Born Choosers….. forever improvers

 

It has been an interesting day at school one where I thought I would have an easy ride as both my classes today were replaced by assemblies of some sort, I was wrong……….

As a teacher you are equipped to deal with many different things in the day and also how you see things and react is paramount to the effectiveness of your teaching. What I experienced today was a similar message been delivered for drastically different responses from the student body. The first message was delivered by a young man with a life time of experiences. He was the Australian youth representative to the united nations, he spoke of his experiences working with the 40 hour famine traveling the world and witnessing the poverty and cruelty of the world, he spoke of the child slave labor trade of some provinces of India, some really powerful experiences that shows how lucky we are to be living in Australia. He moved on to speak about his “Dear Kevin” campaign, where he has been traveling around Australia getting the youth to write a message to our political leaders in Canberra. This was all positive things he was sharing and the opportunity for the student body to express their hopes and dreams to the people who make the decisions on our behalf was a fantastic one. Unfortunately the response he was looking for did not eventuate and no one in the auditorium saw what was coming next.

After showing his video blog taken be different youth around Australia was shown (where a former student of mine popped up to my surprise) He proceeded to inform the students that he will be addressing the UN general assembly in Copenhagen, where he wanted to share the students story of how they handled the Black Saturday Fires that effected so many of them and the aftermath, he wanted to let the world know about the support this community has received and how they were coping with the aftermath of this tragedy. You could of heard a pin drop as an uneasy silence descended on the room.

Then one of the bravest things I have seen from a teenager in a long time happen. A young girl stood up and stated that the trauma of black Saturday still hurt too much and it felt like once they get a chance to move on with their life, someone comes along and opens up old wounds and it hurts too much. The emotion shown was amazing, it was articulated further by another student who let him know that even though she was directly effected, there was an effect on her as she is a part of the community. The spotlight was firmly on these kids in the months that proceeded the fires, then when the media circus left town things became quiet however there was always someone coming to slowly open up the wound, be it a political figure, representatives from another school in the country or even a charity organization giving out things like laptops or bikes to those effected. Each one of them scratching away at the wound.

When the opportunity came for this young man with this world of experiences to express their story to the world the emphatic chorus came out where they asked him not to say anything. There was no words that could be said to express how awkward the whole situation became, they cleared out the auditorium say for a handful of students who stayed behind to share their thoughts on the situation that had arisen. I took my class back and for the last 20 minutes of the session we watched the rest of an episode of Mythbusters.

In the afternoon the students once again gathered in the auditorium to listen to an enigmatic American from New Jersey. His catchphrase was “We’re not born winners, we’re not born losers, we’re born choosers.” He spoke about the choices we make in our lives and how through those choices we guide our lives. Once again he spoke of his life experiences and shared stories of choices made by people in his life and how some chose to be strengthen from the adversity they face and others who choose to give up.

He spoke about how the words we say can make or break others, and how once words are spoken they can not be erased. He injected humor whenever possible and it seemed that having a heavy American accent helped…….

On reflection the choices we make in our lives not only effect us personally but has a wider effect in the community. However before we make a choice I think we need to decide where we want to be heading in our lives. They say that hindsight is a wonderful thing yet wouldn’t it be better to make sure that we didn’t need to think “Oh if only we did this….” or “why didn’t we do that…” rather than think “if this situation arises again how can I improve on it.”

Over the past weekend my beloved St. Kilda Football team lost the Grand Final in an amazing match of football, what made this significant was not the loss but the response to it. Both the Captain and Coach summed it up well when they said that the team was hurting from the loss, but they needed to bottle that feeling, learn from it and Improve… This is a team that nearly went through the regular season undefeated yet because their ultimate goal was not achieved it was perceived as a failure. The point is no matter how good you are, whatever mistakes you make, there is always room to improve and get better.

It is important to make the right choices in life but not only that but to improve and get better with every choice we make, remember how we felt and use that as positive motivation for future choices and endeavors to ultimately better ourselves to reach whatever we are striving for.