Who doesn’t like ice cream?? I anticipate there might be one or two peculiar individuals amongst you who profess not to, and at the risk of sounding as if I live for pleasure alone, a dislike of ice cream is a phenomenon I simply do not and cannot understand. Over the summer I was incredibly fortunate to spend a good long while in Italy, and of course Italian ‘gelato’ is quite simply the best, surely? I was there for legitimately cerebral reasons, namely to go back to school and spend some time learning a bit more Italian. It was an utterly joyful experience on many levels and I have been sharing with colleagues here how being back in the mode of ‘learner’ for an extended period of time helped me reflect very deeply on what the pupils learn at our school and how they might be feeling when they do so. Considering how our brains operate and how we therefore learn best is something that we shall be attending to over the course of this coming academic year, and is in fact a distinct strand on our school development plan. We are excited to be working on this as a staff body.
I shared with the boys in the Prep in assembly yesterday what I learnt the most about myself, in addition to the above, as a result of going back to school over the summer. Chief amongst my personal conclusions was thinking anew about learning from one’s mistakes. As an example, I told a rather long and convoluted real-life story about ordering an ice cream with a pretty huge mistake included in my uncertain Italian language skills and therefore not being able to get what I wanted, but once I knew where I had gone badly wrong, my ice cream ambitions were eventually fulfilled! (Do ask your boys to tell you the story).
The upshot of all this is, I managed to get my fair share (more than my fair share…??) of delicious Italian ‘gelato’ from that moment onwards and I definitely know now how to ask for an ice cream correctly. No one at our school is perfect, we all make mistakes and we shall continue to do so over the coming weeks and months. How and what we learn from those is critical to our ongoing success. School life is so endlessly fascinating to me and we are all looking forward to the year ahead, the mistakes we make included!
