Celebrating Growth and Individuality
Last night, I was lucky enough to attend the Chairman’s Dinner. This is an event put on by the School and hosted by our Chair of School Council, Mr John Fradgley, to honour graduating students who started at All Saints in Pre Prep or Prep, and to thank their parents for their loyalty and support over so many years. It is always a splendid evening. John spoke beautifully about ‘mercy’ and ‘grace,’ and we always ask two of the students to speak on the night. Ruby McDougall gave a most moving tribute to the parents (a few of them were in tears!) and Ray Ayoub (God bless him) read a speech written by Oliver Hains (who had lost his voice) thanking the teachers. Ollie’s speech paid special attention to the staff in Middle School who face on a daily basis the challenge of getting to know, understand and care for 12-, 13- and 14-year-old boys and girls. It can sometimes be a challenge. They are beginning to get delicious glimpses of the adult life and yet they are essentially still children at heart. It is confusing and sometimes distressing for them, just as it was for us, and all we can do is love them through their changes as best we can.
It is particularly important that we encourage our children in the Middle years to be individuals. As everything begins to change, both physiologically and emotionally, young teenagers tend to seek comfort from their ability to blend into those customs and styles that are deemed acceptable by their peers. They strive to conform to alternative behaviours that of course ironically very quickly become the norm. For boys, mullets seem to be the in thing! As parents and teachers, we need to help our children to challenge the assumptions that underpin such conformist practices in favour of just being themselves. From a school’s perspective, the best way of doing this is by providing opportunities for our students to try things that take them out of their comfort zone. Getting boys to read, and cook, and play music and draw, and dance and sing, and laugh recklessly, and valuing them for such pursuits, will assist their growth into healthy adults. I get a lump in my throat every time I hear the Brumby Boys’ Choir, a Middle School ensemble with over 30 boys who love to sing their hearts out. Encouraging our girls to embrace IT opportunities, to delight in scientific and mathematical enquiry, to expect and exploit the challenges of leadership, to feel comfortable in their bodies, to laugh recklessly, and then valuing them for these things will inspire them to become the women of the future that our world so desperately needs. The curriculum and co-curriculum in the Middle School at All Saints are designed to challenge students to take risks in a safe and secure environment, and thereby to discover aspects about their own characters and personalities that might help them to discover their own uniqueness.
Another equally important part of encouraging children in the Middle years to forge their own path in life, obvious as it may sound, is to actually treat them as individuals. As parents we must try to celebrate their quirkiness and their difference, rather than be threatened by it, provided of course that this quirkiness doesn’t express itself in anti-social or destructive ways. And as a school, we must try to find teachers who are prepared to look out at the sea of faces confronting them on day one and be determined to develop relationships with each one of those children that will take them to the very heart of what makes each of them tick. Here again, I feel we are unbelievably blessed at All Saints. In order to fit in to the culture that operates here as a teacher, we simply have to love children. We have to be able to see beyond the limitations and focus rather on the possibilities.
The true secret to our success, however, lies in our ability to work together, parents, grandparents, friends and teachers; to pool our resources, in the certain knowledge that together will always be better than apart. There is a short poem on this subject, a little twee in its simplicity, but worthy, nonetheless. It goes like this:
I dreamed I stood in a studio
And watched two sculptors there.
The clay they used was a young child’s mind
And they fashioned it with care.
One was a teacher, the tools she used
Were books and music and art;
One was a parent with a guiding hand
And a gentle, loving heart.
Day after day the teacher toiled
With touch that was deft and sure,
While the parent laboured by his side
And polished and smoothed it o’er.
When at last their task was done,
They were proud of what they wrought,
For the things they had moulded into the child
Could neither be sold nor bought.
And each agreed they would have failed
If they had worked alone,
For behind the parent stood the school,
And behind the teacher, the home.
One of the things that struck me about last night was how many of the students present, girls and boys, had wobbled during their Middle School years and yet how every single one of them had grown into kind, responsible, decent young adults. I believe our provision of a stand-alone Middle School that loves working closely with our amazing parents, has a great deal to do with this.
To all our parents I thank you for your gentle, loving hearts. To the staff for whom I hold such a profound respect, I thank you for continuing to bring the sport and the carnivals and the books and the music and the art and the fashion and everything else that you can muster to lead your students to that oasis where true learning and discovery takes place. Together we are forging a generation of whom we can all feel proud.
Patrick S Wallas
Headmaster
