When we focus on things bigger than ourselves

Many years ago I learned to scuba dive and whenever we are on holiday I love to explore the underwater world. When Maddie was nine an old sea salt of a diver in Cuba took her under his arm on his 'occy' to spy on the lobsters on the wall off Maria La Gorda. She was hooked, and as soon as she was old enough she learned to dive. The two of us have never looked back. Over the years this pastime has led to connections with the people of remote Fijian, Indonesian and Thai villages, and most recently with Project AWARE and the quest to 'save' our sharks and rays. This 'work' or interest has given us a sense of purpose and immense satisfaction. It's an aspect that enriches our lives, creates deeper connections and helps us feel we are touching the future in some way.


When we encourage children to get involved in things bigger than themselves it expands their world view, creates empathy and understanding and gives their lives a purpose.

A recent story of two children in our school demonstrates this brilliantly.

Poppy is a little dog from Fiji. She was brutally injured in a hunting accident and then left to starve. Poppy somehow survived for months on her own, before a good Samaritan saved her and drove her several hours to the Animals Fiji Clinic & Adoption Centre, in Nadi, Fiji. Despite having no funds, no medical supplies and no vet, the Clinic cared for a fed Poppy and kept her safe until help arrived. Poppy’s plight came to the attention of animal lovers in Australia who began fund raising to bring her to Australia. Channel 10’s Bondi Vet Team filmed Poppy’s airlift and several reconstructive surgeries to finally give Poppy a new nose and aired a 1 hour special all about Poppy in March this year.

India Davies (a student in our school) has been visiting Fijian communities since she was a few months' old. In 2012, India was so touched by hearing about Poppy that she began a personal journey to raise funds in support of Poppy's care and welfare. In just a few months, India conducted many fundraising activities (including selling her own toys) and raised over $3,000 Fijian which she presented to the team at the Animals Fiji Clinic & Adoption Centre, in Nadi in July 2012. Poppy is now visiting with the Davies family and will feature again on the Bondi Vet TV Programme on 27 April. She is now the mascot for the 'Poppy’s Sponsor A Vet Appeal' for the Animals Fiji Clinic & Adoption Centre. The aim of her Appeal is to ensure the Clinic can afford to pay a permanent vet to help little animals in distress in Fiji - http://www.animalsfiji.org/

I'm so proud of the Davies family, India and her sister, Sienna, for their care of this little dog, and for getting involved in something bigger than themselves. The learning, the personal satisfaction and the skills India and Sienna now have will stay with them a lifetime.

Conversations about life, learning and growing up

The school holidays always afford a wonderful opportunity to spend quality time with our children. Gone is rushing out the door with brief cases and brief kisses goodbye, with a sandwich hastily made, and the cats protesting about having to spend the day outside. And in its place are long sustained conversations over breakfast and the paper or morning coffee in a cafe - or in the case of this last holiday, midday rests between hitting the underwater world for Dive No 2 of the day.

Stories anchor children to their futures

During one such conversation, Maddie, my daughter, suddenly said 'well, you know, it was never an option about whether or not I would go to uni - the conversations about post high school always included a certainty I would have a degree.'  And she's right -  our conversations and discussions since she was the tiniest thing were about creating a picture of what her future could be.

Parents are very powerful and influential in helping to create the stories that children see in their heads about a lot of things - not just their future possibilities but also about their self-worth, their capability and their attitudes to school, learning and life in general. If we know this, then we need to take care with the stories we tell and the conversations we have. Which ones will be the most powerful in helping our children develop an overarching life story of positivity and fulfilment; one in which they embrace learning and change as a natural part of life?

I think we could tell stories about taking risks, persevering, setting goals, planning for success, personal organisation and leadership. These are far better stories for anchoring the future than those stories about school results, getting good grades and doing homework.

The stories could be about ourselves succeeding or failing, about other positive role models in society (who our heroes are and why), about what's in the news and what we think about it, about our observations of daily life, and about what life could be like.

Maddie's comment got me thinking about the conversations I've had with her for the past 18 years - these conversations have already taken her to some pretty special places (both physically and metaphorically); she has learned to set goals and persevere and manage her time well; she's prepared to try for things I would never have thought of when I was 28, let alone 18, and I believe she will be a great leader in the future. As far as personal organisation goes - by the look of her room, I need to lift my game with these particular stories. I'm not sure which ones I was telling but they have not resulted in tidiness. Last year she won an award at college for having the cleanest room at the end of the semester (so clearly it's possible) - anyway, this provided an endless source of amusement for my husband and I who have never seen a clean and tidy room we haven't orchestrated! And perhaps herein lies the answer - the story we were telling wasn't often about success in the area of a tidy room - and more about how like my brother she is!

Where is your beam of awareness?

I've loved this past week.

I took some leave to accompany my husband on a trip to Queenstown on the southern island of New Zealand. He was to attend a conference and I thought 'what a great opportunity for a little downtime'. My husband is an accountant. The things at work that excite him bore me to tears so when he came home with a spare ticket to the conference I thought 'you must be joking - sit cooped up in a conference centre when I could be out enjoying the mountains? - Not a chance'. 

Anyway, two speakers caught my eye - Dandapani (a Hindu monk) and Natalie Cook (five time Olympian volleyball player and gold medallist at the Sydney Games in 2000). I figured I might just give up mountains for that... And I'm so glad I did!

While they were very different presenters they both talked about the same thing - how to sustain motivation when working towards a goal. How do we as humans learn to give something 100% effort and attention and how do we keep doing that past the honeymoon period.

It's easy to start something new, to focus on a change, and to set a goal - we have renewed vigour and a certainty that we are going to make it this time. As Natalie talked about this, I was reminded of all the diets I've started! But how do we sustain this and keep going? And as parents and teachers how do we teach this skill to our children?

Dandapani's messages about training the awareness, focusing on finishing what you start, finishing it well and doing a little better than you thought you could will stick with me, and I know I will use his 'monk tools' and analogies to make it easy for me to do and easy for kids to understand. Today's children are so distracted - they flit from one thing to another, giving everything only their light attention - a game for a few minutes, a text to a friend, a TV program interrupted by ad breaks and snack stops; sometimes it seems like they don't focus on anything for very long (and then complain they're bored!)

'Proceed with confidence.'

Dandapani teaches that the mind is everything we know, feel, see, touch, taste and hear and our awareness is like the beam of a torch that shines on what we are paying attention to at the time. When our awareness flits around like a search light at sea we get tired, we don't finish things, we appear 'scatty', we're not focused, it's hard to learn well, and sometimes we even get diagnosed with something too!

How good would it be to train our children to shine their beam of awareness for a sustained period of time on one thing and one thing only - this would create powerful learning opportunities and build the metal muscle needed to solve life's trickiest problems.

This week check where you are shining your torch light - is it flitting about or is it trained on one thing at a time? What we practise we get good at; so practising focusing our torches in our mind's eye for ever increasing amounts of time can only be a good thing.

Kids who love to learn

Last week I circulated a parenting tip sheet from Michael Grose's parenting website called The Pitfall of Using Other Children as Benchmarks.  If you didn't see it, check your Inbox.  It's a great read.

Parent Teacher Student Conferences are on the horizon at Peregian Springs State School. Class teachers will meet with parents and students during the last two weeks of Term 1 to share the learning progress your child has made throughout the term. This is meant to be a celebratory time focused on your child and your child only. It's a time to celebrate how far they have come in relation to their own developmental clocks (and not in relation to how far other children have travelled).

Parent Teacher Student Conferences can be a tense time. Parents sometimes worry about whether their child has learned as much as another child, whether they are on the same reading level as last year, whether a friend's son is faster at their number facts, and even whether their child is as fast a runner as the neighbour's daughter. The fact is that all humans are stretched along a developmental scale and worrying about whether someone is further along the scale than your child tends to lead to anxiety and tension.

As parents, we want our kids to be the best they can be - and this is the trick. We need to think of the difference between being the best they can be, and being better than everyone else. The messages we send our children either directly or unconsciously tells them which we think is more important.

If you want your child to concentrate on their own learning and recognise their movement along the developmental scale then our language must focus on their growth - and not on the growth of other children. A comment such as 'Your reading is much more fluent now than it was a few months ago' is a much better measure of progress than 'You are the best reader in the class!'  Or 'Look at these big numbers you can partition now compared to the small numbers you were working with last year' sends a better message about the learning we are looking for than 'You know more number facts than anyone else in Year 2!'

No matter where your child is on the developmental scale he or she will have taken some steps along it in at least one area and probably many more. Focusing on these will make Parent Teacher Student Conferences a celebration and will go a long way to ensuring your child maintains their love of the learning process. Kids who love to learn will continue to be learners.

What to do in this weather...

If you are like me, you are probably quite affected by the weather. On a sunny day I feel optimistic and uplifted. Warm sunshine imparts a general feeling of wellbeing. Rain, clouds and cool weather leave me feeling somewhat deflated and at times, quite gloomy.

I have always found that connecting with others generates the same feelings as sunny days - I don't mean connecting on the Internet such as Facebook and email. I mean real connection involving a warm bodied person who laughs along with you, gossips and tells stories.

Games are often at the root of all connection between humans. As a youngster my Grandma taught me how to play 21; a little unorthodox - but my skills and fluency in adding and subtracting numbers to 21, remembering what was left in the deck, and strategising about what Grandma had in her hand was phenomenal. Games were played in our home a lot - Monopoly, Scrabble, draughts and chess were the order of the day. I also remember Boggle, Battleships (my brothers loved that), Mousetrap, Pictionary, Uno and Four in a Row. Playing games was great fun and it taught us kids a lot about cooperation, being a 'good' loser, and the place of competition. We would laugh a lot, look at each other's faces, practice 'give and take', use our manners, and would usually be sitting around a table talking about other things as we played.

On the weekend I read about some research into the educational power of parents*. A group of 125 parents were asked to play a board game one night a week for four weeks with their children. The results were stunning - parents and teachers reported improved concentration, social interaction, and cooperation with siblings. (Doesn't every parent want this last one!) Playing board games also boosted patience, teamwork, sharing, communication, sporting behaviour, critical thinking skills, and fluency in maths and spelling. Family relationships improved and parents were amazed that their children did not need to be glued to the TV or Nintendo.

Parent engagement in their child's learning and development takes many forms - and if you are interested in giving your child's learning, manners, compassion, play habits, kindness and thinking skills a boost, you can't go wrong with a deck of cards and a game of 21! (Perhaps draughts might be a bit more politically correct these days.) And let's face it - our current weather system is certainly giving us plenty of reasons to stay indoors and enjoy the company of our family.

These days I still play games; many on my iPad. These are often designed to play alone or against the machine itself. I still find a way to interact with someone else, even if it means posting a 'Help' on my Facebook page for a 4Pics 1Word puzzle.

* Herald Sun, Wednesday 19 August 2009, p 27