Posts by Jackie Clark
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This discussion has several points I'd like to address - James talked about arming teachers, which is a patently ludicrous idea, frankly, but I'd like to explain to him why. If guns were as freely available in NZ, as they are in the States, it is highly likely that I wouldn't be alive. We have policies for dealing with violent adults on the premises, policies I have written largely in response to having violent adults on the premises ( the premises being the kindergarten where I teach). If guns were available, hiding in the office wouldn't have sufficed now, would it? And certainly locking all the children inside wouldn't have sufficed. Not to mention the fact that teachers are there, by and large, to model positive learning (see: life) behaviours. So, no, I don't think teachers being armed is a very sensible, nor reasonable, idea.
And then there's the whole discussion around gender (hormones!) and violence. Men are more violent than women. Except they're not. Men seem to enact violence in a very different way to women, most of the time. Which is nothing to do with testosterone, and everything to do with what behaviour society condones in each gender. As a teacher of junior citizens, I can tell you that boys are not more violent than girls - and this is anecdata purely - they simply learn that expressing it more physically is more acceptable in their world. Even if you come from a pacifist family, there is a high probability that a boy will turn a piece of lego into a gun. Parents are often confused about this, but what a child sees and hears, everywhere, all the time, is subtle, and they don't have the filters (see:life experience) to understand those messages, nor decode them. Having said that, most of our girls wear fairy dresses and carry "guns", but that's about what they see around them in our very boy- heavy kindergarten. I don't stop them - playing with a gun doesn't mean they're going to turn into murderers after all - but it's something I've thought about for the last 17 years, certainly.
And so we come to hormones. I've fair experience of having an excess of hormones over the last couple of years. It's what happens as women age. And I don't think hormones are a reason for male violence - I'm not being funny when I say surging hormones can make you think differently, but the enactment of those feelings is everything to do with what's deemed acceptable.
I don't know that I've added anything valuable to the discussion, but those are my thoughts, anyway. -
Hard News: The Public Address 2012 Word…, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
I am in favour of bringing back words such as higgledy-piggledy and jeepers
I went to retweet this. How embarrassing.
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I just have to share this with you all. Now, I'm not a great fan of fruit cakes/xmas cakes in general. But this one isn't really a cake. It's more of a celebration of nuts and fruit, really.
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Thank you for sharing those beautiful photos with us, Murray. I particularly like the one of Graham. I never knew him in those days, but I know him well now. He was a beautiful young man.
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Capture: The Castle, in reply to Ben Austin,
Yes! Went there on Monday morning - lovely place.
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A few more…..
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I’ve discovered a new love – Dunedin. So I’ll just share a few photos, if you’ll bear with….
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And a couple more, one of which is native toetoe…..
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I spent the last 3 days in Dunedin – a truly wonderful place and I’m still processing what I felt and saw there, including a trip to Aramoana yesterday morning. While there, I saw some flora that I’d never seen before. Maybe some of you have names for these plants?
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Oh, well done David. I’m currently in Dunedin for a long weekend. And LOVING IT. Anyway, with this thread specifically in mind, I took a couple of photos last night, in the long evening which is the Southern Summer.
