@Zoe7 wrote:
I am telling you, personally this, as I want you to know I have read a lot of what you have written here on the forums for a long time, and whilst I cannot always relate to your experiences, I do very much respect your insights and thoughts. This world would be a much better place if we all 'looked at the other side for a minute' and actually listened.
Wow, @Zoe7 😲 Thank you so much! That is really nice to hear. I don't know what to say.😀🤗
Though I must confess, I suspect that all too often I get carried away with my own point of view, when I really ought to be calming down and listening to the other side for a minute, as you say.
@Zoe7 wrote:
@chibam I had a heated 'conversation' with an ex senior staff member around respect. Her view was that every child should respect all adults. The school I worked at had a lot of children from backgrounds that were not so great - so my statement to her was 'how can you expect these children to respect adults when all they see from then is hurt and pain? In essence you are saying that they should be respecting their abusers". She, of course, did not have an answer to that. I also said that we as adult (and role models) need to show that respect first for those children to know what it is like to be respected and to follow in our footsteps. Again, she had no answer. My point here is pretty simple, show respect to get respect.
TBH, I am at a loss to understand how people don't carry this basic knowledge on from their own childhoods. Did they really ever respect adults who had no respect for them? They might have feared such adults; they might have impeccably obeyed them. But did they respect them?
I was something of a problem child at elementary school, and you could easily draw a line between which authority figures I was a problem for, and which ones I was not. The ones who I was most eager to please were the ones who showed me respect. In fact I remember an interview once where my dad constantly refered to me as "a Jekyll and Hyde", because the differances in my behavior in various settings were so stark.
I also remember a particular teacher in highschool. This was a guy who ruled his class by fear. There was never any horseplay or misbehavior in that class. Everybody always say perfectly still and listened carefully. The exam results were always commendable. But we didn't respect him; we feared him. When we got to the end of Yr. 11 and we had the curriculum freedom to drop a subject, so many of that class dropped out. But we weren't dropping the subject, we were dropping the teacher. I remember, when our very last lesson in there finished, we all came together and hugged one another as if we'd just been liberated from a refugee camp. You didn't see scenes like that outside the classrooms of other students who dropped their various subjects simply to reduce their study load.
Obediance and order are not the same thing as respect.
The point I'm trying to make is, your statement rings true on every note.🙂
