Some thoughts … on thinking
My wife says – and I expect that, as usual, she is right – I think too much. In my defence, I would say that I am a human being and that thinking is one of the things that characterises us. We are Homo sapiens, after all; we are “thinking things”. The great thing about […]
Eulogy virtues
Recently, I attended the funeral of a colleague and friend who was taken from us suddenly, and much sooner than any of us would have expected. Cameron was only 61 years old and had retired from a long career as a teacher just over a year ago. As I listened to the wonderful eulogies that […]
“Who am I? What am I becoming?”
Carl Rogers, a pioneer in the field of clinical psychology, wrote – It seems to me that at bottom each person is asking “Who am I, really? How can I get in touch with this real self, underlying all my surface behaviour? How can I become myself?”.[1] More than sixty years later, it seems that […]
On the need for wellbeing programs in schools
Personal experience and logic both suggest to me that adolescence has, most probably, always been a time of angst. Young people have the awareness to understand the challenges in the world around them (and, often, a capacity to imagine the worst), but do not yet have the experience or autonomy to be able to do […]
The paradox that is servant leadership
“Good leaders must first become good servants”. This extraordinary, counter-intuitive leadership theory was first proposed by Robert Greenleaf in 1970 and has since become a highly regarded alternative to more traditional, top-down leadership paradigms. To better understand servant leadership, it is necessary to consider the key principles to servant leadership that were developed by Greenleaf, […]
Why the obsession with ATARs?
The weeks leading up to Christmas are often referred to as the “silly season” and I suggest that it has to do with more than just shopping. If you have high-school aged children, or if you have anything to do with schools, you can’t have failed to notice that there has been a lot of […]
