SG Wages

I was watching a phenomenon last night. There was a young man, certainly not an investment broker but with the sort of income and tastes that you might associate with one. He was dressed in a blue outfit, not his usual one, and looked rather harassed, as if he had come home one day to find that all his leather shoes had turned to sandals.

Out of idle curiosity, I decided to see if my memories of his chosen sporting environment were correct. Yes, indeed; this young man named 'SG' was paid approximately £120,000 a week; which works out to about £17,300 a day. It is a mindboggling figure. If you were to type it into the little Google window and convert it to SG dollars, that would be about SGD 40,000 a day.

It put me in mind of a certain unsavoury incident that SG was involved in. Apparently, he was accused of participation in the sort of thing young men get up to when soused, and carted off to the local nick. The amount of income SG would have earned for 3 days in jail would have been 120,000 in SG dollars, just for sitting at Her Majesty's convenience for a while. I'm sure his fellow detainees would have been in awe.

These days, it seems that the wages of being a good ball-kicker are far greater than anything a conventional education might bring. That said, watching SG perform in his chosen colours, or even in his away kit (which makes him look as if he is from the other team in town), is an education all of its own. He is a great sportsman, even on a reasonably bad day; and in mitigation, there are about ten other sportsmen in his field who are paid more than he is throughout the world.

Running

Recently I had the occasion to think about what it means to run a race. I came to some simple conclusions that probably need no elaboration:

1. You must run the right race in the first place.
2. You must obey the rules.
3. You shouldn't stop half-way.
4. You should continue on to the end.

I think most people have problems with the first one, though.

You see, the only really worthwhile race is one that starts at the beginning and goes on to the end. All other races are either distractions or subsidiary events. While some of us have our favourite distractions and/or subsidiary events, those aren't the main thing. A decathlete can't just keep persevering at the 100m hurdles while neglecting his other events.

That's what life is about.

Full Court Press – School Version

I remember from my short time with sports such as water-polo and basketball the idea of a 'full court press'. Essentially, in games where possession and scoring are important and it is allowable to exert pressure on all or almost all of the opposing team at once, this is the strategy of exerting that pressure in order to force errors and hasty play. This post is dedicated to LKW and HYC, the guys who taught me everything I know (which is sadly a lot less than I had the time for) about water-polo. As I was reading Huberman on classroom teaching, I happened to bump into one of these guys online. That's why this post exists.

Huberman, in his 1983 piece 'Recipes for Busy Kitchens', pointed out that teachers face at least four major pressurising factors in their working life:

• the press for immediate responsive action, estimated at 200k interchanges per year with students, staff and stakeholders, all of them wanting something 'right now';
• the press for simultaneous multiplex action, in which teachers must do many things, monitor, evaluate, provide different levels of interaction – all at once;
• the press for continuous adaptation to changing circumstances, because every student and every batch and every year's situation is different;
• the press for meaningful personal interaction, because education is a human thing.

This is the 'full court press' – school version.

The problem of facing this battery of pressures is that education is very much a human, personal art, even though we may try to see it as an extremely complex science. Any science that is too complex must necessarily be handled by qualitative, human-intensive approaches. Therefore, each of these pressures is made more debilitating by a corresponding truth about the teaching environment:

• immediate responses may be tactically useful but seldom make for a coherent strategic vision;
• humans are not good at handling more than a handful of simultaneous tasks with the degree of excellence required;
• it takes time to change and adapt effectively;
• meaningful personal interaction falls off rapidly as numbers of interactions increase.

This is what makes the 'full court press' a terrible thing. The debilitative effects on teachers in general spawn not from these truths, but from the pressures that make us deny or attempt to compromise them.

What are these debilitating effects? The question might very well be asked in a different way: "Why are we losing the game?"

We are losing in four ways related to the four pressures which act against the four truths I've mentioned:

• we are forced to focus on short-term gains, perspectives and results at the expense of the long-term view;
• our energy is exhausted by a drunkard's walk kind of approach to getting things done in all directions and ways;
• we are not given time for reflection on what is and is not, but are forced to survive rapid change and consider that a victory;
• we are deprived of collegiate fellowship and the true development of whole persons because of the lack of quality interaction.

Most schools end up like slightly dysfunctional factories, while remaining half-effective as schools.

This is what the full court press is like in the school context. It's a lot like water-polo or basketball: four quarters per game, and if you are continually under pressure, you will lose unless you are very, very talented. And even then, how long will you last?

Honours Day

"Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have, I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!"

Thus spake the apostle, and have we any reason to mistrust his words? It is said that in a great house there are many vessels, some of gold and silver and honourable in disposition, some of clay and wood and made for humble purposes. Yet besides honour, there is use; for there are things of honour with no use and things of use that we do not honour.

"Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man," said his brother apostle.

Those apostles were really good. Good as gold. And it is quite clear from their words that there are two meanings of silver and gold (and neither has to do with my own pocket-money funds). The first connotes nobility of value and use; it is used to speak of the purity of divine purpose and of the foundations built in our lives by the workings of the Spirit. The second is what another apostle calls 'filthy lucre', the cancerous desire for scoring more worthless points than our fellow humans.

Today I felt happy that young people were being honoured for what they had done, what they had earnestly striven for (and in some case, got away with). All of that has value in this world, and the Word does not refute that this is true. But in the end, the most important points were in the hymns that were sung: leadership, dedication, glory. All of it, to God and His holy purposes. Which is why I wince when I see and hear the behaviour and language of some of our athletes, and remember that I too was sometimes like that when I was young.

Old Injuries

All of you have shoulderblades. The technical term for 'shoulderblade' is scapula, which means 'cloak' in Latin. Place your left hand on your right shoulder. You can feel the top of the shoulderblade, a bony lump where your arm connects. The topmost bony process is called the acromion.

If you feel around it, you will realise that it seems connected to the end of your collarbone. That's a good thing. Your collarbone is also known as the clavicle, which means 'small key' in Latin. The connection you feel is called the acromioclavicular joint. (Anatomical language is a lot like that, and if you want to be a doctor, you'll probably talk like that too.) But it means simply that it is the joint between the acromion and the clavicle.

Seasoned doctors call it the a/c joint, unless they want to impress younger colleagues and medically ignorant friends. Or patients. Yes, patients, which is where this story is heading. Please, be patient.

Here's a very short story. Patient used to play rugby. Accident. Extremely hard impact on the point of the a/c joint. Sudden blackout. Odd thing for the pale blue sky to do, that. It turned purple at the edges, and then black.

Later, one doctor would apply force against the ligaments holding the a/c joint together, just to find out what had happened. He learnt two things: 1) patient is very resistant to pain; and 2) patient had actually separated the two bones of the joint.

The patient learnt two things as well: 1) patient is very resistant to pain and even if not, he would never allow some two-bit torturer the pleasure of hearing him express that; and 2) exactly what patient's immediate maternal ancestor meant when she said, "If you get injured, no more rugby."

Patient took six months to recover. He learnt two very important facts that would stay with him all his life: 1) it is hard to change clothes, sleep, or do many other things with only one mobile arm; and 2) girls can be very kind to an injured boy.

Patient didn't get much out of that season. One bronze medal. Three sets of torn ligaments. 22 years of shoulder pain in cold weather. And the determination to do lots of chin-ups, just to prove that he could.

Later on, the myalgia would balance the nostalgia. He would consider this a blessing. And he would smile each time it hurt, for pain is a reminder of sensation, life, mortality and love.