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Warden’s Thoughts: ‘What is the Point of School Sport?’

Latest Thoughts from the Warden:

29th January 2018

When I was a young teacher I used to think that whether my team won or lost on a Saturday was all that mattered and I would be depressed for a week if my team lost. It was what defined me as a teacher. As a Liverpool supported I quoted Bill Shankly:

Some people think that football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. It’s much more important than that.

Happily I grew out of that. But what is the purpose of sport in schools? Is it to hire in all the Ireland Under 16s into the 5th form in order to have an unbeaten season, to win at all costs, or is it to teach the importance of teamwork and to develop resilience of character? Does one develop resilience by being thrashed every week and getting demoralised? Or by trouncing the opposition every week and never losing a single game? How does one learn to treat the two great impostors of triumph and disaster the same if one only ever experiences victory or defeat? The Victorians who codified all the great team sports and introduced them to the public schools were under no illusions:

And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat

Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame

But the captain’s hand on his shoulder smote

‘Play, play up and play the game.’

It was not about personal glory but about something much greater…the team, the honour of the school, playing the game in the right way, rather than just to win. Unfortunately the next verse makes it clear that this was merely the ideal preparation for young Englishmen going out to slaughter natives in the colonies, so let’s not get too idealistic about it:

The sand of the desert is sodden red

Red with the wreck of a square that broke

The Gatlin’s jammed and the colonel’s dead

The regiment’s blind with dust and smoke.

The river of death has brimmed his banks

And England’s far and honour’s a name

But the voice of the schoolboy rallies the ranks

‘Play up, play up and play the game.’

(Sir Henry Newbolt)

One could argue that nowadays we live in an age of professional sport that could never have been envisaged by the Victorians and it is our obligation as educators to prepare our pupils as best we can for whatever careers they wish to pursue, including professional sport. They need to learn that success does not come without hard graft, that there is no gain without pain. They need to have an outlet for their aggression and energy and where better than on the sports field. They need to learn to work with the limitations of others and to work to the strengths of their team. Is there a better feeling in life than being part of a really good team? And if they happen to be good enough to turn their passion into a professional career, then surely that is a good thing.

Yes. But there is an increasing tension in school sport. Gone is the schoolmaster who taught Homer till lunch time, practised with the choir after lunch, then put on a tracksuit and ran a training session till dinner. He was competitive but still viewed the sport as part of the whole picture of educating a young person. Winning was great, but losing was not terminal. Now all good sports schools employ external professional coaches. They are not school teachers, with a wider perspective, and they want to win at all costs. They are not looking at the bigger picture but at winning the next match. How their team behaves is less important than the result. The crucial role of sport as a creator of character has been outsourced. It is bound to make a difference.

Captaining a rugger team at school is no longer considered a prerequisite for governing a large part of India or Africa. However being a team player is still seen as vital in almost every career that I can think of and that is why public schools have always placed a greater emphasis on the team sports than the individual ones. Playing in a team teaches you to work with others. That is a great thing.

Even in a cynical age, which justifies cheating to win, everyone loves it when someone displays true ‘sportsmanship.’ It is as if we all know, in spite of ourselves, that there is a better way to do it. Bunny Austin, who was the last Brit to reach the men’s singles final at Wimbledon prior to Andy Murray, was a friend of my parents. He told a story about playing in a big match, when he hit the ball onto the sideline. The umpire called it out but his opponent graciously intervened and said that the ball had been good and the umpire changed the call. After the game Bunny was furious with his opponent, despite the call having gone in his favour. He was angry because his opponent’s action had undermined the authority of the umpire and made him look silly. Really. Don’t you love it when a golfer calls a foul on himself, which no one else has seen, or when a batsman walks when he is give not out? And don’t we howl in derision when a penalty is given when the player dives. The TV pundit then says, ‘well he touched him, so he had every right to go down.’ We know what is right, even if we rarely see it. Just imagine if Thierry Henry had turned to the ref after his double handball against Ireland in that World Cup play-off and said that actually he had handled the ball and he did not want to win qualification in that way. He would have saved France total humiliation in the tournament and he would now be considered the greatest sportsman who had ever lived. But no…he didn’t. The end justifies the means.

So what is the end of school sport? I would argue that it is to play as hard as you can, to teach your pupils to respect the referee and the opposition, to be gracious in defeat and humble in victory, to make friends and to learn the importance of the team.

When I was taking the 1st XI cricket at Wellington College in the UK we played Rondebosch Boys from Cape Town. They were very strong and won comfortably. In the post-match speeches their coach said, ‘going on tour is all about beating people.’ I wanted to rebut him publicly but I was decent and gracious and congratulated him and his team. But he was wrong. Totally wrong. Going on tour is about making friends, having new experiences and learning.

One year I coached the 1st XI at Ivanhoe Grammar School in Melbourne. Before the first game there was a cap presentation ceremony and they were given out by a former Australian captain, Graeme Yallop. I can still remember what he said because it was so awful and so against everything that I believed in. He told these young boys that they should not let anyone get in the way of fulfilling their dreams…that they should elbow aside anyone who got in the way…that they should be utterly ruthless and selfish to get what they wanted, by whatever means. I wanted to object but as I looked around the room the parents were all nodding with approval and I was just a Pom on a gap year and I couldn’t afford to lose my job…so I kept quiet.

Sport at school is about many things, but above all it should be about teaching values, teamwork, resilience and respect for others. I may be very old-fashioned but I still think it is about learning to meet with triumph and disaster and to treat those two impostors just the same.

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Transition Year Pupils Attend ECO Conference

On Tuesday January 23rd eight Transition Year pupils attended the 9th annual DLR ECO Conference in Dun Laoghaire Town Hall. The conference is run in conjunction with ECO-UNESCO and Stillorgan College of Further Education, and aims to influence young people to become stewards of change both in and outside of their school communities.  Upon arrival we were warmly welcomed by Mr. Dean Eaton who passionately explained the need for the sustainability and the awareness of the sensitivities of our environments in our world today. Our pupils actively engaged with other students present through activities such as the World Trade Game and Food Miles Workshop, they also attentively listened to talks from Rebecca Doyle of The Native Woodland Trust, Veronica Ryan of WECREATE and finally Ji Hynn Kim of ECO-UNESCO. The day was thoroughly enjoyed by all the pupils involved, and we return to St. Columba’s better prepared to become stewards of change without our community.
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Geoscience Week

A number of our Transition Year pupils recently took part in a Trinity College Geoscience Week. Shannon Dent reports on a challenging but exciting week’s events.

Geoscience week was organised to engage students into geology and the importance of this science in our daily lives. I went to this event with two other students in Transition Year in St. Columba’s, Calina Sacolax and Sam Lawrence. Apart from us there were 12 other students from different schools that also showed an interest to science and geology. The activities ranged from lectures to museum visiting to a day on the beach analyzing rocks and entering a small cave. We had 3 lectures and the one I enjoyed the most was one focused on seismographs and looking at earthquakes. The museums were also great fun. I have always wanted to visit the Book of Kells and the Old Library, and I was able to do it! It was a beautiful library and the book itself was crafted so intricately that I can understand the reason for its popularity. We also visited that Natural History museum which is packed with exhibits. Among the museum category we visited an art and science exhibition. These were a lot of fun and there was one specific piece that caught my eye, which was a DIY science kit including its own microscope that was made entirely of materials you can buy at local stores. During the beach day my friend Sam and I were picking at a rock and a shard-like piece fell out. We looked at it and decided to build a sort of spear with it, which sounds dangerous but was actually just for gags. Later on Shane told us about the micas (which are the shin bits in rocks, more specifically in granite) you can find in that specific rock and the layers of age in the rocks. Overall Geoscience was a really enjoyable activity and I definitely do recommend it for all Transition Year students who are interested in looking at the world through a scientific and curious point of view.

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Junior Play 2018

This year’s Junior Play is a short one (rehearsal time has been particularly limited this term): Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News, first produced in 1904, a classic of the Irish one-act canon which tells the tale of small town citizens on a normal fair day allowing their gossip and imaginations run riot…

There are two performances, and parents are welcome at both: Friday 2nd and Saturday 3rd February in the Big Schoolroom at 7.15pm (performances should be over by 8pm). No booking is needed.

The Cast:

Mrs. Tarpey – Emily McCarthy
Mrs Fallon – Aurora Higgins Jennings
Bartley Fallon -Tadhg Rane O’Cianain
Jack Smith – Nikolai Foster
Mrs. Tully – Elizabeth Hart
James Ryan – Jamie Green
Shawn Earley – Florian Zitzmann
Bridey Casey – Emma Hinde
Magistrate – Caleb Swanepoel
Garda Joe Muldoon – Guy Fitzgibbon

 

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Parents’ Association Lecture

(Please note that this event has been switched to the Big Schoolroom at 10.30am on Thursday 25th, since Sixth, Fifth and Fourth Formers will also be attending).

The Parents’ Association is delighted to announce that we have arranged an informative presentation for our parents which will take place next Thursday, 25 January 2018 at 10.30am in the Big Schoolroom. Our guest speaker will be Professor Donal O’Shea, HSE Clinical Lead for Obesity.

Professor O’Shea is a consultant endocrinologist and physician based in St. Vincent’s University Hospital and St. Columcille’s Hospital. Qualified from University College Dublin in 1989, he moved to Hammersmith Hospital in London and was awarded a Wellcome Trust Training Fellowship to study how the brain controls appetite. Since 1999, he has been the lead clinician for a hospital-based multi-disciplinary obesity service that includes bariatric surgery.  In recent years he chaired the health impact assessment group on the potential benefits and harms of a tax on sugar-sweetened drinks and co-chairs the Royal College of Physicians Policy Group on Obesity. He is a regular commentator on the importance of preventing overweight and obesity, advocating for changes in how nutrient poor, energy dense food is promoted and marketed to children and young people as well as the need to re-engineer regular physical activity into everyday life.

As Clinical Lead for Obesity, Professor O’Shea works with the HSE Healthy Eating Active Living Policy Programme. A key focus of the role is the development and integration of evidence based models of care that strengthen prevention, early intervention, treatment for overweight and obesity across primary care and acute services for both children and adults.

The talk will be followed by a Question and Answer session and then our regular Coffee Morning will take place in the Lower Argyle, giving parents the opportunity to chat and catch up before collecting their children for the Exodus weekend.

We are very pleased to have been able to secure Professor O’Shea as a speaker and really hope to see a good crowd there to listen to what he has to say. We are confident it will be an extremely informative event.

Janine Jamieson, Chairperson of the Parents’ Association.

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Staff and Pupils’ Concert

This year’s Staff and Pupils’ concert on the evening of Sunday 21st January featured slightly fewer performers than previously, thanks to the ‘bug’ which had depleted numbers in the school. But it was a real tonic for the spirits, with ten performances of high-quality musicianship. Mrs Malone-Brady in her introduction pointed out that duets featured strongly this year, and that playing with someone else was a great way to learn, while having fun in the process.

However, solos started and ended the concert. The first was from Sixth Former Hector Wright, who sang the perennial South Pacific favourite “Some Enchanted Evening”, followed by singing teacher Edel Shannon’s version of “Till there was you” from The Music Man. Her confidence and expressiveness were a good example of the value of pupils learning from their teachers how to perform for an audience. Two pupils followed: Charlotte Klingmann (IV) played Danzi’s Variations on Mozart’s “La ci darem la mano” with lovely consistency of tone, and Aurora Higgins Jennings (III) accompanied herself singing ‘Wishing You Were Here” from The Phantom of the Opera with a great sense of mood.

Then the duets took over, starting with Edel Shannon and another singing teacher, Anna Brady, who delivered the popular “Flower Duet” by Delibes with aplomb. The Transition Year group had been hit by illness, but Alan Grundy on the guitar accompanied Charlotte Klingmann, Josepha Westphalen and Sakhile Khumalo (with a particularly pleasing light voice leading the line) for “Horse with No Name”. Mrs Malone-Brady then explained piano duets, and with Anna Brady gave familial performances of Schubert’s “Serenade” and a Hungarian dance by Brahms. The final duets featured Alan Grundy (by far our longest-serving music teacher) with Ann Murnaghan in a guitar/’cello combination, including a ‘world premiere’ performance of Alan’s own lively piece named after a Homer Simpson quotation: “This is not my fault. It was like that when I got here”.

The finale was provided by Anna Brady, with an hilarious performance of Adelaide’s aria from Jonathan Dove’s 2006 opera The Enchanted Pig (“I want shine! I want bling!”) – an excellent way to polish off another highly enjoyable concert.

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Warden’s Thoughts 2

The Warden’s second blog-post of 2018 is about recent events in the world:

Every time that we think that Donald Trump cannot get any lower we are proven wrong. It would be funny if it were not for the fact that he is the most powerful man in the world. This time he has described Haiti, El Salvador and various non-specified African countries as ‘shitholes.’ (I don’t see the need to use asterisks to tone down the language.) I rather enjoyed the response of the Botswanan government who contacted the US embassy in Gaborone to ask whether Botswana was one of the shitholes to which the President was referring. I know Botswana well…it is a wonderful country, full of fabulous people. I also spent New Year’s Eve with a very good friend from El Salvador.

No one needs to be told that there are many countries in the world which are full of poverty, poor infrastructure and corruption. Sometimes those failures are due to no fault of their own and sometimes they are self-induced. A bit like all of us really. However for the loudest bully in the playground to start abusing the weaker ones says far more about the bully than it does about the bullied. It is good to remember that the USA is a country of immigrants, who often fled from poverty and persecution in their own countries. They are the lucky ones to live in a great and prosperous country, from which the indigenous population was ethnically cleansed to make way for them. It is also important to remember that much of the wealth of the United States was built on the backs of slaves from those shitholes, carried far from home against their wills and abused for generation after generation. Only in the last fifty years has the ‘Land of the Free’ ascribed civil rights to African Americans but there are still huge inequalities in the USA.

America itself was not a colonial power, at least not in the manner of the European powers, but many of the problems of Africa are the legacy of colonialism: random borders uniting traditional rivals and splitting traditional friends, uneducated people left after independence to run their ‘liberated’ nations, resources exploited by foreign powers and an understandable brain drain which has resulted in many of the outstanding people from African countries, unable to make a good living at home, nor give their families the security they wanted to moving abroad. Many work in top professions in the USA.

I am sure that I am not alone in seeing the USA as, in some way, the bastion and champion of the free world. I long to be able to look up to it and to its president. But what sort of America do I want to look up to? I want to see an America that is wealthy but does not want to hoard that wealth for itself; I want to see an America that is confident in itself and what it stands for, but does not despise those who are different from her; I want to see her setting an example in the harmony of relationships between ethnic groups.

One day, probably quite soon, the American people will look back at this time as an excruciating aberration. For now though it is just simply embarrassing.

Mark Boobbyer.

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Warden’s Thoughts

The Warden’s thoughts as the new term and year start:

9th January 2018

‘There are two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.’ (John Adams, second president of the USA)

The best schools and colleges have always had a holistic view of education, believing that what goes on inside and outside the classroom are of equal importance in the development of young people. I am sure that one of the reasons why British and Irish boarding schools continue to be so attractive to parents and children from overseas is because in many developing countries the emphasis is all on academic performance, to the neglect of everything else. One hears stories of children in some places who get up early to study, attend school all day, come and home and have hours of tutoring before falling into bed and getting up to do it all again. Many parents want more for their children and that is what St. Columba’s and other such schools have always stood for.

I like the above quote by John Adams, who distinguishes between these different types of education. Academic achievement is of crucial importance in providing the tools for success. Public exam results open the doors to good university courses and university degrees equip young people either directly for a career, in the case of science or technology subjects, or indirectly, through the Arts, by enabling them to think clearly and understand and appreciate the world around them. Those exams are the markers that we have acquired the tools to earn a living and, however good our personal skills may be, without those markers it is harder to open doors to success later in life.

However, one can be successful in one’s career while failing in one’s life. As a wag once said, ‘on your deathbed no one ever says, “I wish I had spent more time at the office.”’ It is the experiences and relationships in life that give it value and also give value to the lives of other people. That is the other education, which St. Columba’s nurtures abundantly. Here we learn to live in community with other people, dealing with conflict, learning to respect others and learning to respect the differences in other people; we learn to play in teams, being part of something bigger than ourselves, knowing that in a team every member counts and that the strong need to look after the weak; we learn to appreciate art, music and other creative skills, which enrich life and give it beauty; we explore our faith, learning to serve those around us as an expression of that faith, as well as giving ourselves a foundation and a direction for our lives. Without that faith we can be like a rudderless ship, tossed about by every breath of wind and unable to steer itself.

Companies these days are keen to employ young people with a broad range of skills. It has long been an adage that those with third class degrees often end up employing those with firsts. Well I wouldn’t advocate settling for a third but it is true that those who get the best degrees have sometimes sacrificed the development of other skills in their pursuit of the prize and are less able to work in teams or lead others.

I am sure that in 2018 St. Columba’s will be providing two educations. As Aristotle said: ‘The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.’ What a great blessing education is.

Mark Boobbyer

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Start of Hilary Term 2018

Monday 8th January

  • Staff meetings in morning and afternoon.
  • Boarders return to school between 6.30pm and 8.30pm.
  • 8.30pm: Roll-call in House for all boarders.

Tuesday 9th January

  • 8.50am: day boys and girls report.
  • 8.55am: first Chapel bell. Assembly after Chapel.
  • Afternoon classes on Summer Timetable today only (day boys and girls may leave at 3.35pm).
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