Category: Stuff that just happens

I was probably told it a hundred times on my teacher training course. I would have thought that my mentors on my teaching practices would have mentioned it, but something has recently become abundantly clear to me, that the worst thing you can ever say to a student is: you should know that already.

As a teacher though, it so easily slips out. Too easily. You would never open your mouth and say: you’re shit! Yet the words: you should know that already, amount to the same thing. As we say them, they sound innocent enough. Perhaps a student has been working on a particular thing for many, many months. You have gone through it and over it and explained it hundreds of times. You have seen in the past, perhaps, that they have been able to do it. Then you allow your patience to wear thin.

Patience and teaching of course go hand in hand. Parents frequently say to me: I don’t know how you are so patient. I always reply that it doesn’t reflect how I am as a parent! It is quite easy to have patience with the youngest students. Your expectations of what they can achieve are obviously different to the older students. However, actually the student’s age should bear no relation to your ability to show patience.

Patience must surpass driving a student forward and wanting them to excel. Drive is important, but ultimately in order for this to happen, patience is always required. We don’t necessarily know what is going on in a student’s life. We don’t know their insecurities and fears, nor why they may have them.

I was reminded of how demoralising and demotivating it is to be told that you should know something already, when a Taekwon-do Master made that comment to me a little while ago. It immediately made me feel completely shit. The thought behind the words is so final. You want to look the person in the eye and scream at them: well, I don’t and you know what, you know nothing about me and my life so fuck off! But instead, you just look them in the eye with a forlorn look. You feel that in that split second you have let that person down, despite the fact that it is your personal journey, not theirs. Regardless of the fact that actually, it is their job to teach you again and again, until you understand what they are saying and can get it absolutely right. They are the teacher.

So if your child ever comes home from school or from a club with their head down, quietly dejected and forlorn, there is every possibility that someone has said to them, without realising the extreme impact it can have: you should know that already. Unfortunately, the damage can have a lasting effect. As teachers, we must constantly be aware of this, so as not to undermine a student’s confidence. Patience has a lasting effect too.

If you enjoy my blog, I would be very grateful if you voted for me in the Mumsnet Blogging Awards: Best Writer and best Comic Writer categories. It is a quick one – takes seconds and here’s the link, thank you 🙂

http://www.mumsnet.com/events/blogging-awards/2016

I’ve always had a sensitive side – worrying what people think and not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings with what I say or do. Of course, this is normal. However, more recently I have become on constant hyper alert…and I think it’s a shame.

Firstly, came the e mails from my ex. I would e mail one thing and he would e mail back in a rage. Try as I might, I couldn’t see it from his point of view. I would read and re-read what I wrote and couldn’t work out what I had said that set him off. I would get my friends to read it and they couldn’t work it out either. However, I know that you can always read an e mail using a tone that reflects your own feelings and perhaps insecurities.

Then there is social media. Sometimes I read in disbelief the angry reactions from people to fairly innocent sounding posts. I came off Facebook for a while because of this. Faceless Book I call it – where people feel they can say what they want, because nobody can see them. These people are cowards, who are hiding behind the protective glass of their screen. Bullies, who don’t see the face drop and contort into disgust and tears as their victim reads the vindictive comments. The bully just scrolls on.

It is these cyber bullies who help to create this irrational fear of hurting someone’s feelings. With the internet, e mails and social media sites, has come the ability to innocently offend, while at the same time the heightened paranoia that you have hurt someone’s feelings with a reply to a post or a tweet. Before this, we relied on more human contact to correspond, where misinterpretations could be easily questioned and dealt with – without the worry of coming across as a social retard. Humour is far more easily inferred verbally, than through words on a screen, where subtle and important nuances can be lost.

It’s not just humour that can get lost in onscreen translation – meaning can too. People can only make sense of a comment with what they read and while of course a discussion can ensue, it is far harder to conduct a debate clearly through a quick fire exchange of the written word.

Never has this been so evident than in the past week since the referendum. I have read many, many posts on Facebook, discussing the result and not only have I been pretty shocked at the level of nastiness in the exchanges, often in response to a mild point of view, but also how many people who voted to leave the EU, are beginning to admit that they won’t post anything on line for fear of reprisal.

This fear of reprisal is growing on a local mum’s network. People are asking the administrator to post entirely innocent questions on their behalf, because they are too afraid to do so themselves – such is the level of hatred that runs intermittently through these online forums.

And so I am scared to offend. I am not always replying to posts, because I am worried that my answer may be taken the wrong way. I am reading things into people’s comments on my posts that they don’t even mean and I know they don’t mean them because they are having to reply to my nervous response with: don’t worry – I was only joking! While at the same time there is a large part of me that wants to rebel against the mediocrity, that I feel an undercurrent is trying to pull me towards.

But I do worry and I worry for our children and their generation, who are growing up having known nothing else. A generation who are shunning dates and who seem to be more prone to avoiding human contact. Teenagers who choose to game with friends, rather than meet with the real life versions. They are immersed in this culture that breeds mistrust, that is open to misinterpretation and with that comes paranoia and a culture where bullying thrives.

 

I need to have a chat with y’all about dishwashers.

Some background: our dishwasher broke at least two years ago. We spent months training 5 tween/teenage girls how to wash up. It became part of their initiation into the real world: pull your weight sunshine, that’s what will get you on in life. There’s no ‘i’ in team etc etc…

It worked a treat: they sorted out their own system of a washer and two dryers, a put awayer and someone to oversee the whole operation. Perfect.

But partner fussed…

He fussed that it was him who was doing the lion’s share of the washing up (vaguely true). He fussed that his hands were suffering (Fairy Liquid claims can go and take a running jump, because that stuff is EVIL!) He just generally fussed.

Now, I am a master at ignoring a fuss. Teenage girls ‘fuss’ about bollocks a lot of the time. Students in my Taekwon-do classes ‘fuss’ and partner fusses…I can spot a ‘fuss’ at a hundred miles and divert it to Mongolia with a well rehearsed brush off.

However, partner’s fuss went on and on. Until, thanks to Tesco Clubcard vouchers, he insisted on buying a new dishwasher.

ON THE PROVISO THAT HE STOPPED FUSSING!!

Now, the new dishwasher is installed. (After a huge stress over plumbing…are you sure you don’t want to pay the extra £10 for them to plumb it in, I innocently cleverly asked?)

Ok. So this morning, as I appeared bleary eyed and slightly hungover in the kitchen, partner leaped on me (metaphorically) and said: I don’t like the way the cutlery basket is on the right hand side. I need it on the left.

Now, here’s the thing. I don’t give a shit about the dishwasher – for me our house ran well without it. I don’t give a crap about baskets and I don’t give a flying fuck which side they are on. So, I am looking at my partner like he is an alien.

Then comes the stacking…oooh (suck in of breath)…you don’t want to put that there…

Actually, I do want to put that there, because it’s a dirty plate and it goes where the fuck I want it to go AND you know what…NOBODY DIES when I put it there.

NOBODY DIES…

Or do they? Because I have heard this fuss before, from my ex father in law: you don’t want to put that there…

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…DISHWASHER STRESS!!!

You see, you are so bloody wrong, because I really, really, ACTUALLY do want to place that bowl right there. Partly because I know that, for the rest of the entire evening, it is going to annoy the hell out of you…yes, that one bowl is going to ruin your entire evening, because it is is the ‘wrong’ place.

We have had the dishwasher for 3 days. The jury is out. The girls are still filling the sink with luxurious, bubbly, hot washing up water, because they keep forgetting that we have a dishwasher. Partner is still fussing, but his fuss is diverted to stacking strategies. I am sitting on the fence…but one more comment about how to stack that bloody dishwasher and…

 

 

The hammock…inside for the month of June

Partner is, rather cruelly I feel, blaming the dreadful rainy June we have just experienced, on my hammock. In fact, he is actually blaming me, because I bought the hammock and every goddamn day since the fateful 13th June, when I dragged him off to Lidl (in the rain) to buy the hammock, it has rained.

Now, I know that it is far too easy as a Brit to blame the weather on everything and to actually think that it has been worse than statistics prove. However, without a word of a British lie, that hammock has not seen enough sunshine to warrant the huge effort of getting it outside, climbing into it, risking injury as dog 1 follows suit and both falling unceremoniously onto the floor when dog 2 puts two paws on it to see what the fuss is about.

The tan lines that graced my body in May, when I got all cocky and thought that I’d avoid having to get a spray tan for our holiday to Spain in August, are rapidly fading. As are the comments from the stream of people who asked: where have you been, you’re so brown? To which I smugly replied: my garden. Yes, I didn’t need to spend hundreds on airfares and hotels to get that orgasmic feeling of the sun on your face, I only had to open my back door.

That was May and here we are at the start of July, wading once more through mud and watching the weeds and the slugs suffocate and kill all the plants on which we spent shed loads of cash on Bank Holiday Monday – back when we felt all positive about the future. I’m struggling not to bring in a Brexit metaphor here…I’ll let you fill in the blanks.

Ah July! With its promises of Pimms and BBQ’s. With it’s alluring thoughts of Sundays spent in my hammock, reading the papers and staring up at the sky. I’m full of optimism for this month. I’m not going to buy any sun cream, charcoal, nor am I going to shave my legs. Let nothing I do curse this wonderful month and then at least, if all goes tits up, it is one thing that I cannot be blamed for.

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.