Two Stars and a Wish

This is just what life is like round ours.

There’s a commonly accepted rule in teaching that you can’t give a pupil negative feedback on their work unless you outweigh the negative with at least a couple of positives. For the most part this is easy enough to do especially in a subject where you have young people sharing with you not just the minutiae of their day, but some fairly momentous and, often tumultuous, events from their lives. Of course, that’s not to say that everything that pupils hand in has the same degree of emotional reflection to it, but by and large teachers are in a pretty privileged position when it comes to the stories and experiences that young people share with them. So this week was a big one for me, because my wee girl (actually the older of my two wee girls) brought home ALL of her P2 work. She’s 6 (and a half – never forget the half) and this is a big deal. We spent a good half hour (okay, it’s not that of a big deal – the “Wizards of Waverly Place” was on and obviously that took precedence) going through her work and looking at all the fantastic bits and bobs that reflect the sum of her school-based learning for the year. Now, Mini-Me is a genius. She has been a genius since the moment she pooped her first poop; cut her first tooth; spoke her first word…clearly, she is to be a future world leader, winner of many a Nobel Prize, do-er of good deeds and I shall live my life vicariously through her and her many successes – like all good parents do.

However, it appears that Mini-Me’s P2 teacher has failed to recognise the genius in her midst and instead saw fit to write the following comment several times: “Good work. Now give me more detail.” “Good work”? “Good work”? That’s not a positive – where is the high praise? The recognition of the talent she has before her? “Now give me more detail”? What does this woman want? For the record, Mini-Me had written about her weekend at Grama’s (yes, that’s not the right spelling but it’s how she spells it so it’s ok by me). And yes, the “story” did consist of two sentences: “I went to Grama’s. We had a sleepover.” But, to be fair, that was pretty much all that happened. We dropped them off just before bed-time; we picked them up in the morning, just after breakfast. So, Hemingway it isn’t - but it’s not bad for a summary of all that happened. More bloody detail indeed…

But here’s where I have to come clean.

I too have asked pupils to “give me more details”.

A colleague and I were discussing this the other day after marking some reflective essays. They were fine, just lacking well, detail…In order to pass, or jump through the hoop of Personal/Reflective writing, the pupils have to emote fully throughout the piece. One of the assessors for the Advanced Higher English course said that he felt the kindest thing that he could have done for his grandson, who had just started out on his AH course was for him to die (the assessor, not the grandson). At least it would give the boy a topic for his Advanced Higher writing. Reflecting on your past is not something that most adults are particularly good at and yet we expect our youngsters to not only do it, but also write about it – IN DETAIL?

Have we always needed to know every emotion that everyone else felt? My bezzie mate has a particular issue with this. She, as she would love to tell you (but as she is ideologically opposed to Blogging, Facebook, Twitter or, heaven forfend, Bebo, and therefore can’t) is fed up hearing about everybody else’s bloody emotions. Now this is not to suggest she is emotionally barren. Far from it. In the weeks following the birth of my middle child (Poorella – named that because she is the middle child and therefore never gets anything new) my bezzie answered the phone to hear only me sobbing. Not only did she know that it was me, despite my ability to make coherent sound, she also left work, stopped for fish and chips (which is the real cure for PND) and stayed until I was able to string together enough of a sentence to assure her that I wasn’t a danger to myself or others. So, not emotionally barren at all – just utterly fed up of feeling that she can’t escape the constant barrage of hearing about other people’s emotions or their reflections on their emotions. In fact, she was even opposed to me blogging lest I fall into a trap of thinking that my emotional ramblings were of any interest to anyone else…I assured her that I knew they wouldn’t be and we swept it under the carpet as we do all other potential areas for confrontation.

And I do wonder; if we get so used to hearing or reading about everything that happens in people’s lives and how it affects them will we get to a point where we reach an emotional overload – is there a capacity of emotion that we can reach? Are we going to end up emotionally desensitised by the volume of emotive ramblings out there for us? Or is it and I’m putting my money on this one, that we are capable of handling much more emotional baggage than we give ourselves credit for – it’s just a matter of being open enough to actually listen to what people are saying?

Is it really such a bad thing to always be looking for more detail?