scrap the NHS slogan, what a twat, and let’s go and build bridges, reach out to the worriers. I know, we can start a new campaign: hug a Remain voter.
Boris, I’m not sure that they want hugs. I think they’re looking for leadership.
Everyone’s so worried. Why? This is fun! It’s exciting! They need to lighten up and join in the games. We played hide and seek at the weekend, but they found me. Blighters. Now it’s British Bulldog – get past the doubters! Move out the way, we’re coming through. Vive le UK!
Er, Boris…

I’ve seen this meme a few times now on Facebook. When I first saw it, I’ll be honest, I groaned at yet another schmaltzy meme appearing in my news feed. Then I thought to myself, they’re not much of a friend if they seriously fall out with you over politics. I mean, a debate over a few beers or a glass of wine sure, but this meme made it sound like serious shit. My train of thought then continued and I thought, actually this meme is being posted to counteract all the bigotry and nastiness that we’re seeing on social media, so I forgave that meme a little. It’s just a small shout of: group hug, amongst a load of nasty bollocks and an awful lot of uncertainty.

It made me think of a conversation I was having with Dad on Father’s Day last week. He was talking about tribes and how essentially the world is, as it has always been, tribal. He said that at the end of the day, when the shit hits the fan, we return to our tribe. We associate ourselves with groups that we can identify with and these groups give our existence meaning. Tribes have always been an essential for community and security. Sometimes a group we are a part of becomes too big and we start to feel that we are losing our own identity and it then that we retreat back to our tribe.

Now, here’s the thing: we will all quite happily create networks of tribes to expand in various ways that will make things better for the tribe, but ultimately the tribal instinct is to hang out with people who share our values, looks, humour, food and desires.

So where does all our innate tribalism leave us as a country now that we have divided into two camps: remain and leave. One camp has a majority and has, ‘won’, but within those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out’, there are friends transcending both groups. Thus, coming back to that schmaltzy meme. If we are going to move forwards, we need to gather the tribes together, friends need to reunite, we need to pursue a common goal in order to make this happen. Rise above the cultural tribal drift. One thing that is certain: a tribe needs a leader. Not ‘big man’ leadership ∗ – look at me, I’ll solve the problem, but a leader who has depth and breadth.

And tribal trust.

∗Leadership For a Fractured World: How to Cross Boundaries, Build Bridges and Lead Change
By Dean Williams

 

So the UK voted to leave in the EU Referendum the most divisive bit of politics that I for one can remember. Politics is always full of bullshit, but this whole debacle was so stuffed full of it, some people were rendered tongue-tied. Unable to open their mouths to give an opinion. Other people couldn’t shut up. Perhaps the conspiracy theory we all read about on Facebook yesterday, warning people to take a pen when they go to vote, was actually a Brexit wheeze. MI5 defected to Boris!

Millions of elves from Eastern Europe were paid below the minimum wage by MI5 to rub out every single ‘remain’ vote and change it to ‘leave’.

There were some amusing comments on Facebook yesterday:

If you are voting leave,  you are only allowed to use marker pens made in UK otherwise your vote doesn’t count. No “Bics” please. 😀

I don’t know about anyone else but I’ve just gone and bought shares in pencil eraser companies 😉

Fuck pens, I’m taking a needle & doing mine in blood

can we use our Bingo dibber dabber dobber things?

And now I feel that we have entered a game of bingo. A game of bingo without anyone calling the numbers. Oh, the uncertainty of it all.

As well as being worried about what the result means for the economy, I am now seriously concerned that the referendum, with all its allegations, lies, scaremongering and propaganda has messed with peoples’ brains. We are becoming a nation who is suspicious of everything. Who questions everything. We no longer trust anyone…

…and today we are a very divided nation.

I’ll leave you with a tweet from JustSomeGuy:

however he should have remembered that…

Remain, they got you. Huge opportunity, or huge risk? Now we just have to hope that as a nation, our numbers come up.