Happily Ever After

..Happily ever after.

That’s the story, but in this case,
The wolf wins,
Jack the Giant Killer falls

No youngest son outsmarts the shadows;
in this case the most that can be said
of those left
of those eager to believe
of the listeners at the doors of faith,
yes the most that can be said is
And they lived…

I wrote this for my son Theo when he died, nineteen years ago. The (for me) unfortunate concurrence of National Happiness Day and National Storytelling Day on his birthday prompt me to post it. Not every story has a happy ending.

Not many people have seen it, and I hope the few new people who do now aren’t upset by it. It stands, I guess, as a remembrance that Happiness is not (or should not be) a smug thing but a springboard for compassionate action, and that for millions of people their lives are far worse than mine, and for millions the sadness of losing a child is a painful reality. And as it is this afternoon I have chopped logs and chased away the shadows, and am typing tentatively as I watch a kestrel on the top of a tree in our garden, I rejoice in my family and my dear friends, but…

Western Roots of Compassion

Not much more than a retweet, really.

I was chuffed to be asked for a contribution to the blog #365daysofcompassion and responded with this piece. The idea that compassion is a new phenomenon is the West is a bit silly, and i wanted to turn a rather random spotlight on a few authors and ideas. There is much more to say, of course – so much so that I can’t help thinking that there is a richer seam here than might first appear, books and books of stuff. I would have liked to explore St Ambrose more, or look at the world of Julian of Norwich, not just her writings, and then maybe looked at the charitable orders of the period immediately prior to and post the Reformation. Or gone beyond my own Catholic point of view to look at the Salvation Army, the Friends (Quakers) such as Elizabeth Fry or Christian Socialists such as the McMillan sisters – or to look at movements and people in different ways?

As Philip Sheldrake puts it,

The pages of Christian history are strewn with marginalized people and traditions as well as forgotten or disparaged ideas.

and looking at a range of compassionate practices in detail would require a meticulous exploration of people we sometimes overlook, from Beguines and Eudists to Leprosaria. Some of the institutions have changed in purpose or patronage and some of this has been in response to changes of understanding in what suffering is and where it can be alleviated. The biggest thing I think I’d want to add, therefore, is something about how our realisation of suffering changes and has changed since the writers I explored in the 365Days blog, and how a critical appraisal of the “history of compassion” needs to take this into account.

I said in my 365Days post that “compassion… appears in all sorts of different guises.” As we become aware of the pressure or demands on that compassion, perhaps we do need to look back more, to find some sense or strength – or simply answers to problems – to create the kind of opposition to the looming clouds of intolerance we seem to be facing in uncertain times. This cannot be something that a positive overview such as my 365Days blog can achieve, and Sheldrake concludes this section in Spirituality and History by noting that

…cataclysmic events such as the Holocaust have caused much heart-searching about Christian history and have heightened our consciousness of its ambiguity…It seems that we can no longer avoid the need to approach even our cherished spiritual traditions and their history in a much more critical fashion.

That this dehumanisation also occurred in the Middle Ages (and earlier) is not the issue here: it’s how our hearing and seeing now brings about a different response.

Or can do. We are faced on one hand with compassion fatigue, on another by the celebritisation of charity – and on a grimmer side by holocaust denial, or the outpouring of hatred when an enemy is seen suffering. Slower communication means less frenetic communication, perhaps?

Sauron’s Mission Statement

O Felix Culpa, O happy fault. (Here at 6’14” in English and here at 5’49” in the original Latin). Lent is here, the Easter celebrations (from which this quotation comes) will soon be here. And I’m thinking about Evil, or more specifically what fantasy writers envisage their real big baddies are after. I don’t find it straightforward.

In one of the best recent meditations on good and evil – maybe the Best, and certainly the funniest – Good Omens, Adam, the child who is supposed to be the AntiChrist is entertained with this rhyme:

Oh the grand old Duke of York
He had Ten Thousand Men
He Marched them Up to the Top of the Hill
And Crushed all the nations of the world and brought them under the rule of Satan our master.

This comedy underlies one of the principal themes of the book, in which the mundane and the transcendent meet in drily witty distjuncture and/or a poignant juxtaposition of ideas.

And there never was an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.

O Felix Culpa. This is a comic-book version – a satire, really – of the Bosch-like vision of Hell: at heart Pratchett and Gaiman are looking at an anthropology of good and evil, not a grand theodicy, and Adam, the boy at the centre of Armageddon escapes the wrath of God, the disapproval of his demonic progenitor and the very real discipline of his earthly father to and go and play, “half angel, half devil, all human…” with an apple or two he has scrumped on the way.

And in this satire of the Apocalypse, Hell is seen not only as painted in C16th horror, but as an antiquated and bullying bureaucracy; Heaven is imperious and out of touch, The downright nastiness of a Medieval Inferno is offset by an inability to manage modern technology; rank on rank the hosts of Heaven don’t really know what God plans are for Armageddon. These failures of evil occur elsewhere: the Big Bad (were)Wolf in Grandma’s bed is fooled by Red Riding Hood needing a poo, and his descendants, such as Catherine Storr’s Stupid Wolf, or Wile E Coyote have similar problems.If we were to apply to other narratives the same comic mismatches, we might find Sauron losing his keys or Voldemort not managing a bus timetable.

Very often Bad does not triumph, it seems, because it is inefficient. This inefficiency allows Good to triumph and Evil to defeat itself. Maybe the best look at the ineffectual evil sidekick for me are Pain and Panic, whose plain idiocy is a thorn in the flesh for Disney’s marvellously impatient Hades in Hercules. However, although minor characters in Rowling’s battle for domination are allowed comic inefficiency, and the mean squabbles of orcs allows Tolkien a sideways swipe at something that falls short of Evil, a dull, malicious nastiness, there are in the big baddies of fantasy depictions of evil that go beyond the silly, the clumsy, the mean. What stirs in Earthsea, the intrusive Dark in Susan Cooper’s sequence: these are not to be discounted as minor threats. It therefore becomes important to ask: what are they evil for? Why are these presences evil?

What these great Lords of Darkness are hoping to gain is not always clear. If we suppose Sauron gains the One Ring, and the new Age that is ushered in is his dominance, the destruction of all beauty, the enslaving of the free peoples, then what? And why?

Sauron is given a backstory in the Silmarillion in the Lucifer-like fall of his master Melkor, Morgoth, the dark Enemy of the World, so that

…he rose like a shadow of Morgoth and a ghost of his malice, and walked behind him on the same ruinous path down into the void.

but this is still insufficient. Malice might be at the heart of the dominating and destructive works of Sauron and Melkor, and a part of their destruction, but at the start we are not really sure what they intend but destruction.

At one level, they are evil the way they are evil in order to provide the foil the good guys need: that there is a personal element to Voldemort’s hatred of Harry Potter is one of the strengths of the series; the growing malaise in Earthsea likewise gives the books their unique flavour. At another level it can be argued that these evils reflect a societal understanding of what evil does, and in many cases there is either an explicit description of how that evil has come about in the story or in a further text (such as the Silmarrillion): a Fall, of sorts, and a touchstone for what the author/audience might see as evil.

But how do they make sense of their existence? What, to turn to my title, are their aims and mission? What is their spirituality? In a moment of clarity, does Sauron at some point think “today was a day well spent”? What are Sauron, or Voldemort, or Cooper’s Riders left with if they triumph? It seems to me they have (only) Milton’s vision of

Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace

And rest can never dwell, hope never comes

That comes to all; but torture without end

Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed

With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum’d…

Perhaps that Nash-Tolkien vision from the World War (think Menin Road or Wire as images of destruction, both linked here in the IWM) is simply of a grim, spreading, malicious destruction. The malice of the orcs, the cruel, sniping pettiness of Rowling’s OfSTED-like Dolores Umbrage are part of the bigger project as they pick apart anything good or beautiful.

The overall project, the destruction of human endeavours to be complete, at one, seeking peace and truth is what Sauron and Cooper’s Dark (and maybe Voldemort) are trying for. To see this vision we might compare Nash’s Ypres Salient at Night with Tolkien’s account of the triumph of evil in the Fifth Battle:

Great was the triumph of Morgoth, and his design was accomplished in a manner after his own heart: for Men took the lives of Men and betrayed the Eldar, and fear and hatred were aroused among those that should have been united against him.

In other words, for Tolkien’s personification of evil, the engendering of destructive hatred is the end…

For Rowling? Apart from his vendetta against Harry Potter we only seem to have Voldemort’s desire for power: the struggle to frighten, to subjugate, to use those who admire and fear that power to bring more people under his rule. Is there a weakness in the narrative here – or is the threat of this fear, the menace that comes with his followers enough? Sauron brings about strife and disunity; Voldemort seeks power and uses fear to recreate the world to his own ends. That leaves me with Cooper’s Dark and LeGuin’s failing powers. I think they are a subtler depiction of evil and will have to wait for another day.

A Contrarian Questions…

It’s International Women’s Day, or Woman’s Day – there are lots of hashtags on Twitter for it. I have put my contrarian hat on and just have some questions (I’m not going to attempt to answer them, and I have attempted not to load them with commentary – well, not too much). No, they’re not the boring and boorish stuff from eejits asking why there isn’t a Men’s Day (apparently there is, but come on, chaps) nor it is about the pay gap in Education, although probably it should be: it’s just questions arising from having been in professional contexts all my working life where women have been prominent leaders and thinkers and managers, notably in Primary and Early Years education and then in Higher Education in a School of Ed. I am not commenting here on opportunities for women to lead, or anything like this: I simply celebrate my time being taught and managed by women who have inspired me.

Last year, very probably my final year in full-time employment, I had a male line manager for the first time since I was a student. It was a nice experience – Roger is a splendid manager, a lovely guy – at a difficult time, so this isn’t a moan about blokes as managers but it does lead me to my first question:

Was it me, or why did I never see having a woman as my boss as an issue?

I learned so much from having a series of headteachers to shape me professionally: Sr Anna in Esh Laude, Leslie Grundy and Elaine Smith at Grandpont. In very different ways they were thoughtful and mindful of my need to learn my trade. When I was a headteacher, I had advisers like Julie Fisher and inspirational figures like Rosemary Peacocke to nudge me, and writers like Tina Bruce and Kathy Sylva. My next question then:

Should we prepare men coming into Primary and Early Years for some ethos-shocks, or, building on my previous question, might professional development for educators simply take female mentorship and leadership as read? Do men really need their hands holding because they might get told to do something by … a woman?

And finally: well, I continue to work with the School of Education at Brookes, and count its previous and current heads as friends, as well as delighting in working with a strong body of women as well as men. I also work with The Slade Nursery where Carol the head is an inspiration and the staff are a joy. I know umpteen reasons why people press for men to work in Early Years but my last question is

In pressing for men in Early Years are we in danger of seeing the thousands of competent, exciting (female) professionals who are already making a difference to children and families seem somehow lesser mortals?

I said I had a contrarian hat on.

Persisting Fairy Tales

Once (of course) upon a time, there lived three disciplines, and they lived in a cottage in the woods or possibly on separate parts of a campus. The Big one was called Anthropology, the Middle-sized one was called Folklore and the Teeny-tiny one was called Children’s Literature…

And one day Alan Garner and a whole load of other people threw open to all of them (rather more than three!) the question

Where are your stories?

That question, which he asks in story-form as well as lectures, might be seen as being as disruptive as the breaking-and-entering “delinquent little tot” Goldilocks’ intrusion into the bears’ cottage. In Boneland – not Children’s Literature, I know – Garner asks his storytelling ancestor this massive question about the roles of story and culture. The Man says he “dreams in Ludcruck…the cave of the world” and in response to the question about stories, begins with an origin tale about Crane. The Man’s stories (which are, after all, Garner’s stories) continue to ring true for the human newcomers to what we now might call the Peak District, and so his dancing and singing are not in vain: the stories are handed on. Garner talks about this relationship of place and story passionately, eloquently. They become origin stories, spirit stories, and mix with concerns through the ages to give Garner his alfar and his Morrigan. This kind of reconstruction and continuity gives a lot of power to the way Garner (and Townsend and Rowling and Pullman and Lewis….) themselves tell stories, drawing some of their authority (if that’s the word) from storytelling of past times. If there is continuity here it is because folklore scholarship has enabled a sort of continuity of sources. Leafield’s Cure-all Water, its Black Dog, all the Black Dogs maybe, and the standing stones at Rollright and elsewhere are examined by writers such as Katherine Briggs and Neil Phillip and often re-presented by Briggs, Lively, Rowling et al. One form of continuity.

We see another in the engaged and detailed work exploring landscape and language in Rob Macfarlane’s Landmarks which, as he writes of Richard Jeffries, is

fascinated by the strange braidings of the human and the natural.

Here, language is seen to contain elements of older land use, beliefs and practices. Sparrow-beaks explain fossilised sharks teeth and a tuft of grass looking like a bull’s forehead is bull-pated in Northamptonshire.

I have written before about folk tales that explain places, and how these “fairy” tales do provide a sort of continuity, although I think that possibly the syncretism of European story and British folk tales brings its own obscurity: Garner is on his own ground by Seven Firs and Goldenstone, but he is not suggesting that le Petit Chaperon Rouge lived in Congleton.

Where we get into trickier areas is when folklore is pulled into service elsewhere. Gargoyles and grotesques become evidence of a continuing belief in goblins; stories of boggarts become somehow real. I have looked behind me in darkening woods, been impatient to leave a lonely valley, and must acknowledge the pull of this argument, just as Garner steps (nimbly) between his own writing and rural practices and traditions in discussing the roots of his great novel Thursbitch. This talk is chilling, enlightening, inspirational – so that Big Bad Wolves, the Green Knight, Garner’s vision of story and space walking together pepper this blog: turn but a stone and start a þurs.

But can this is universalised? I suppose my problem comes down to how much is understood but not spoken and certainly not (until recently) written. Can we see a Jack-in-The-Green and know for certainty this is the same as the carving on that roof boss, and that this is a continuing belief? Can we really link Star Carr and Abbots Bromley? Did my great-grandma know quite who she might be warding off by crossing the fire-irons at night?

I would love to see those links clearly. We have tantalising hints, shadows, half-stories (Katherine Briggs’ doctoral work documenting the continuing traditions in literature in folklore across the Interregnum is fascinating) that might lead us in all sorts of directions, and Garner’s defence of place and story should not be overlooked. Rob Macfarlane’s “strange braidings” go between town and country but also between present and past, and how far back they link and join we can speculate – but we cannot know. Briggs puts it well when she comments on the recurring concerns in Arthurian stories:

A remarkable thing about the Arthurian stories is the way in which primitive themes reappear amongst the most sophisticated embroideries. It seems as if the matter of Britain had a magnetic quality which attracted every type of myth towards it

This “magnetic quality,” it seems to me, is a good image of how Children’s Literature, especially when it explores themes that themselves arise from traditional tales, draws to itself fears and triumphs from former times. Piers Torday’s There May be A Castle is a good example, where quests and knights and woods and danger are explored: Abi Elphinstone, too, works magic here. Perhaps our best bet is to see that similar concerns – fears of the outside as well as celebrating its joys, the worrying menace of wolfish men, women placed outside the Christian context by their (sometimes useful) cunning, half-seen wanderers in a twilight wood – continue to be represented in cult and place and story.

Apologies for the weak ending here: I think what it means for me is that, studying Children’s Literature I have to pay due attention to Anthropology and Folklore as fundamental to my understanding of so many works I want to study. You can see it clear as day in Garner’s Elidor or Weirdstone – but what about other books – younger children’s books, for example – I am trying to look at, where the outdoors is a challenging place?

From accepting to celebrating imperfection

In the run up to my birthday (yesterday) I found myself thinking about the Japanese craft of mending a bowl by joining the shards together with golden lacquer. I even went to the Ashmolean to see if I could find some examples (I didn’t find any). The Book of Life, part of the School of Life, explains it like this:

It means, literally, ‘to join with gold’. In Zen aesthetics, the broken pieces of an accidentally-smashed pot should be carefully picked up, reassembled and then glued together with lacquer inflected with a very luxuriant gold powder. There should be no attempt to disguise the damage, the point is to render the fault-lines beautiful and strong. The precious veins of gold are there to emphasise that breaks have a philosophically-rich merit all of their own.

and here is the full text, an essay on their rich and carefully thought-through website. I’m not sure what to make of the organisation, but I passed their shop/centre in Marchmont Street last weekend before my final visit to the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition at the British Library, which I blogged about before.

Plenty of people have explored the psychological metaphor before me.

Gold-Joining, Kintsugi. Too easy to go back to my crises of the spring and summer (and the Christmas that has just gone) and say “There! Broken – but at least I shine with gold!” Being broken is not like that. Whether a sudden crisis, or a dam-burst of emotional turmoil, or a long, limping condition, the brokenness of mental ill-health does not always shine with gold: but it invites a painstaking mending that will not hide but will (eventually) accept and celebrate. That painstaking is core, and for me it also invites two related things: silence and compassion. They are not easy, and I know I am really not good at these two things that, joined together, are transformational. Here I am, for example, blogging when the house is quiet and I could be sat still.

Cyprian Smith, whose book on Meister Eckhart has yet to be surpassed, writes in his book The Path of Life that silence

…takes us into the depths, the depths of our own minds….There is no spiritual progress without that descent into the darkness.

But (to some extent) the descent into darkness, the pains-taking of spirituality, is not taken alone. That descent into darkness is partly the acceptance of our weakness, but the mending is informed and mitigated by the communal aspects of our lives. Cyprian goes on to talk of the silence of the carefully swept room, lifeless and suffocating, and some of that comes from not listening to our compassionate selves – or to others (in person, in written form, whatever) who extend a genuine compassion to us. Feel (y)our own weakness, be confronted by it, stare at it; acknowledge and accept; be compassionate and know it is who you are, who makes you the lovely person you can be. It is in this compassion that we move to add the gold to the mend.

To extend the metaphor with which kintsugi is heavy, it is not the pot that mends itself.

Time for a job: Horror Stories

Three interview questions and their follow-up (all coming from time working as a teacher, a governor, a Head and most recently in ITT in Higher Education) and then some thoughts.

“Tell us a bit about why you want to be a teacher.” Warm-up question to start the relationship, to get the candidate talking and the panel listening. A sound check for the interview. Except the candidate froze, and grinned nervously and said “Don’t know really.”
“In which situations do you feel most confident? In which situations do you feel least confident and why?” This is a bit of a cheat, and I must acknowledge my source: Margaret Edgington’s The Foundation Stage Teacher in Action. The candidate is asked to show their self-reflection on the spot. The best one began “That’s a really deep question,” thus buying herself vital time to muster the argument.
From a job interview: “We have a lot of people in all sorts of roles in this school: tell us a bit about how you understand teamwork.” “Well, as teacher, I see myself as in charge…” And the pens of the interviewers started.

Number one was painful. A half an hour slot for an interview and despite everything we tried, questions were knocked back by increasingly long and embarrassing silences and that dreaded response. Don’t know really. Except she did know, of course; what she couldn’t do was overcome her panic and start talking. I’ve seen panic in interviews in other cases, but this was extreme. At the end of ten minutes we wrapped up.

It spurred me on to getting PGCE students to ask each other questions in a sort of interview game: four students in a group with four envelopes. A opens her/his envelope and turns to B and asks an interview-type question B hasn’t seen and B has to answer it. B then does the same to C… A bit of a giggle – but it impresses on people preparing for interviews that fluency is key. Not gobbiness, but fluency. Rifle quickly through your mental index cards of stories and start with “Well, there was one time when I was in the art base when I was a TA and….”

Number two is there so that I can advertise whole sets of questions around teamwork and curriculum that Edgington poses. They’re not exclusive to early years, and this one – and the third, around team work – might, with a bit of adaptation, come up anywhere. But others might include “How do you know if the children in your class are making progress?” or (this one more or less straight from Edgington, p9) “Can you tell us how you have enabled/could enable a ‘hard to reach’ family to become involved with their children’s learning?” Ask any of these in the interview practice game and a panic starts: but think about the job description you will have had, think about why the question is there. At heart the panel want to know What do you know about record keeping and can you do it? or Have you worked with families before and what’s your vision? The important self-reflective element here is not about to ask the candidate “sell yourself down the river;” the panel wants to know whether you have a real understanding that will sustain you when things go wrong.

What is an interview for? Partly it’s to make sure you are able to put flesh on the bones of your personal statement; partly because you are entering a profession where oral communication is key not just between you and the children, but between you and the TAs, you and the parents, the teacher in the parallel class, the governor linked to your class, the Speech and Language Therapist who visits… And there are some things that are easier teased out by conversation than reading. And this brings me to

Number three. Ouch. This was a tricky one, and having started from there the candidate argued herself into an authoritarian corner from which she would not emerge. The knack again is maybe to ask “What is this question really about?” Maybe your predecessor was immeasurably crap at this and they are looking for a good person to lead the micro-team of the class; maybe there is a recalcitrant resident of the staff room who the Head is hoping you might be the spur to their re-enagegemnt with the school project (and if the Head is hoping for this from an NQT they are either very stupid or very brave); maybe… maybe…. Even with the big hint in the question about “a lot of people in all sorts of roles in this school,” you are unlikely to know exactly what prompts this question, so you have to ask yourself ” Where are my skills? Do I have a story to tell here?” This is where the conversation element of an interview comes into its own. A personal statement that talks about your good team work can now be used as the way into a conversation about attitudes, maybe even your sense of humour.

GSOH: right, a last horror story, even if only a light one. A candidate who wrote “I have a good sense of humour” in an application was once challenged simply at interview with “Tell us a joke, then.” Really? Really?

What on earth is an interview for? Well, the first reason might be that some things on the job description and person specification are very hard to assess on paper or on line. Just like in your reading of the school website and the last OfSTED inspection, this can only take the panel so far. “Drilling down” is a phrase I’ve heard too much, but that is really what the conversational element is/should be about: details, anecdotes, further information. The second reason gets people into serious hot water: face to face interviews tell us what you’re like and (dare I write it?) “whether you’ll fit in.” I must state that I hate this second one, but there it sits, potentially discriminatory, dangerously non-inclusive, menacing an appointments panel from the boundaries between the Head’s responsibility to build and manage an effective team and a possibly illegal unconscious bias for or against this or that person. Good interviewers are at least aware of the baggage they bring; good interview panels work to mimimise the effects of the baggage.

Final point about the interview: what do you do with “Do you have any questions?” As I said in the previous post, a positive answer is better than a weak one, but you might want to know about the school’s support for NQTs, or whether parallel classes plan together, or all sorts of stuff that show you’re interested in them.

I can’t say it enough: this is a two-way process.

Roll up, Roll up: time for a job.

“The new year reviving old desires…” The new calendar year is here, spring is almost upon us…

And the desire to teach starts to stir in the trainee, impatient, maybe, with the rigours of the training programme, or simply thinking “It’s time” or “I’m ready for this.” And it is time, so here are some thoughts, unofficial, off-the-cuff, but stemming from my own experience. You may have other experiences yourself, and they almost certainly differ from mine, but this may at least help you formulate your ideas.

So here is my Polonius-like advice, the bloggiest blog post ever, in some ways, I guess, growing out of experience interviewing people for school and other education jobs. And I’d like to think first about the ambiguities of the interactions before you find yourself sitting in the Head’s Office for the half-hour grilling of The Interview. That’s about thinking on your feet, listening to the questions and having examples ready to tell the story of when you… Or when they…

First things first: selection procedures are not straightforward. They are a very particular set of human interactions, and therefore will have so many variables from the unconscious bias of interviewer or interviewee to whether it’s time for coffee soon. They also have a definite start and end but they are not where you think. They start from the scrappy info the school puts out or the over-shiny telephone system before you get to talk to someone. They might also include the person who answers the ‘phone to you – was that the Head? Will the School Business Manager be the person on the ‘phone, and will s/he set you at ease or be so officious it puts you off? Breathe, and smile, even when you’re on the ‘phone. The relationship games are already starting. No-one really intends them, but they are there. Similarly, at the every end of the interview after the excruciating “Do you have any questions?” (see below), you have to get up and walk out of the room still looking like you are all in one piece. And then the ‘phone call that evening “Hello, Nick: well, we had a very full day, as I’m sure you realise, and the governors have asked me to call and….”

The task of establishing relationships also seeps into the tour of the school. This was my advice to a Brookes student recently:

Be on time;
Remember that whatever Equal Opps say, this look-round is part of the process;
Listen to the hints: “This would be your class; Displays were Ms X’s strong point” is a hint;
Be you: don’t be a pretend you (it really shows – trust me!).

Let’s expand them a bit.

Be on time. Schools are busy places. It may be that there are other people being shown round, or the Deputy or the School Council may have set aside time to see you. This is the first courtesy. The look-round is part of the process. You are looking at them, they are looking at you. It may be that the person showing you round will be asked their opinion, even if only very informally. This leads into being genuine: don’t be a fake version you think they want. I’m afraid I’ve seen them, and they are excruciatingly embarrassing. But remember to listen to the hints. “This would be your class; Displays were Ms X’s strong point” might also be the less guarded, less professional “This would be your class; I’m sure Ms Y’s class have been having a lovely time here today, and she will get round to tidying it up before the morning.” Yes, I have heard both – and worse. If you’ve read their last OfSTED report you may have picked up some the nuances already. Just don’t barge in by saying “Yes, I see the last OfSTED said a,b, c…” especially if the abc were critical. And if you see something you really don’t like, consider: could I be happy working here? As I said, this is you looking at them as well as them looking at you. But be courteous.

What to wear for the tour? Well, not casual: if this isn’t a tour-teach-interview experience, save your interview clothes for the interview. And if it’s during the school day, dress like a teacher in case you need to get down to work with children at a table or help put a jigsaw/pile of maths equipment away.

Do you have any questions? You will doubtless be asked that at the interview, and if you aren’t, then end on a bright note with “No, I think I’m fine for now: the information you have given me was very full, and this has been a very positive experience. Thank you again.” Nervous giggles as “Not reeelly though” aren’t what you need. On a tour that isn’t attached to the interview, you might be more candid with your questions, but try not to sound like you are wary of hard work. I was once asked “How long to people stay in the evenings?” and while it was a very reasonable question, it did come over as “When can I leave?” Questions on pedagogy, schemes of work, things you might be able to get involved in might work – but again: be yourself.

Now, assuming you’ve done all this, and you still like the school and you think they like you, it’s application form (or letter or whatever) time. I’m sure you get some guidance on this as you come to the end of whatever ITT you’re doing, but here are just three things to remember.

Application forms are often read at the end of the day by tired people. Don’t waste their time or energy with

Misspellings and grammatical horrors. Come on: copy-edit ~~ebfroe~~ before pressing send. I’ve known good students lose out on an interview over this.
Formulaic stuff that staggers from catchphrase to catchphrase. I know you have a limited word count, but buzzwords won’t help.
Waffle that doesn’t show clearly how your experience and qualifications make you the person the job description is getting at.

“I know all this,” you say.

Good. Go for it.

Mindfulness

To talk about Mindfulness I want to start with Thich Nhat Hahn. Here he is working – except he says it isn’t work – on calligraphy that conveys his central messages. As he says:

Breathe and enjoy the Kingdom of God in the here and now. Breathe and enjoy this wonderful moment.

I’ll stop there and do just that before I continue.

In preparing a class on spirituality for the Education Studies students at Brookes, I have a number of choices about how to approach mindfulness.

In terms of resources, there is the possibility of using words from Thich Nhat Hanh himself and the wonderful music and Nature graphics in the Great Bell Chant. There have been times when turning the lights back on after showing those 7 mins to students has felt really quite a disruption to a sense of quiet: it is (for me and for some of them) a moving little bit of film.

The universal dharma door
is already open.
The sound of the rising tide
is heard clearly…

(3 mins ff)

and I will probably need to weave these in with this cute and thought-provoking footage from a school in Ireland.

But here I find myself in a bit of a quandary. There seems to me to be something of a divergence of expectations here. Quite what does Mindfulness (or spirituality in general) do in schools? Let’s look at what the children say, speaking of their jars full of sequins and other glittery materials that exemplify their minds – shaken and busy with ideas and feelings:

“Your jar is like your heart and there’s loads of stuff inside it….”

“Your mind is so busy it can’t think of a load of things…”

“…and then when you leave it to settle you take a deep breath and then it all goes to the bottom.”

Lovely stuff, and drawing on a similar story from Thich Nhat Hanh about watching apple juice settle. I would hope that the children are the better in some way from practising this.

The clip goes on, however, to present the children’s acts of kindness and what they are thankful for. They are personal, domestic things – making breakfast, giving mum some peace, feeding the dog; being thankful for food, presents, a warm house. So with one short clip (we have to admit it is short, edited, &c.) we move from mindfulness through kindness and gratitude.

These are interesting values and practices for schools to promote. The way they are presented is that mindfulness makes you think more clearly, acts of kindness earn the approbation of adults, and we can be grateful for what adults provide. Of course, the converse might be things we want to avoid – chaotic thinking from ungrateful, unkind children (or adults), but is this really mindfulness, or a new, maybe more accessible and acceptable catechism? Christian children all must be/Mild obedient, good as He, as the Christmas hymn goes. This is less than the commodification of spirituality that many are wary of, but it could be its schoolification.

So in terms of practice, how might we look at Mindfulness in schools? I think we might take a lesson from Forest Schools. An initiative is seen and adopted faithfully by some, with minor alterations by others, and a dilution takes place until a school calls the weekly visit to the pond at the end of the school field by a name that might also be used by a wide-ranging, risk-taking experience some miles from the classroom. Similarly, a teacher might be a committed follower of the Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism, or they might be involved in some kind of sitting mediation themselves, or following a course of guidance on mindful meditation. I suppose That Candle Thing sits somewhere around this marker – and the original project for that was a largely improvised activity. Or they might have read a book on the subject, or seen a bit of mindfulness practice as part of their Initial Teacher Education or some CPD and think that this is something they might spread more widely. I find I am thinking “Think Raisins:” the quick introduction to mindfulness many have experienced as CPD in schools where people contemplate a raisin. Is this enough to think about how one might adapt a practice to school life?

I’m not arguing for regulation and accreditation but for a recognition of foundational ideas and texts. Here – although Buddhist meditation can’t really have a foundation text from the 1970s (can it?) – I would want to refer back to The Miracle of Mindfulness. Not all books on mindfulness will acknowledge the source, something I find a bit disturbing, but here are some of the things Thich Nhat Hanh has to say, first about what mindfulness does and then what we do about or with it.

I like to walk alone on country paths, rice plants and wild grasses on both sides, putting each foot down on the earth in mindfulness, knowing that I walk on the wondrous earth. In such moments, existence is a miraculous and mysterious reality.

People usually consider walking on water or on thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or on thin air, but to walk on earth.

and then, more practically

Your breath should be light, even and flowing, like a thin stream of water running through the sand. Your breath should be very quiet, so quiet that the person sitting next to you cannot hear it… To master our breath is to be in control of our bodies and minds… Each time we find ourselves dispersed an find it difficult to gain control of ourselves by different means, the method of watching the breath should always be used.

And of course there’s much more.

Is this what the children are doing? Should their eyes be open or shut? Does it matter and if so why? Do the foundation texts need to be in play? And is this spirituality? Well, it will depend (cop-out phrase coming) on what we mean by spirituality. Is it about making sense of self and our relationship with others, in ways that Ursula King or Andrew Wright might recognise? Is it about transcendence, devotion? What are its links to communities of faith?

Some mindfulness practices – sitting quiet, listening to your breathing, trying to just be rather than plan dinner or think great thoughts, or fight feelings of inadequacy (yes, this is me, in meditation) – can be seen as practices arising from spiritual traditions in East and West. In that sense they are part of spirituality. They differ from some (largely Western) attempts to define spirituality in that they do seem, in their purest forms, to lack a goal. Sitting to sit, washing the dishes to wash the dishes: someone who sits in meditation may find clearer water in which to view their past and present (and maybe their future), but they are chasing a bird to put salt on its tail if they think meditation will automatically give that. Sometimes when I sit it’s like sitting on a block of ice, and I am desperate to finish, or I spend all my time chasing what I should have said, how I might have looked. I certainly am not “better” when I get up. It is not Penicillin or Novocaine.

Martin Laird’s books are a good way to see some synergy between the goal-orientated or biography-centred definitions of, say, Wright or King and the goalless sitting of Zen. His (Christian, monastic) perspective looks at the therapeutic outcomes of silence in which arises an awareness of our own psychological states:

The specific focus of this book [Into the Silent Land] will be on the practical struggles many of use face when we try to be silent – the inner chaos going on in our heads, like some wild cocktail party of which we find ourselves the embarrassed host. Often, however, we are not even aware of how utterly dominating this inner noise is until we try to enter through the doorway of silence.

Just sitting, for me, needs my eyes to be open: to sit where I am and see things come and go, rather than plunge myself into the interior cinema of deadlines or wishful thinking or regrets. I’ve written about this before when reflecting on birdsong in the morning. It also needs me to see the things that worry me as the “weather on the mountain:” not me, just the stuff that swirls about me (this is another image from Martin Laird).

Back to the classroom – both the compulsory-age children’s rooms and the HE classroom I’m preparing for. Although it’s a lot to ask, I think I would expect spirituality in an educational context to encompass three or more aspects:

Awareness of self and others
Compassionate attitudes
Practices that encourage these two.

Compassion and spirituality are sometimes artificially linked: Christian warrior monks, for example, in the twelfth century had compassion for some and not others, and coupled this with intense religious practice from Cistercian roots and combat to the death. Similar attitudes might be seen in religious groups today. Nevertheless, in general, spirituality is linked often to the awareness of others we might describe as compassion. It’s a tall order to “get schools” to do this work, but it has been represented in OfSTED guidance and in local curriculum materials. It is there in germ in the aims and objectives of Oxford Brookes and other Higher Education organisations – although I have critiqued this before. Compassionate attitudes, spirituality, real vision and purpose: they might be enunciated but not embodied. Children are wild, students are on their ‘phones, teachers and lecturers are overworked or grumpy, systems prop up systems rather than support users. It is, as I say, a tall order.

If a bit of quiet sitting does form competent, reflective, self-aware compassionate students (and staff???), I’m happy. If a lot of quiet sitting is needed, well, maybe schools and Universities need to think this through and ask what the role of education is. If sitting quiet and sparkly jars help, then fine, whether they have the backing of a training group or no. If, however, sitting and the rest is tokenistic and without wider ripples into school, then I don’t see the point.

So while my class for the Values and Religion in Schools module will have mention of mindfulness, will look at the SACRE on spirituality, and at thinkers like Wright, and Eaude, will mention outdoors and wellbeing and read some Thich Nhat Hanh, I do not see piecemeal adoption of spiritual practices as a cure-all, any more than I think a bit of woodland exploration will save the world. But it’s a start.

Wolf Moon

I missed the superbloodwolfmoon thing this week: cloud hid it in Oxford, although lots of amazing pictures emerged around the place. I tried, in compensation, to write a blog post linking back to my earlier explorations of Wolves and Red Riding Hood (my “Jack Zipes schitck” as someone described it) and the stuff I mull over a lot around outdoors and storytelling and wolves, and maybe (although this is where I stumbled and tripped) on the Black Dog of depression, nipping my heels nearly all this Christmas.

However, the death of Mary Oliver prompted me to buy a collection of her poems and comment on them. Social Media had all sorts going on – as is the way, some friendly and some not-so-friendly – but with today’s cold weather in England, I thought I would cite one of her bleaker pieces as apt for the weather and the moon:

Wolf Moon

Now in the season
of hungry mice,
cold rabbits
lean owls
hunkering with their lamp-eyes
in the leafless lanes
in the needled dark;
now is the season
when the kittle fox
comes to town
in the blue valley
or early morning;
now is the season
of iron rivers,
bloody crossings,
flaring winds,
birds frozen
in their tent of weeds,
their music spent
and blown like smoke
to the blue of the sky;
now is the season
of the hunter Death;
with his belt of knives,
his black snowshoes,
he means to cleanse
the earth of fat;
his gray shadows
are out and running – under
the moon, the pines,
down snow-filled trails they carry
the red whips of their music,
their footfalls quick as hammers,
from cabin to cabin,
from bed to bed,
from dreamer to dreamer.

Superb, and as bleak as the landscape and weather she is writing about. It’s over ten years since I began to explore children’s literature as means to look at the outdoors, and literature continues to be a lens I use to look at how we react to landscape. My brother, I note (as I type), is in the snow at the Cat and Fiddle – close to Thursbitch in the snow. I think of Jack Turner, and the car off the road we saw in the fog by there: worlds collide.

In Wolf Moon Oliver picks up the themes of Death and cold – “his belt of knives,” “his gray shadows” – in an almost Grendel (ettin or þurs)-like way; this is a Big Thing to terrify, with the wolves’ howling as the “red whips of their music” disturb the night. Because it is (perhaps) a simple point to make, but I feel it needs making: Mary Oliver is a good poet, not always writing comfortable nature poetry about childhood or inspirational lines about

I was thinking
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.

Five A.M. in the Pinewoods

and her sharp eye and the writing that comes from it is able to look at the aspects of nature that humanity finds inimical – and has, in some ways dedicated a lot of its evolutionary history to conquering. She is able to write about the “roaring flamboyance” of the sea and the “hallowed lime” of owl pellets: the memento mori we can gain outdoors that I mentioned in my earlier post.

The response of literature to the winter is itself interesting, and writers such as J R R Tolkien (think Caradhras the cruel) and Kenneth Grahame give vivid pictures of its dangers: although snow in The Wind in the Willows is softening, almost redemptive, the creepiness of Mole’s wintry experiences in the Wild Wood are very expressive “Then the faces began…Then the whistling began…Then the pattering began.” The winter wood; the dark wood; the wild wood as evening closes in. More modern writers have given us some great examples of snowy landscapes and confronting death: Philip Pullman works the theme extremely well in Northern Lights; Michelle Paver is terrifying in her adult book Dark Matter but also richly descrtiptive as Torak battles the limits of human (and animal) endurance in the snow, and (again for adults – I wonder if this is significant) Garner deals with death and loss in the ice in Boneland, a death that stalks both strands of the book in different ways.

It seems to me that the immediate reaction is to see “outdoors” as somewhere positive, just in the same way as Mary Oliver is seen as uplifting – but we take on these broad judgments without thinking at our peril: literature does well to remind us that the outdoors is not always friendly, as sudden blizzards by Cat’s Tor can show.

Hope you’re OK, Mark.