When should you ring 999?

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There was a lovely passage read to me by one of year 5 this week from Anthony Horowitz’s book ” Public Enemy No 1″:

“Mr Roberts … had been teaching history for so long that I reckon he must have been alive when most of it was going on.”

I had to smile as earlier in the week we had been talking about the wonderful example of Simon Weston, the Welsh Guardsman so badly disfigured in the Falklands War, when I found myself talking about that episode in my history in a “Tell us about the olden days, grandpa?” sort of way with Year 5. I recalled the Thatcher years and the Task Force sent from these shores to reclaim the Falklands and how my fellow sixth formers avidly watched the news reports in our Sixth Form Common Room, wondering if the next day’s post would contain our call up papers.

Sensing the gift of a red herring on a plate, the children encouraged me to turn to the world map as we followed the Task Force on its mission and” counted the planes as they set off and as they came back” and retold the scandal of the Belgrano.

A lesson or two later we were in post war Germany as the Russians invaded, enjoying the middle chapters of ” Silver Sword” by Ian Serraillier.

“Whats a communist ?” one pupil asked, opening up my stories of the post war “Cold War” of my childhood and early adult life and the collapse of the Berlin Wall etc.

Today that Europe once divided East and West, but now more often North and South, battles to save its Euro credibility, while Putin’s Russian “democratic” elections are contested in Moscow street protests.Bankers are classified as the source of all this new millenium’s evils as campsites outside city cathedrals witness to the” real truth” that we’re just not getting. Afganistan faulters as brothers in faithname bomb out their differences, and hopes felt and found in Arab Springs harded in the freezing winds of reality.

It will be interesting to see how history sifts and filters the events we are living through to provide the easy read history narrative we file to tell to the next generation as they in turn ask…

” Tell us about the olden days”

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I am always struck by the tremedous examples of bravery, commitment,resilience and humility, in short, humanity at its best, that is Children In Need.

Here at LPS we had a lovely day sharing our homemade cakes and admiring our spotty clothes, while listening to some remarkable stories of young carers.

In a follow up assembly yesterday I told the children the bible story of the three servants and the talents. I asked the children what great gift were we given each day? The first three replies were “LOVE” from a boy in Y2, “HOPE” from another Y2 pupil and “LUCK” from a little girl,wise beyond her years in Reception. LIFE of course swiftly followed, with AIR and FAITH to follow.

As so often happens, in teaching , the teacher learns. Each of the responses was said with all the child-like simplicity to fool the wise. That LOVE came first was to me a reminder of the source and purpose of all life, Creator to creation. HOPE reveals the expectation that something new is to be grasped in each new day and that it is a good thing. LUCK reminded me that we are indeed lucky to be alive now, living this day! What a great outlook on life! Thank you children.

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“Sir! Sir! Are we going to keep two minutes silence for Poppy Day?! were the words that greeted me from one of our year four pupils at eight o’ clock this morning.

This, together with an urgent text from one of my teenage daughters yesterday to” Pleeeeeeeeease buy me a poppy for school assembly”, made me realise the hope and the power of this national day of remembering. It is also a powerful thought, is it not that this is the first Armistice Day when there are no surviving servicemen from the First World War. That chapter is closed. Whatever our beliefs, they are together now in death. Those grown old are no longer the ones left…. and yet the generations of 1939-45 and the generations of the subsequent conflicts of the last century and this take their place as we stop and remember.

At school, busy London Road quietened and the road cleaner ceased his mechanical leaf blower for a time, as the guns announced the beginning and the end of the silence over the city and our little pupils remembered “Them” as they have been taught. It is a very powerful moment in any school when all pupils, all staff come together and know that this is important. A moment of the spirit. We read the Laurence Binyon’s Ode of Remembrance, For the Fallen, and the little children in their innocence of unknowing still knew what it meant.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.

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Half Term

Posted by Leicesterprep on October 27, 2011

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