Catching Glimpses

Photo by Amada MA

Last week I found myself down on the lower field throwing gumboots and measuring distances. Ok, so I wasn’t throwing gumboots – my school was. It was part of a fun afternoon we were running, celebrating the Olympics. No doubt schools were doing something similar all around the motu.

Being a rural school, we made sure that our events had some sort of agricultural flavour – hence the gumboots, the wool bale sacks, and the hobby horses. None of this mattered to the kids. They didn’t worry that our particular brand of the Olympics was far removed from what they saw on tele in Paris.

I’d brought my dog along, an excitable golden Cocker Spaniel, and she played freely amongst the relays and fun. No one seemed to bat an eye.

As I was measuring a fifteen metre gumboot throw it struck me (not the gumboot!) how far removed this was from the mountain of papers on my desk, and the weight of the unread emails in my inbox. This was the “real deal” stuff – the stuff that all the kids would remember; their very own Olympics.

As we handed out the Two Dollar Shop medals at the end of the day I joked with the kids that this was our inaugural Olympics and that in a hundred years time the new students of the school would look back on this day and marvel at the athleticism of us all – just like how in the Paris Olympics we look back at the ancients in awe.

I’m sure some of the children thought I was serious. It didn’t matter whether they did or not. The point I was really trying to make is that these sorts of events are fantastic for giving our tamariki experiences and opportunities where children get glimpses of themselves being great. There’s a sense of hope, wonderment and awe in these glimpses. It’s a human thing!

None of that could be found in the piles of paper on my desk or in my emails. And so as I put the medals around the necks of the kids I took a little moment to pause in my own mind as to how special this all was, and how good it feels too, for our own wellbeing.

Our schools are full of special things. We don’t have to run a mini Olympics every week to prove it, but we do have to get out of our offices, and away from the piles of paper to see it. 

That’s where the real education is – not in the unread emails in our inboxes, the forever growing to-do-lists or the piles of paper on our desks. And maybe when you find those places of real education, you’ll also see glimpses of yourself, being great.

Steve