Friday Lessons

1) Rough translation: “A Day At Work Doesn’t Look Like This. What About A Day At School?” France Television’s anti-bullying video.

… And an additional comment that while all bullying is sad, not all bullying is that obvious, especially in Hong Kong. Crackdowns on “obvious” bullying make bullies more subtle, not gone. I blame society’s ultra competitiveness that starts at a younger and younger age every generation… (But I have to say we have a few French quant friends, one of whom lives in an actual castle (I…know! HOW un-Hong Kong is that??) back home, and their math is just insane and I mean that as a compliment, and I really don’t know whether or not they were ultra competitive from very young… I charge there isn’t as much correlation to ultra-competitiveness and brilliance as we might have thought…)

2) In contrast: Teenager Brings Class To Tears By Just Saying A Few Words. Almost bullied out for a near-debilitating stammer, Musharaf Asghar overcomes it. Watch his classmates’ reactions towards the end. I put that here because it shows teenagers can (also) be kind, happy for their friend. Watching quite a few teenaged boys tear up was so sweet.

http://youtu.be/-shi5BL-Y2Q

(And how cute is the nick “Mushy”? But it’s also here because weaknesses can be turned into huge strengths. I love humans that way. Well not for everything, but at least that one. Sometimes almost as fun as investment products.)

3) Most schools could probably start a very good one… British Teacher Archives Confiscated Toys. Note conkers and sikh knife.

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4) To entertain Rockstar: Quirkology’s 10 Simple Party Stunts

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5) To entertain everyone else: 19 kids probably dressed better than you. Here’s a couple I just had to say something about:

a) Matching dog
b) Matching bandana
c) He’s taking a selfie? To what, post on his Instagram or FB?!

Hipster cool

Love the outfit but  I had words with Rockstar recently about kicking walls when we’re out (I’d forbidden him to kick people and he has been on a real taekwondo kicking practice spree) because his shoes were leaving marks…

Umm… I didn’t have many choices for the girl ones either because most had duck face or some pout or other, and I’m still in the prudish phase of believing I might be able to keep Little Miss from pout and duck face until I don’t know, 21? 😀 (fine, 13 at least?)

(And this doesn’t count, right?)

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6) A-and Lesson Time In The Rockstar Household…

Little Miss’ this week was Not All Dogs Are JD. She is of course, completely unafraid of dogs (and probably cows and goats and sheep if she met the real ones because right now she’s giving me the animal magnets and declaring them dogs too) and this is n-ot exactly a good thing.

So this was her this morning, 5 minutes before she was bowled over by what was either a huge Irish Setter or Rhodesian Ridgeback or some other large breed puppy (i.e. behaves like a puppy complete with chewing at you because she’s teething but is really not the size of a puppy – this one was about two-thirds the size of 17kg JD) who swarmed up her shoulders trying to lick her face.

I think she got this when she fell over

But no, I did not follow after the dog minder (who was an errant helper – the owners should know their new crazy jumpy-licky puppy was running loose where there is water and very fast cars not that far away), yelling repeatedly that the dog was “uncontrollable” and that we should “shoot it and kill it.” (True story ok, JD at 7 months herded a boy close to my height in Botanical Gardens Singapore during her night walk and the mum did that. It wasn’t even like she actually touched him, she just ran really fast around him like he was a sheep, but he screamed like a little girl which I guess is why his mum got mad.)

So I asked the helper wait, and when Little Miss had calmed down (maybe couple minutes) I had Big Crazy Licky Puppy brought back to meet Little Miss because I wanted Little Miss to understand the dog wasn’t trying to hurt her, but that dogs really don’t all behave like JD and she needs to not go right up to every dog she sees and feed them Gerber Stars. Little Miss stared at the fast-moving whip-like tail with a kind of horrified fascination BUT didn’t try to grab it. She did run her hand over the dog’s silky red coat (while we held Crazy Licky down a bit to keep her from jumping all over the Miss again) before going back to JD.

Sensory comparison of tails and coats

Little Miss was very happy to stay close to JD after… (I also think she was very happy JD doesn’t do Crazy Licky with tail like disembodied cicak’s.)

And what did Rockstar learn?

A lot.

Seriously a lot. His long-awaited Year 2 Christmas Show was yesterday, that’s a whole other post, but Kings is away this weekend again so I probably won’t have time to blog a longer one til next week…

Good weekend, one and all.