Etiquette and Martial Arts

Today I learnt what a teacher should do if a pupil slaps another pupil in my class. Ignore it, and ignore the return slap that will follow. Mothers tell daughters to slap someone back if they are slapped first, and my sending someone to the referral room will make no difference. If the person who was slapped first does not retaliate in kind, then they may be thought of as weak, so they will lose face. Not good. As teachers, we are paid to teach, so we should ignore any of this kind of behaviour.

If a pupil who has been ignoring us all year comes to us a week or two before the exams asking for extra help in our own time, we should help them, rather than telling them that they should have concentrated all year then they'd understand - after all, that is what we are paid to do. If a pupil decides not to focus all year, they should still get our help. We don't have free time. We don't need time to mark, prepare or assess - we should be at every students' beck and call for whenever they need us.

If someone asks me which area I'm from, it's probably safe to tell them if I'm in my own area - otherwise tell them that I'm visiting my grandmother in that area, or say I'm from outside London (still best to be visiting my aunt or someone).

If my little brother or sister "borrows" my new shoes and returns them in an appalling state, then I should beat them.

Overall, the Etiquette session was an eye-opener. Very interesting ... it ended up being about conflict and assertiveness rather than etiquette, and would probably have benefitted from another session on the difference between agressiveness and assertiveness.

After the break, I decided to try out Ka-Zimba, an African form of martial arts. It was very interesting to watch the instructor demonstrate what this martial art can look like. One of the boys, whom I think does boxing, tried to fight with him, while the instructor glided around, avoiding any hits and showing how he could have got some fatal blows in, but doing this all fairly slowly and not hurting the pupil in any way. It was dance-like, and even funny at times, and you could see how effective it could be. We learnt some key moves - ngoma, stepping in and out, and another called spear and shield. Then we "freestyled" against each other in the ring. Fun!

More etiquette tomorrow, although I think I'll have a look and see if there is something else active that I could swap to do in the second session!