Perfection and being human.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an alliterative poem written in about 1390 by an unsung anonymous genius who lived only a few miles from where I climbed and walked in my teen years. The poem has fascinated and obsessed me for the last forty years.
http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/gawain.htm

Gawain, the youngest knight in Arthur's court and a bit of a ladies' man, agrees to undertake a challenge which leads to a quest to find a Green Chapel and meet a formidable opponent. As a prequel to this quest Gawain arms himself with a shield whose device, an endless knot or pentacle, is described in a very precise and lengthy section. It is an emblem of Gawain's wish to be a perfect and integrated knight. On this quest he meets with various tests which severely try this perfection. Please read the poem! I will not bore you with the erotic and comic seduction scenes, nor the astonishing descriptions of a wild winter landscape, nor the evocation of hunts so vivid you can smell the sweat of the horses. And as for the landscapes, architecture, interior decoration, armour and sexy frocks!
The final denouement is such that Gawain is made to realise the impossibility of his aimed for perfection. Being human and fully alive is not compatible with a constructed ideal.

Which brings me to my bugbear at work. The English education system has a series of judgments which inspectors make to categorise individual schools. These range from "failing" to "outstanding". A couple of years ago the school where I teach had a report of "good with outstanding elements". The Headteacher wants the school to become "outstanding" in the next round of inspections due in the New Year. A laudable and understandable aim surely. Alas what seems to be happening is that the pressure the staff are feeling is getting in the way of what was outstanding in the last round: our care for, and relationship with the children. These pressures are administrative, to get the paperwork perfect, to make sure our plans are perfectly cross referenced with our colleagues, and, of course, all the peripherals that our education system seems to be bedevilled with must be perfectly adhered to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwDt94Z62gY

We are human. We are gloriously, messily human and our pupils respond to that. They are children for whom their previous schooling has failed. They are children with ASD, ADHD, ADD. They come from families where care and nurture have been difficult. Some have physical difficulties, some have emotional problems. Almost all have problems with self esteem. What these wonderful children need most of all is a group of relaxed, consistent adults with time for them and the love, care, patience and humour to forge real links with them. Only when we respond as accepting, flawed human beings ourselves, do our children begin to feel good about themselves. Our last inspectors found this care and we were congratulated for it. It seems a pity that this humaneness is put in jeopardy by a push for spurious perfection.

I'm new to this......

As a teacher of nearly 35 years experience, an avid reader and a bit of a thinker ( friends have questioned which bit and how big the bit really is ),  I have felt a sudden urge to share my opinions about all those bits and pieces which I've thought important, contentious or just plain intriguing.

Over the next few weeks the big issue in my life is my wife's upcoming interview to try to get an Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis.  It's one of those events which will change nothing but change everything. The very fact that she feels she needs this diagnosis to explain all the difficulties she has felt throughout her life means, I think, that she warrants it.
When we watch Butterflies on DVD, I want to know how the family works: will Rhea get with Leonard &c? Annabel wants to know where the door leads to from the kitchen. If a friend walks past her and ignores her, she is convinced it's because she has upset her. Causality and rules are at the centre of her universe.
If a piece of litter is dropped on a pavement, it bothers her for days because people should not drop litter. And as for any drivers infringing the Highway Code........car journeys can be pretty rancourous!
Aspergirls* are so good at pretending to be good socially ( unlike their male counterparts ) that they often get labelled as "Quirky", "Eccentric" or "Different". All these adjectives have been used by friends describing Annabel. Indeed these attributes were and are the facets of her character which I fell and fall in love with. These and her intelligence. How else could you possibly rehearse conversations, try to predict responses and organise your life to try to fit in with a confusing world?

The bizarre thing is that I have worked with Autistic spectrum children, off and on, for nearly twenty years, found that I had a real affinity with the ( mostly ) boys I worked with, and found their different world view intellectually challenging. I could communicate with them, and not necessarily through language: music was good, and mime too. But I completely missed Annabel's difficulties as being ASD related. Boys had Asperger's, not girls. Besides, her anxieties, depressions and anger were due to a whole host of external issues.....weren't they? In fact we laughed about her Autistic tendencies. Then, one night during one of those three o'clock moments, Annabel googled "Autism in women" and came up with a whole cascade of sites which summed up her difficulties and achievements. We sent for various books which other women had found illuminating and useful, saw our extremely sympathetic GP who referred Annabel to the psychiatric services and now we wait.......

*See the book of the same name by Rudy Simone.