When Preppies Attack

Preppies are like white blood cells attacking a virus. The first and closest white blood cell recognises that a virus is alien and not supposed to be there, it immediately attaches and the battle is joined. At the same time other white blood cells converge en masse to smother the virus. Covering its entire surface area to control, suffocate and subdue the interloper. It's the same when you visit a Prep class...

Example Preppie Attack Modus Operandi, This women is in dire danger.

When I first left the corporate life to start career 3.0, I thought I'd aim for a better balance. Mixing parenting with part time roles, which would allow me to do a bit of corporate work, as well as working in the community.
 
Actually it's worked out pretty well. As well as my becoming THE parent and working as a Coach/Mentor, I'm also employed by my local primary school as a part time Teacher's Aide. I help out with science and maths, not because that's my background of course; it's just that I'm a terrible nerd.
 
This is how I found myself at centre of a Prep melee last week. I had to pick up some science equipment from a Prep classroom when I was spotted as an alien and intercepted by the preppie on point. "What are you doing here?", he asked innocently and in the moment it took me to answer, they had me in their clutches. There were now about 7 preppies attached to my legs and their leader, Osama Bin Preppie (name changed to protect the innocent) was asking me if I knew the password and was swinging a cardboard cylinder and slapping it into his hand!!! I was a downed teacher aide, deep behind enemy lines, my salvation (their classroom teacher) was outside communication range. All they were going to get out of me was name, rank and serial number.
 
I should have known better.¶
 
Earlier this term, after my first “Teacher Aide” experience in the classroom, my wife asked how it had all gone. “Um, I sort of made a bit of a strategic error” I admitted. "What did you do???" she asked excitedly, "Did you say F#ck in front of them, did you call someone an idiot like you used to at work? What did you do???". ¶
 
I had sat on the floor with them.
 
You know, there are plenty of psychological studies that say adults get it wrong when they talk "Down" to children in a learning setting. Well I wasn't going to do that. I was going to be a new brand of Teacher Aide, one that was on top of the latest learning philosophy, where there was no desk, no teacher & student, no us, no them, it was just going to be us - on the floor.
 
So there I was on the floor with the Year Two kids, having folded myself up like an origami me amongst the kids. I heard my knees click as I sat down and thought, "I hope I don't have to get up in a hurry".
 
From the floor I also notice that the actual classroom teacher looks a lot bigger. That's because she’s standing up. There’s a good reason for that, as I was about to learn. The floor is the natural habitat of the eight year old, not so the 45 year old.
 
I excitedly start my spiel about gravity, and the kids are all wide eyed and look like “WOW, this is so interesting”(that’s how I prefer to remember it anyway). I then turn to grab a prop from behind me. When I look back they seem spookily closer, “Hey guys – did you all move? I need some room to do my experiment and everyone needs to see”. No-one moves.
 
So I do my experiment and it goes fine and we move onto the next experiment. This time when I look back around they’ve moved in about a foot and cut off my left and right flanks. "Whoa guys, just give me a bit of room here, can everyone see?" I ask, "Oh yes", they all say in unison and move in some more!
 
So at this point I’m taking particular note of how inflexible the adult body becomes when sitting cross-legged at ground level, and I'm attempting to do a reverse arse walk to re establish some clear air around me. "Does anyone have any questions?" I ask. As the questions come, so to comes their final advance, they were now basically on top of me.
 
They were the pack of lions, I was the stupid well-meaning antelope who had got separated from the herd and had ventured onto their turf. The last thing I saw before a sea of year twos blotted out the horizon, was the sight of the classroom teacher with one pitying eyebrow raised in my direction, as if to say "He's not going to make it out of there?".
 
I may have briefly blacked out at that point, but the next thing I knew was there was light again, children were getting up and I could breathe again, I had been saved. The classroom teacher had told everyone to rotate to their next group.
 
I told myself, "Perhaps that group was just a bit over excited, I'll get the next group to sit back a bit further”. Three rotations - same result every time. If there had been a fourth rotation I would have had them sitting in the next building, and even then they still would have attempted to asphyxiate me!
 
I wouldn’t make that same mistake with my second class I said to myself. A wonderful invention the chair – who would have thought?
 
So my second class was going fine, I had a great spiel, I had a chair, the kids got the idea of gravity. We had a great time. The bell rang and the classroom teacher dismissed the kids, and I stood and turned to gather my gear when I noticed an odd pressure through and around my right leg. No, please not a heart attack now, not now that I’m bringing science to the kiddies. Nope, a young fella thought a quick hug was in order after that serious bit of Newtonian science.
 
But back to the Preppies. Just when I thought they would be filming a ransom video of me reading passages from The Hungry Caterpillar then posting it on You Tube, their teacher looks up and sees my stricken state. She called them off like a farmer calling sheepdogs, “Git-away-back, whit, whit, whit”. They released my legs and off they all ran, having topped up their hug reserves.
 
What I am learning is that the school years between Prep and Year Two are like moving from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance. There are elements of survival of the fittest, tribalism, witchcraft (one of our Year Twos is on record as having asked the Librarian in all seriousness “Miss, are you a witch?”) and then awakening and excitement about learning. But above all they still just love to get up close and avail themselves of a hug when they can. And just quietly, it’s pretty cool too.
 
This entry’s title “When Preppies attack” was inspired by a podcast “When patents attack”, by This American Life, one of the world’s best radio efforts.

Primary School Debating - Good for you, your kids, your kid's school and ... your employer

I reckon coaching primary school debating is a great way for more corporate parents (dads in particular) to get involved in their kids school.

 
This is my third year of debating coaching and I've got to say I've had a great time and met some amazing individuals - nearly all of them under the age of eleven.

Speaking from experience, as a senior executive working full time I found it difficult to work out how I could interface with my son's school in a meaningful way, so I largely outsourced it to my wife. Don't get me wrong, I fully understood the concept and the benefits of having parents help out at schools (especially dads), but the idea of helping with reading groups or tuck shop frankly just didn't appeal to my ego.

But about 3 years ago my son decided he wanted to try out for the school debating team. With some encouragement (read manipulation) from my wife, I found myself volunteered to coach a bunch of five nine and ten year olds. To my surprise I realised my general corporate communication and facilitation skills were just as applicable in training my new debating team.

1. Most corporate jobs require you to clearly communicate a persuasive message every day, be it in front of a PowerPoint slide, defending/enlarging your budget, or convincing a prospective new manager that you are ready for that next role. Effective communication and persuasion are everyday corporate skills, so too in school debating.
2. Debating is not a mysterious art, it is a highly structured and rule based process. So once you've read the debating "how to guide", you're good to go.
3. Facilitating a group of pre teens is easier than chairing a corporate meeting. In this case, you are the wise elder with the loud voice and the bag of lollies to encourage compliance (if only your work meetings were like this!)

I expect the main objection corporate parents have is that they don't have the time available (I know that was part of the problem for me). Well it is true that coaching a school debating team does take time. On the plus side, the actual debates are generally held out of school & working hours and the dates are generally known weeks in advance so scheduling these should not be a problem. However, committing to a weekly practice session will be the most difficult to schedule. But before you throw your hands up and say you can't afford the time out of your diary, let me just give you a brief sample of the guilt trip I could lay on you…

• It's great for your relationship with your kids. It gives them a perspective on you as an individual not just as their parent, it's an opportunity for you to teach them a life skill, and by meeting and getting to know their school peers it gives you a better context for understanding where your child is at.
• It's great for your kid's school. Having professional volunteers (especially male ones) on the ground delivering a learning experience is gold for your child's school. You become a role model for why learning and attending school is important.
• Finally debating’s great for your kids. Debating at primary level helps them start to form ideas of their own, appreciate both sides of an argument, and become adept at thinking on their feet, all of which builds confidence and aids their intellectual development.

So let’s face it, when the payoff is that good, YOU CAN SPARE THE TIME.
Yes, scheduling and logistics will be a challenge but you're a grown up executive, you're supposed to be good at this stuff.

So here's the pitch. I want to see more corporate parents (especially dads) get involved in their local school and debating is a great entry point. But am I stopping there? No. I'd like to see HR and training functions within corporates encourage/formalise/legitimise this as a personal and leadership development opportunity. Coaching a school debating team has benefits for you, the individual, your family and your community. You don't get much more development pay off than that.

It's worth the effort!

How I think the “aging population” will make us a more compassionate nation, probably overnight.

As a result of our aging population, I think Australia might wake up one morning and find itself more compassionate.  

Last week I was urging some young indigenous undergraduate marketing students to think about the not-so-obvious future social & marketing changes associated with an aging population. All the usual stuff came up: death becomes a growth market, housing requirements will change, the need for increased health care, pets as therapy, etc. Then we got onto how society's attitude will change as a portion of the population starts to disappear. This was where it got interesting.

For a few years now I've been dismayed at the lack of compassion shown by almost all our political leaders and the popular press on issues like refugees, gay marriage, the support of indigenous peoples and the needy in our community. The thing is, I struggle to see the allegedly large portion of our community who hold these values dear to their hearts.

True, I don't read News Limited newpapers and yes I do live in the rarefied air of a leafy suburb in Brisbane's north, but when I walk down the street I generally speak to compassionate people. People who don't care if you're gay, who would welcome someone who has gone through terrible hardship to get here, and who see great value in our indigenous peoples whom we've marginalised for so many years.

So when our political leaders speak about these issues in such harsh terms, whom are they speaking to and if these people are in the majority, why don't I run into them, even occasionally?

One group of people in the community I know are more likely to hold these beliefs are the aged - people like my Mum. She's 80 something and when asked recently if she would help knit a blanket for "the homeless", she looked aghast and said something along the lines of "Why would I do that for those bludgers?". Mum's always been like this, especially when you talk about de-identified groups in society. But on a personal basis she's as compassionate and welcoming as I am, if she had been asked to knit for a neighbour or the Salvo's, she would instantly have said "Where's my needles?"

My theory about Mum's attitude (and that of many of her contemporaries) is that having experienced the depression as a child (quite literally the "worst of times"), she learnt an extreme lesson in self reliance that in modern Australia we've never had to learn. That you personally had to take responsibility for yourself and your family, otherwise you/they could starve. Importantly there is another side to this, that if you couldn't look after yourself or chose not to, you were a burden on everyone else, a bludger. This lesson, learned early, has shaped her thinking through her life.

We've found this attitude very hard to shift with Mum, so rather than battle with her in these last years of her life, I sort of quietly ignore it and say "Oh Mum that's not right", or we change the subject. That's how I'm going to continue to play it too.

So here's my point. I think there is a segment of society who have strongly held views about this stuff and it's not shifting, it's ingrained and was put there a long time ago by a powerful experience. On the positive side I think many parts of Australian society have changed their views to be more progressive and compassionate on these issues and that's why we seem to be nearer and nearer to a tipping point. But now we are down to the "rump", the unchangeable.

So let’s be blunt, there's a good portion of the "rump" in our aged community and this group is dying at a higher rate than everyone else. So I reckon one morning in the not too distant future Australia will cross the compassion line as regards refugees, gay marriage and acceptance of indigenous peoples, mainly because there will be fewer of us responding to the political dog whistle.

A final and important point, I am not saying that all aged people have negative attitudes towards refugee, gay, or indigenous communities. What I am suggesting is that these attitudes are more likely to be found in the aged.

How’s that for a first effort?

Post Zero

I recently heard an interview with the fantastic Barry Humphries, in which he told Richard Fidler how the then Edna Everage, originally contacted him:

“She had read “A write up”… Anything about you in the papers was as far as your mother or her friends was concerned, a “Write up”…. Effort too… I like effort. They didn’t like your effort… Sometimes I call a show a “New effort” by Barry Humphries. And it is an effort”.

So I’m calling my Blog, "A bit of an Effort!". Who knows I might even get a “Write up”.

The interview is hilarious - It's here