In The Event

Felt tired today, mainly as a result of being so busy on Saturday. There wasn't a lot to do yesterday - Haj class in the morning, a bit of marking, visiting Fuad's mum in hospital in the evening - but I didn't quite catch up on the old zzzzzz's. And I was pretty busy today also with yet another big event coming up on Thursday. Actually I don't feel the same frustration over this kind of busyness as I can feel at other times in the frenetic school year. Saturday's dramatic event was essentially educational and, therefore, enjoyable, despite the long hours (and it was our own idea, rather than being forced on us.) Funnily enough on the same day the school was playing host to a big national competition called Odyssey of the Mind, in which a lot of our students were involved, and, again, as an innocent bystander I got a real sense that the experience managed to transcend just being another competition for the various teams and that they were having a rare old creative time and learning lots in the process. Lots of silly props and colourful costume and general mess: fun, as well as hard work.

It's difficult to argue against providing young people with this kind of experience. But therein lies the problem. You can justify almost any event (by which I mean something time-bound added-on, in a sense, to the general run of the curriculum) in a school as developing something in someone somehow (even the ones that turn out to be not so genuinely educationally beneficial, but simply the kind of things done for their own sake.) And that means it's very easy to make students and staff too busy to benefit in any deep and lasting way from those experiences. They become associated with learning to cope rather than learning.

It's all a question of balance. I've experienced one system that didn't really do as much as it could. And another that commits itself to too much. Somewhere in the middle lies a kind of wisdom.