Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Where does Good Enough Come from?

It was Donald Winnicott, of course, who coined the phrase good-enough in connection with parenting. He first introduced the term in 1953 although he had worked on the concept for years and the idea is there in his advice to parents in his wartime radio broadcasts. Basically, it recognizes the need for children to learn that: a mother is neither…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Good Enough

The signs are everywhere. Along with so many other institutions, schools – and all those who work in them and for them – are in great distress.  Just look at the teacher responses to this tweet from yesterday One thing you wished that people understood about being a teacher in 2020 below… — Nicole Biscotti, M. Ed. 🍎❤️ (@BiscottiNicole) December…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Schools and COVID-19: Gloom and Doom, Hope and Glory

What Schools Have To Be About Now A colleague shared an article  – That Discomfort You’re  Feeling Is Grief from the Harvard Business Review and it struck a chord. Suddenly – with the pandemic – the future, that had been lurking and looming on a horizon in plain sight, had arrived all at once. And everything was different and everything…

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Books, RattleBag and Rhubarb, WW2

Mental Health, Leadership and the Plan for That

They say the war is over. But water still Comes bloody from the taps. from ‘Redeployment,’ Howard Nemerov In April 1961 the BBC Light program broadcast the first episode of a new radio drama: The Avenue Goes to War. It was based on the R. F. Delderfield novel of the same name.  It’s the story of one suburban street in…

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Education, Headlands, RattleBag and Rhubarb

The Changed Face of School Leadership

The schools we attend and work in help shape the people we become. Seven of my sixty plus years in school were spent here – at Headlands Grammar School, Swindon. It is long gone and the site redeveloped.  When people go into education as a career they sometimes seek to replicate the good experiences of their own schooling. Others dedicate…

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Books, Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Angela Brazil, the Tribal World of School and School Change

Scooterons-nous vite. It’s Back to School with Angela Brazil Long before Harry Potter – and indeed long before all those school story authors who gave us Malory Towers and St. Clare’s and the Chalet School and the Abbey School and Jennings and Billy Bunter – there was Angela Brazil. Brazil – rhymes with dazzle – didn’t invent the school story…

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Education, Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

After great pain, a formal feeling comes

It’s graduation season and across the land schools are saying goodbye to students and students are moving along and into the next phases of their lives. It’s all very heartwarming and etc. I usually couldn’t wait for them to be over.  All that dressing up and ceremony and sitting and waiting in uncomfortable chairs. At least at the dentist you…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Celebrating a Trevor Class and a Teacher Retirement

Just a few pictures of very lovely evening at Trevor Day School. Great appreciation to all who helped make this reunion celebration so successful. It was good to be back among Trevor folk and to catch up with so many people. And congratulations to the ever wonderful Diane Tisman, head of the world languages department, who has been an extraordinary…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

New Head of School Installed at Robert C. Parker School

It was Robert C. Parker Day at Robert C. Parker School in Rensselaer County, NY – just across the Hudson from downtown Albany. If you don’t know Parker, it’s one of those schools that legendary educator Tom Little lauded in his book Loving Learning as “schools for the ages”. Parker is a school in that long – and very American – tradition…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

A Guide to the Agony and Opportunity of School Right-sizing

Those of us who were heads of school in 2008-9 probably remember all too well the pain of school downsizing and some may still bear the scars to show for it. It was a tough time all around. And that’s what made it easier. The whole world was struggling and any particular school or enterprise or person was not alone.…

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Poetry, Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

On the Steps of the Jefferson Memorial

The simplest poems can be amongst the most profound. On the Steps of the Jefferson Memorial We invent our gods the way the Greeks did, in our own image—but magnified. Athena, the very mother of wisdom, squabbled with Poseidon like any human sibling until their furious tempers made the sea writhe. Zeus wore a crown of lightning bolts one minute,…

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Education, Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Leadership, Problem-Solving, Compassion and Empathy

As Donald Trump spirals deeper into madness and depravity the toll on the collective psyche just grows. Fortunately help is at hand in the form of the example of Hillary Clinton who recently demonstrated her tremendous problem-solving and self-calming abilities. We all know that cats saved the internet. Now it seems they are saving people from the stress of this…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

The future happens very slowly and then all at once

My title line is from Kevin Kelly whose new book The Inevitable is about the deep trends in the next 20 years that will shape our lives. And a little reflection helps us understand that truth. The future happens very slowly and then all at once. First it seems outlandish, strange, unusual and possibly impossible. Then it looms over us and then…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

The Headship: History Matters

Ok – so you wanted to be a head of school and you applied for a job and then you got it. Congratulations. Among all the things that you now have to make a priority is becoming the expert on the history of your school. This will take time. Schools are not alike and independent schools often take pride in…

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Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Without Empathy There Is No Leadership: “All America Felt My Pain.”

“You Have Sacrificed Nothing” Grieving father Khizr Khan said four simple words:  “You have sacrificed nothing”. It was one of those moments of astonishing clarity. A father grieving over the loss of his son – and speaking without notes or a teleprompter – delivered a resounding rebuke of everything Trump is and stands for. These words sang out in a…

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