The Month of Contrast

Even beyond family (see my last post – The Turbo Season), December remains very much a study in contrasts. I always love Christmas festivities: things like carol services, shows, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day celebrations (not to mention the holidays); but am struck by the pressure that accompanies December. There are often more tears, more guilt, and more anxiety in December than in the rest of the year, which seems so ironic for a season of joy.

For students, in large part this is due to exams. Based on the number of people I know who still have nightmares about exams (often decades after writing their last one,) they must rank up with fear of public speaking, arachnophobia, and fear of heights in the hierarchy of phobias.

Just a couple of weeks ago, we were in the middle of the Appleby carol services. While I am only halfway through my first year here, it is hard to imagine warmer, more beautiful, and more community-fulfilling events. And now, the Gym and the Bubble are full of Upper and Senior Schools students in exam mode. They must feel a bit like they have run out of a sauna and dived into a snow drift. The prospect of holidays in only a week must also seem like an invitation back into the sauna. But first is the task of digging out of the snow bank.

Not surprisingly, exams have been the focus of a great deal of conversations around here over the last few weeks. People have suggestions about the length of exams, formats, locations, how to deal with health issues, and whether they should be held in January rather than December. Exams are important on many levels. From an assessment standpoint, they provide a common platform for teachers to understand how successful each of their students has been. But there is also the question of stress. Stress is a good thing … in the right dosage and circumstance. Most of us have achieved our greatest triumphs in stressful moments. They are almost over-stated realities that we grow most when we are outside our comfort zones, and we learn the most about ourselves in times of failure.

While performance in school, university placement, and preparation for success in university are all important aspects of great schools, our real game is a 25-year one: our number one priority must be preparing our graduates with the attributes and attitudes – things like empathy, creativity, a strong moral compass, critical thing skills, courage – to be successful throughout life. While there is an immediate argument for the benefits of exams, I am most compelled by the longer term view.  It’s a bit like Senior 2 Boarding at Appleby. While we are interested in how students perform today, we are trying to prepare them for university when they may be facing 100%, three-hour exams; or making it through the defense of their doctoral thesis; or making the pitch to their company’s most important client, after staying up all night with a screaming newborn, and knowing that jobs are on the line; or dealing with a crisis involving life and death. Exams here are a baby-step towards life readiness.  How we – as parents and educators – help prepare them to address stressful situations is profoundly more effective in the long-term than helping them avoid these times. It becomes a critical, iterative process – face a tough situation (like an exam)… succeed or fail … reflect and adapt … face the next situation … get better … reflect and adapt … etc. If you take this perspective, it becomes more relevant to focus on effort than result. So long as the student shows commitment to the “reflect and adapt” steps, s/he will continue to get better prepared for life’s challenges. With that attitude, the process becomes a virtuous circle. Without it, it can become a destructive vortex.

There are two cautionary points. The first is to recognize when kids end up “over the line” in terms of the impact that stress has on them. One of the recent positive trends in education and society in general has been the more deliberate approach to mental health, especially relating to anxiety and depression. Organizations like CAMH, The Jack Project, and Queen’s University, among many others, are lending voice and providing tools to help young people and their families recognize and address these conditions. It’s important to recognize when our kids are dealing with challenging stress in a healthy way, versus when it may be contributing to mental illness.

The second caution is to try and keep the long-term perspective when reacting to sub-par performances. We have to know our children well enough to understand how to keep them motivated to be in the “reflect and adapt” mode, rather than either tuning their parents out, or living in fear of the parental reaction. Fear as a motivator is neither sustainable, nor healthy in the longer-term.

And if anyone knows how to get me to stop dreaming about showing late, half-dressed and not having attended any classes prior to my 100% Civil Engineering 293 final exam, please send word ASAP.

The Turbo Season

So many of us have this either wonderfully or excruciating complex relationship with December.

For most, be they Christian or not, Christmas is a dominant catalyst for what we do and how our relationships play out. It seems turbo-charges everything – from shopping to family dynamics to social interactions with friends and colleagues. Whatever usually happens during the rest of year seems, for better or for worse, to be magnified three-fold in December (just like the Grinch’s heart!) This applies equally to joy, loneliness, anxiety, happiness and generosity of spirit.

One aspect of this dynamic is how we see our families. Many of us look at other families assuming that they are “perfect” and wondering how we can ever compare with whatever our own blend of weird uncles, intra-sibling conflicts, control fixations, and off-beat traditions. I was reminded of this when our family attended Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Café Christmas show last weekend.

(For those who don’t know about The Vinyl Café, it is a CBC radio show that is a bit like Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, with a blend of music and stories, either sent in from listeners or written by the show’s creator and host Stuart McLean and his team. Many of these are about the fictional family headed by Dave and Morley and relate to interactions with families, neighbours and life. Dave seems like a hybrid of the cartoon character Herman and a Bill Cosby creation, all neatly wrapped in a stereotypical, earnest Canadian package. The Christmas stories about Dave and Morley are often the best. You either love The Vinyl Café or hate it, and I am devotedly in the former camp. McLean takes his show on tour across the country on a regular basis, and Alison and I have been going to the Christmas show for about a decade. For the last few years, we have included our kids, my mother and aunt, as well as a variety of friends and relatives. It is one of those experiences that cuts across generations and I always leave with a smile on my face and my heart feeling just a little bit warmer. I highly recommend it.)

This year’s Vinyl Café Christmas show featured, in addition to the usual amazing and often little-known Canadian musical talent, two new terrific Dave and Morley stories. One of these dealt with Dave and Morley’s first meeting with their daughter’s boyfriend’s family, and over Christmas dinner no less. McLean does an inspired job humorously capturing the angst created by the collision of a teenager’s two previously separate worlds.

The older I get, the more that I realize that there is an absence of “perfect” families (the Cosby Show was just that – a show, not reality,) and that all of our families are quirky in their own special ways. The major differences are in terms of degree and specifics. The quirkiness of great aunt Edna in your family is matched by, but completely different than, old weird cousin Harold in mine. And while your brother may be completely fixated on how to cook the ham, my sister has meticulously strong views where every light bulb should go on the Christmas tree – exactly. (And none of these may come close to our own personal peccadillos.) In many cases, there comes a time when we have learn to do more than accept – we have to embrace our quirkiness and realize that it can be fun and interesting … and even enjoyable. Imperfection at Christmas dinner will make it more memorable, more exciting and more entertaining, if we choose it to be.

A Different World

Appleby has had a long tradition of great hockey, a tradition that has included boys hockey for more than a century and girls hockey for close to 20 years.

During our centennial celebration last year, the school hosted an invitational start-of-season hockey tournament with separate divisions for both men and women. What could have been a one-time event was so successful that I had the pleasure of watching most the games in the second annual Appleby Invitational Tournament three weeks ago. My youngest son Alec and some of his young cousins accompanied me to some of the games and the intensity, speed and agility was riveting. While standing in the arena and taking in what seemed like mid-season performances, any worries about the NHL lockout vanished. If you have an opportunity, come and watch one of these games. They are really entertaining.

Both Appleby teams acquitted themselves well during the tournament, but the thing that has stuck with me most relates to another team. One of the girls teams was a select team visiting from Moscow. To the best of our knowledge, none of the team members – coaches or players – spoke English, so some of the Russian-speaking Appleby students helped out with translation over the weekend. The women’s final featured the Moscow team versus Appleby. Sadly, we lost with 14 second left in the game, but it was a superb match. (There is a photo in the slideshow on the right of the two teams at the end of the game.)

The incident I remember happened at the start of the game. The Russians were a fairly dominant team during the tournament and expected to win. Appleby took the opening face-off. Our right winger blew by her mark outside, then cut inside the Russian left defense before roofing the puck over the goalie’s right arm. We were up in spectacular fashion after less than 30 seconds.

The Russian coach called over the five girls who were on the ice. He didn’t go into a long diatribe, nor did he bench them. He ordered them off the ice, to go to the dressing room and change. Their tournament was over. I was at the door when the five 14 year-olds (+/-) came off – all of them either in tears, or fighting to hold them back. Everyone in the vicinity was stunned.

For a hockey-mad country like Canada, this was a poignant reminder that different cultures have very different ways of operating. (The 5 girls aren't in the photo.)

Finding Sugar Man

Last month, I wrote about a tip passed my way from our lawyer regarding the singer/songwriter Sixto Rodriguez and a documentary about his strange story entitled Searching for Sugar Man. On Saturday, my wife Alison and I finally managed to get out to the see it. (She was quick to point out that this was our first dinner and a movie couple night in many, many years. Whatever credit I should have received for the date seemed to be negated by the frequency! But I digress …)

It is a fabulous movie that we recommend to anyone. It is hard to imagine writing this story as a fiction because no one would judge it sufficiently believable. And neither of us thinks the story, which takes place mainly from the 70s to the late 90s, would even be possible today in the age of the internet.

While the story is captivating, I found myself mesmerized by Rodriguez himself – his personality, his values and how he interacted with society. Despite our watching his story for an hour and a half, he remains mysterious. It raises questions about those we meet during our lifetimes who seem to transcend traditional paths and roles. While it would be hyperbolic to consider him a prophet, it does make you think about those special individuals whose words, actions and auras affect far more than could be imagined.

Here again are links to a couple of his songs ...

Sugar Man

I Wonder