Posts by dyan campbell
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Interestingly enough, I don't know whether uniforms were ever widespread in Canadian schools. I would hazard a guess they weren't (imagine setting a uniform raincoat in Vancouver, or a uniform parka and balaclava in Edmonton....)
Heh, You will certainly find plenty of rain gear worn in Vancouver schools, that's for sure. Looking through the yearbook there are many Goretex jackets.
I do remember the checking of regulation undies which I thought ( and consequently got detention for
Good god! For real?
They already obsess enough about minutiae such as gender-specific rules for hair-length, hair ties, the number and size of earrings......
They're not big on gender roles in Canadian schools. We had the traditional Homecoming Queen, but we also had Homecoming Queens which involved many boys in drag. There would be the final crowning of the the Mr. Mt View. I remember a lot of girls talked their boyfriends into it for the pleasure of applying makeup to them.
-
ope it's not foreign here at all. GBHS in the 70s may not have had the attention to detail that Dyan describes, but the culture was there alright. Kids who could skateboard well set fashion, fun kids, funny kids, smart kids and sporting kids set fashions. We weren't obsessed with what we wore and I don't know anyone who spent "too long" getting dressed in the morning to learn.
We weren't very fashionable until later years of high school - I started junior high (13 year old - grade 8) in 1970 - and at that age and in those days skating gear was about as far from fashionable as clothes could get, and were also referred to as "play clothes". Striped t shirts, bermuda shorts, hoodies, sweatshirts that had tributes to cartoons like Fat Freddy's Cat or Harold Head or The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. These were the sartorial choices of those who had not yet discovered fashion.
My Mum would pick something up that I'd skated in and say "it looks like it exploded". She put iron-on patches in the elbows, knees and butts of all my clothes because I could write off a garment in an afternoon.
This is in the day before polyurethane wheels on skateboards - imagine a tiny, rigid wood board with metal wheels that supposedly could rotate independently but usually jammed instead, pitching skater and resulting in both road burns and ruined clothes. Skating was all lazy-daisys (interlocking figure 8s on a flat surface) or downhill slalom. The most impressive thing you could do was a downhill jump but as the boards didn't bounce so well in those days, that was pretty dicey. There was no way you could make a tight turn. Skating in those days was the same as scooters and roller skates - strictly the province of children. Road rats, they used to call us.
Skating changed forever just as I was too old to have fun with it - the polyurethane wheels and the vertical skating. With it suddenly came skaters who were older than 13 or 14 and who started getting quite famous, and with that fame the stuff the kids were wearing became fashion statements. But believe me, when I was skating, all my older siblings/siblings girlfriends/my mum/and all female friends were trying to do a fashion makeover on me.
By senior high (15 to 18) I became much more interested in clothes, partly because I inherited an endless number of garments from my two sisters who were 9 and 11 years older than I was and would no sooner purchase something then tire of it. Plus a small army of people who'd been trying to style me for years.
-
my case, since I have to remember 90 little peoples' names every day - and their parents and grandparents. I suspect there is a name for it, and I know how you feel. I so often feel really rude not remembering peoples' names, and I resort to calling them darling, love etc
I can sympathise... I used to struggle to apply names to the kids I was coaching, but there were usually four different classes of about 20 kids, one right after the other, and of course they were never in the same place for two seconds. But I would try to use a name whenever I could, and one child I called "William" for a whole term, until he looked at me and said, kind of anguished and exasperated and asked Why do you call me William?" It was then I discovered his name was "Richard".
-
Re: the diversity of names. Another good point, but 3 of the first 5 names I entered into my cellphone in Canada were "Bob". "Bob", "Doug", and "Mike from Calgary"seem to account for 50% of the male population.
Bob & Doug - yes there are a lot, the most famous being the comedy duo of fictional brothers Bob & Doug MacKenzie, who were always trying to demonstrate how to get a mouse into a beer bottle, in the hopes they might teach everyone how get a free case of beer out of this elaborate ruse. Mike, yes, plenty of those, but I recently read a statement to the effect that "You know you're canadian if you know at least 3 guys named "Gord, Gordy or Gordon". I must know six and they forgot "Gordeaux".
-
I wouldn't define "responsible for" as "boss of" or "in charge of". It's more of an obligation than a power.
I know the concept of prefects aims for this ideal, but I do hear many stories - all second hand I admit - but many stories of people who were targeted for infractions such socks that were too wide for their legs or hats they kept losing. Having gone to a school where one classmate used to sometimes wear t shirts with obscene slogans without a murmur of a problem - from staff or other students - it seems an insane time wasting exercise when I hear stories - however second hand - of people being bailed up because their hair ties were the wrong colour.
I have observed first hand mother child meltdowns over uniforms not laundered, who didn't throw what in the wash - and I've seen a kid retrieve dirty clothes from a hamper and go off to school dressed in dirty clothes. When there are drawers and drawers of clean shirts that just seems like a much bigger waste of time than choosing an outfit to go with whatever you plan for the rest of your day so you don't have to go home to change before you go out after school.
Don't know much about sports teams (didn't know gymnasts didn't wear uniforms! they always seem to have them on TV!), but I kind of assumed there would be sport related parallels to things like
Those are big time gymnasts who are on tv - we were (or at least I was) a junior high school gymnast that competed with other schools.
I knew of little league baseball teams that had amazing uniforms, bought by some local gas station owned by someone's Dad... but no, we just wore those nylon vest things you tie on with string - one team green the other red. We're talking more than 30 years ago here. I'm sure it's swankier now, though I have to say when I taught gymnastics here (20 years ago) it was the same as in canada - kids just turned up in ballet leotards, bathing suit and t shirt combos, t shirt and short combos, and (this was not good) jeans and t shirt combos. You can't really do gymnastics in jeans.
- delegating to a 17 year old the task of checking that the junior choir have their music ready to go on stage
- having the senior students in each voice part run sectional rehearsals
Aren't there?
Er, possibly. I was mostly absent. I had a veeery patchy attendance record by high school and I only went to 50% of my actual classes so I didn't belong to many clubs. I was in a choir in elementary school (8,9 or so) but we didn't have books, just a page xeroxed (or rather "mimeographed" in those days" of whatever odd song they wanted us to sing. King of the Road was an odd one to get children to sing, I thought, and another one where we declared we were "off to join the IRA". God only knows what that was about, hardly anyone was Irish.
But there was a sense that you should really be responsible for yourself, and be a good citizen, help other all of that. But it wasn't assigned, not in any official capacity. And teachers are specifically warned off saying things like '"I'm leaving you in charge" in case there is a mudslide or an earthquake and some child blames themselves forever. Canadians think like that - we once got a christmas card with a stamp that had a tiny detailed picture of a car being hauled out of an icy river, ambulances in attendance. "Drive Carefully This Christmas" it said.
-
Ahhh, peer support is completely different from the prefect system.
Yes, exactly what I am trying to say. Canadian schools have no concept of "prefects" and the concept would be quite startling to say the least.
In my training as a coach we were specifically warned off the idea of ever leaving one kid in charge, if was specifically cited as something not to say. It was to drive home the point that the adult is always responsible. So no, I would never left one kid to take responsibility for any others if I left them unattended. Kids teaching each other? Sure, but they don't have to be in charge of other children to do that.
-
Did none of your gymnastics teams ever have uniforms?
Er, no we didn't. I wore the same Danskin leotards I wore for ballet classes, and either a ballet sweater (one of those wrap around things) or a long sleeved t shirt over it, as a ballet leotard has no sleeves and you need long sleeves for gymnastics. Most girls wore the same. Some didn't have gymnastics suits and wore shorts and t shirts, skater gear we called it. And hoodies, called kangaroo tops in those days.
If I hadn't owned a bunch of leotards from ballet I would have worn my skater gear - very unisex clothes worn by all kids of the 70s. The lind of clothes Stacy Peralta, Peggy Oki, Jay Adams, Suzanne Tabata, Tony Alva wore on the skating circuit. No uniform - just stipey t shirts, bermuda shorts, Keds, Converse or Addidas sneakers. Weird hats, beaded headbands. Not the dayglo colours favoured by Stacy Peralta later in his career. As Jay Adams comments in the film Lords of Dogtown "Stacey looks like a stock-car."
Having said that there were enforced rules about safety gear - tooth guards for ice hockey, helmets for catchers etc.
That you were expected to wear to a certain standard?
No, no standards. Not remotely. Sometimes I wore a sweatshirt with Alfred E. Neuman that said WHAT? ME WORRY?. Another had one of those t-shirts that looked like you were wearing a tuxedo. No one minded much about what you wore.
Did senior team-mates never have some responsibility for junior ones?
Good god no. The concept of leaving one particular child or group of children "in charge" with "responsibility" over other children is irresponsible and unwise. The teacher and or coach (often the same person in a school setting) is in charge. Period. Why give one kid authority over another. What on earth are they supposed to do? Get everyone out if there's a fire or an earthquake? That shouldn't be left to a kid. Or is it to "maintain order"? I don't get that - why the assumption that everyone would turn feral if on one was left controlling things? Usually if an adult left they would just say "talk quietly among yourselves and try not to make a lot of noise..."
-
I actually find the accusation of sickness/contemptibility extremely offensive.
But you can't see how it might be equally offensive to make an assumption and a blanket statement like this about the effects of letting kids choose their own clothes??Yet, every minute a teenager spends fussing over what they wear and where that will put them in the complicated and vicious social hierarchy of high school is a minute that they could be spending doing something more enjoyable and productive
I attended school where everyone chose their own outfits and not only did this not result in a "complicated and vicious social hierarchy" but in fact everyone seemed to mix up their styles quite a bit, depending on what they planned to do with the rest of their day. Or what we happened to pull out of our closets.
And I am not swayed in my opinion that it encourages bullying and petty minded, or as I phrased it contemptible, sick behaviour - to encourage one child to have authority over another based on their personal appearance.
One of the things that sprang to mind when I wrote that was a young girl I met who worked for my hairdresser, and she told me (tears welling up in her eyes) that she had just quit school because she had been hassled so mercilessly over this socks-up detail. She could never keep socks up she told me - she was of French Polynesian ancestry and had little slender calves that couldn't hope to hold up the giant knee socks of her regulation uniform. She told me her life at school became unbearable because of this girl's attention - she had even taken to wearing rubber bands around the top of her socks - though this proved to be too painful - and the situation had blighted her life to the point where she'd decided to just quit school and go out and take the sort of low paying, low status dead end job that's available to a kid with no high school education.
boys with names like Thor, Elkir and Blade set a new style other boys copied -
So clothes won't do it, but a totally awesome Marvel comic name might?
The thing is, in Canadian school those aren’t particularly unusual names – there were kids named Ravi, Lourdes, Alita, Vito, Mohinder, Liborio, Fatima, Mahmoud, Toyohiko. There was a kid I taught gymnastics who was named Vagnus.
The Scandinavian names are odd by NZ standards, but just about any name is considered normal in Canada, as it is a nation of many different ethnic types. NZers kept commenting to my cousin when she visited that her son’s name (Theoren) was “weird”. Actually it’s a perfectly normal French name, for instance the hockey player Theoren Fleury is famous in Canada, Barbara was taken aback by how many people commented on how “weird” his name was, and how many expressed the opinion he would be "beaten up". No in Canada has ever said they found his name weird, nor has he ever been beaten up.
My point was that the Scandinavian kids’ weird inherited woolen zippered cardigans became a craze, briefly replacing the leather motorcycle jacket craze started by the Italian kids. Early geek chic, a look so bad but worn so well it’s good. A fad. It was not exactly idyllic, but bullying seemed to run its course by age 14 or so. There was bullying in elementary school, and through junior high, but it was deeply, deeply frowned upon by both teachers and other students.
By senior high (15 to 18) the atmosphere was much like university, live and let live. As in university, bullying would have been considered socially immature and deeply unacceptable.
One of the things that struck NZers about my yearbook is that in a lot of the photos the teachers are in ridiculous circumstances – one science teacher is wearing a frilly bonnet, a tea-towel for a bib and drinking juice from a baby bottle. In another there is a teacher laughing like mad wearing a toilet paper hat – she would have been reciting something silly at the request of a student.
There was an organised set of days – Twerp Day, Sadie Hawkins Day and Pay Day. These days were set aside for crazy behaviour and pranks, the thought being that if one day was devoted the this, we could be expected not to indulge in time wasting behaviour the rest of the year. Twerp Day the boys could make the girls do anything – be wrapped like a mummy in toilet paper, or carry their books down the hall, balance a basketball on their head, recite while they recite “rubber baby buggy bumpers” – that kind of thing. Sadie Hawkins day was the same thing, except the girls got to dish to the boys, plus it was the one day of the year girls asked boys out on dates, to dances etc. In those days boys did all the asking, except on Sadie Hawkins Day. Pay Day was when the teachers got it, and students could do things like make the the teachers do or wear ridiculous things, recite stuff, pretend things. “Pretend you’re a confused mouse being chased by a cat!” that kind of thing.
My NZ friends seem to think this would bring out really awful behaviour. It didn’t – partly because you could refuse a request if you really didn’t want to do it, partly because the requests had to be within reason, but mostly because no one requested anything of you unless they liked you to begin with, it was kind of the point. The teachers who were challenged to do these things were either hugely liked by the requesting student, or they were a thorn in the side of the requesting student. The teacher could decline the request (it is a lot to ask a teacher to wear a baby bonnet and drink apple juice out of a bottle for the school) but if they declined, they would provoke the sullen wrath of the student body for the rest of the year, while if they complied the relationship between student and teacher was forever softened, the offending student usually thought of that teacher as a pretty good sport, and it quelled the desire to cause trouble. Paul tells me this wouldn’t have worked at his school – between the students there would have been no point, as it was all male (the point of Twerp Day and Sadie Hawkins Day really being flirting) and the relationship between the teachers and students was never playful or warm enough that Pay Day would work.
My niece Danielle is a teacher these days (high school math – she’s 30) and she says those days – Twerp, Sadie Hawkins and Teachers Pay - are extinct, high school kids are too sophisticated for that sort of thing now, they were disappearing in her day 15 years ago. But she also says that bullying at the senior high level remains virtually non-existent, and in the present day as in her day bullying also ran its course by age 14 or so, it’s considered immature by other teenagers to persist in that kind of behaviour past junior high.
-
Yet, every minute a teenager spends fussing over what they wear and where that will put them in the complicated and vicious social hierarchy of high school is a minute that they could be spending doing something more enjoyable and productive. Uniforms are cheaper for parents and take out one of the levers of toxic power games.
This is a strange and endlessly repeated assumption - and it ignores the reality of fashion, where it comes from and why . More importantly this assumption fails to recognise the real origins of the toxic power struggles that seem to dominate NZ school experiences.
There is no jacket, scarf or outfit in the world that will render an unattractive person attractive. People wore cool clothes at my school in Canada (1970s) but a really awesome suede coat, leather jacket or an amazing silk-velvet blazer could do little to compete with physical beauty. Some of the most gorgeous and popular boys in my school wore the most alarmingly ugly, generations old Nordic sweaters - but not only did no one think they looked anything but fabulous, boys with names like Thor, Elkir and Blade set a new style other boys copied - there was a fad of ugly pullovers with reindeer or snowflake patterns because gorgeous, weirdly dressed boys made them look cool.
The most charismatic kids would pick up a style and everyone would copy it. There would be kids dressed to the nines in silk, velvet and suede and kids wearing rain gear and hiking boots - often the same kids on different days.
There were beautiful girls, but the best dressed girls were not necessarily the richest. Many kids earned money to buy a real Courreges, Yves St Laurent or Valentino (as opposed to a knock-off that looked exactly the same) and pretty much everyone owned either a leather, suede or shearling jacket, which was usually the big-ticket item of the wardrobe. But these made no more difference to your popularity than if you owned first rate skis or if you rented your gear. Popularity wasn’t even entirely indexed to looks: it was very much noticed if you were nice or not. Bullies and bitches had been socially pressured since elementary school to behave decently. The Valentine’s Day box is the great leveler, not fashion.
Expensive clothes don't necessarily make you look great. But if someone who did look great turned up wearing something, it was a great coup to have imitators by the end of the week. Whether this was glitter on a bare shoulder, an aviator scarf or an ankle bracelet - it wasn't the thing so much as the impression it made.
There were no rules about what you could wear. In my senior year (1975) the David Bowie craze had hit well and truly, and both girls and boys had that Bowie haircut, some dyed copper. Some boys and some girls wore glitter, eye makeup and shaved their eyebrows and wore eyeshadow.
No teacher had the right - or the inclination - to tell anyone how they should dress. It was perfectly acceptable to wear very bare halter tops in warm weather, if one wished. Bare midriffs could be seen on young men as well as young women. Some kids opted for a low maintenance, preppy look that survives the ages (duffel coat, chinos) and others went for the whole west coast granola thing hippie stuff mixed with denim, stout hiking boots boots and eccentric hats or beaded headbands. Cowboy boots, Calvary boots, Indian moccasins, Ashtrakan coats were all popular with both girls and boys. Some kids, both boys and girls (including me) wore ex-military gear, styled in different ways. There were a lot of looks to choose from, and most people tended to mix it up. A lot of tiny girls wore huuuge clothing, the jackets and sweaters and shirts of the boys with whom they were going steady.
I owned a lot of clothes, but the item that created the greatest sensation was my Mum’s WWII RCAF dress uniform jacket, a smart, dark blue jacket with beautiful silver buttons and an adorable wing-and-zig-zag insignia (she was a wireless operator during the war). This jacket was a greater object of admiration and envy than my snow white, obscenely expensive Courreges jacket or my collection of suede, leather and shearling jackets, and unlike those, I never lent it out my Mum’s jacket to friends. The RCAF jacket (form fitting, belted) looked great with jeans and a white tailored blouse or with high waisted skirts and a little silk top. It also went well with tailored cream coloured trousers and a black turtleneck cashmere sweater.
My parents had both joined the RCAF partly because the uniforms were so cool. That and the country needed them as there was a war on and stuff, but mainly the uniforms were adorable. They were both teenagers at the time, and an RCAF uniform was the thing to be seen wearing.
Unfortunately we had destroyed my Dad’s sheepskin flight jacket and leather aviator’s hat thing playing war as kids, but on of my brothers did wear my Dad’s dress uniform jacket for a couple seasons. At school in those days it was considered bad form (very bad form) to wear any medals your parents had been awarded, it was considered wrong to wear a medal if you didn’t win it yourself. The uniforms were a different thing and lots of kids wore them, some wore those khaki jackets if their Dads had fought in army during the Korean war.
The list of physical attributes that are admired are unchanged down the centuries and do not vary from culture to culture. Usually they are associated with good health and good nutrition (great skin, pretty eyes, long legs, white teeth etc). What exists is the charismatic kid's ability to influence a trend or start a whole new style, by sheer force of style. In university some young men resurrected the male bare-midriff - in high school it had been jocks in cut-off football shirts - and in University it was flannel cowboy-and-indian flannel pajama tops a look that actually swept the campuses across North America and was picked up by Kurt Cobain and Evan Dando a few years later). It looks quite silly, that bare expanse of middle, but if the body is great and the boy is gorgeous, a it is_ cute. Like the old song says "My Dad said we looked ridiculous, but boy we broke some hearts". So true.
In my day it was mostly the 7th formers who noticed the petty infringements and dished out the correctives (taking out the hair tie/pulling up your socks/going to their common room at lunch to clean your shoes/etc).
Well here's the origins of your toxic hierarchy. In my country it would have been considered very peremptory and bullying to even express and negative opinion about another person's appearance, let alone presume they had the right to force their will on that person. How humiliating for the person with lower rank. How contemptible that someone should enjoy exercising that power, and how sick the adults in charge invest one child with that sort of power over another.
My husband -( who wisely hid the fact that he'd been captain of the rugby team from me while he was dating me - correctly guessing I'd like him better if I thought he'd been an arty, sensitive milk-drinking type) tells of a nightmarish atmosphere of brutality, petty mindedness and cruelty. And he'd been the popular boy. But he hated the school, and its rules, hated catholicism, hated the forced conformity, hated the atmosphere of racism and brutality.
For myself, when I first met the women Paul had grown up with (they mostly went to EGG or catholic schools) I was startled by how little it mattered to them how they were perceived socially. My impression of them was that they were bizarrely intolerant, bullying and socially immature for women (who by that time were) in their 30s. Of the women I met in those first months here it was not uncommon for the first words out of their mouths to be something negative and challenging about Canada. Sometimes it was couched in half-polite terms "Oh, you must be so glad to be in a county like New Zealand where there are clean green spaces - I guess it's pretty polluted where you're from." but usually it was even ruder and more pointedly confrontational.
Much of a person's identity is predicated on being well regarded - considered kind, smart, charming, honest, gentle, gracious etc. I was quite shocked by my first encounters with women who were quite happy to be perceived as a terrifying, bullying queen bees. In fact they seemed to relish that sense of socially grinding someone down. That kind of social pecking order is much frowned upon in my neck of the woods. I am happy to see it disappearing in wider NZ culture, it does seem to be on the wane. But I agree with Paul's observation that these pecking orders are established in these schools - they seem to be much less prevalent among people who either went to more liberal schools or rejected the petty, pointless rules if they'd been forced to attend those schools that enforced them.
-
'Nanny' is very déclassé. We prefer au pair.
Again with the confusion... a nanny has professional childcare qualifications, earns more money and is right to resent any housekeeping duties that might be foisted on them - while an au pair is untrained, earns much less money than a nanny and their duties do included light housekeeping
It's so hard to define good help these days.