Respect and friendship
I knew something must be wrong when small groups of staff stand at the edges of your working area looking at what your doing with shaking heads and folded arms obviously horrified at the delivery of your workshop.
To cut a long storey short we were playing musical chairs with a twist and blind mans buff with 30 secondary school students, followed by falling backwards into trusting arms, all activities designed to place participants in positions where trust and respect and friendship are highlighted.
The expectations of the school were so very different from what we were trying to achieve and a quite word in my shell like made me feel extreemly awkward and that this was inapropriate free form woolley liberal nonsence that did not fit into this school of artistic exellance where teachers at the top of their game taught students who learned things!
Oh……..we were trying to demonstrate the values of respect and friendship as the project was designed to include participants in experiencing the core Olympic values and this afternoon we were going to write some thank you cards make some friendship bracelets and do some art and craft stuff you know watch an instruction video showing you how to make some paper flowers and that out of crepe paper, possibly read a poem make little gift holder simple origami sort of pyramids, whatever you want to do really.
I felt pretty humiliated and that how could we be this far into the project and have missed the target so completely. I found myself being shown a display of wildcat sculptures from lce cream tubs and paper mache with leopards painted on them. All 20 of them were formulaicly painted and constructed, obviously a lot more art was involved in creating these sculptures which had shown how to research something and make it.
Fair enough.
Our values project has a budget of £20 materials per day and is not being marked for exam criteria and we send a gift onto the another school as indeed will receive one in turn from them.
I am delivering this with a new collegue and we both have the full support of our project manager who assured us we were doing exactly the kind of thing that was expected of us.
We have three more workshops to deliver and as it happens determination is another of those Olympic values. A quality which we undoubtedly need to reach the end of our programme!
