Looking at Balance

26 Jan 2010

After what can seem to parents an interminably long summer holiday we’re shopping for stationery and counting sleeps as we ready our darlings for another exciting school year. Hooray!

Those whose exam results were less than delightful may already have a cloud over their heads. If that’s so, parents need to nurture optimism about what’s on the horizon. Disappointment remains one of life’s most important, yet most underwhelming, building blocks.

As children head back to school they enter an environment that exists to teach the essential skills for success within society. This includes the basics of reading, writing, maths, communication skills and computing. They’ll learn and practise important social skills: how to follow orders, how to get along with others and how to handle conflict. And they’ll learn about culture—theirs and other people’s. For instance, with Waitangi Day on the horizon, the melting pot of New Zealand school children will learn about the Treaty of Waitangi Day and a bi-cultural relationship that still needs care.

Pray for the nation’s children as they shoulder their school bags to start this new school year. And pray for their teachers. The demands on them are countless and complex. Some will remain fond figures in their students’ memories for a lifetime; others will be recalled as ineffective figures that missed more opportunities than they met.

All I ever really needed to know I learned in kindergarten

Newspaper columnist Robert Fulghum wrote a wonderful piece in the 1980s headlined ‘All I ever really needed to know I learned in kindergarten’. He suggested everyone in the world stop for cookies and milk at three o’clock each day then lie down with their blankets for a nap. Ah, bliss.

Here are a few things Fulghum says he learned in his formative years: ‘Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush …’

Even after leaving teachers, classrooms and lunchtime games of tag behind, we should never forget the lessons learned at school. One lesson, reinforced by timetables and school bells, is the importance of balance: fitting a variety of tasks and experiences into a day.

What does ‘balance’ look like? Here is Fulghum’s school-day definition: ‘Learn some and think some and draw and paint and dance and play and work every day some.’ I don’t know about you, but—with the addition of prayer—that sounds like a worthwhile mix for any day.

By Christina Tyson (from War Cry magazine)