A face-to-face place

This week we welcome our Deputy Head (Academic), Dr David James, who reflects on the importance of face-to-face relationships.
Evidence seems to grow each week that mobile technology could be playing a significant role in the rise of mental health issues among young people. Of course, being online is not in itself a bad thing: you could be on Google Art Project researching Caravaggio, while listening to Handel’s Messiah on Spotify. There are endless opportunities to be educated and uplifted on an iPad or mobile phone, and it should not be forgotten, in the rush to ban technology from our schools, that, as one teacher puts it, not all screen time is equal. This is complicated enough when one is an adult: we should know when to close the lid of the laptop, or to switch our phones to airplane mode in order to get some rest, or to read a book. Having said that, many parents are as guilty of modern social faux pas, such as phubbing, as their children. How many meals have been ruined because Mum or Dad simply has to reply to that email? But teenagers may be under more pressure to keep Snapstreaks going, or to move to the next mission in GTA without letting their friends down, than adults are to keep email correspondence alive. To adolescents, friendships and being accepted by others have always been of profound importance. And, like much of the world today, a lot of that has moved online, which in turn has made it - and the possible concomitant shaming - more public.

Such things shouldn’t surprise us. But what should alarm all parents and teachers (and indeed anyone with any interest in the wellbeing of young people) is that social media companies have deliberately made their sites as addictive as possible. When Sean Parker, an early investor in Facebook, claims that the company is deliberately “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” then the laid-back West Coast mask that Mark Zuckerberg wears begins to slip a little; and when Parker admits that Facebook’s effect on children “literally changes your relationship with society, with each other...God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” then the reality dawns that these new companies may be just as ruthless at exploiting human frailty, and addictive tendencies, as Marlboro, McDonald’s, and Jack Daniels. As Roger Daltrey once famously sang: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Where do schools fit into this? Well, we could go to one extreme and ban all technology from our site (just as a junior school popular with Palo Alto CEOs has done, which in itself raises some disturbing questions), but we suspect that teenagers, being teenagers, will find a way around that. In addition, parents understandably want to keep in touch with their children when they’re at boarding school, and so even asking pupils to hand over their devices for long periods of time (as is becoming popular in some US schools) presents certain problems as well. Plus, to reiterate what I said before, there is so much wonderful stuff out there that actively aids learning that only the most retrogressive and anti-intellectual educational establishment would contemplate switching it off at source.

But perhaps the solution to the challenges that technology is presenting us with now is, literally, staring us in the face. And what we’re looking at is another human face. An anecdote that might illuminate my point. When I was interviewing a pupil who wanted to join Bryanston from her day school last term, I asked her why she wanted to give up the 4.15pm finishes, and have lessons on a Saturday. Her answer has stayed with me ever since. She said: “I’m a face-to-face person, and I guess this is a face-to-face place.” She went on to say that the many arguments that teenagers have via WhatsApp and Snapchat tend to escalate after school. By the time the pupils return to school the next day, or on Monday, grievances have deepened because correspondence has occurred via text, not voice. We all know that a simple statement like “I hate you” can be spoken with venom and with humour, and how we modulate our tone makes all the difference. But as a flat, written text, it can be destructive. For my interviewee the answer was simple: she wanted to talk to people, and in doing so form bonds and friendships that are robustly independent of Zuckerberg’s nefarious network. For her, Bryanston would provide her with more opportunity to make real and lasting friendships. Through articulating our ideas to others we make sense of our thoughts to them, and to our own self, at the same time. For young people this is an essential part of establishing their own identities. In time, I have no doubt, the miracle that is the human voice will win out over cold digital dialogue. Ideally, both will add richness to our lives. But it is perhaps only in a boarding school that the time and space, and the opportunities, are so varied, and allow for such ongoing interaction, that our young people develop in a more fully human way.

“I wanted to see what would happen!” part one

This week Simon Vincent shares his insights into teenage boys after 12 years as housemaster of a junior boys’ house at Bryanston. The first in his three-part blog looks at communication, or the lack thereof.

I need to come clean at the start – I have never parented a teenage boy. I have three girls (which presents its own issues!), but I have stood in loco parentis for nearly 440 13- to 14-year-old boys over the last 12 years and I hope that this has put me in a position to offer some insight.

“I wanted to see what would happen” is a phrase that I heard many times over the last 12 years when questioning boys about something particularly stupid and thoughtless that they had done. This ranged from spraying deodorant at close range onto their nipples to see if they would freeze, to drinking the contents of a glow-stick and then standing in a loo with the lights off and waiting to see if their wee would glow in the dark! Indeed, these are some of the more explainable ‘experiments’ and when, during the course of an investigation into an incident, I would ask “What were you thinking?” the answer would often be “I don’t know.” This was an honest answer – they really didn’t know what they were thinking, but just did it anyway to “see what would happen.” This is part of both the frustration and charm of teenage boys; they live in the moment, sparing little thought for consequence or caution. They are natural risk-takers and, if harnessed, this can be a great route to success, but the path is a dangerous one also.

I find most teenage boys eager to please, loyal almost to a fault, and endlessly entertaining. To see this, however, one has to accept the inevitability of failure. Teenagers will let you down, they will make errors of judgement, they will do stupid things and once you have grasped this reality, you can get on with the business of building relationships with them.

Of course, my generic teenage boy does not apply to every child, but almost all that I have looked after display some of the traits I am about to describe. I have no qualifications other than experience for these thoughts and please feel free to ignore them as you wish.

Most boys are not great communicators – at least not with their parents. They tend only to see the point in communicating when there is something they want or need to offload. The key to this is that they do not see their parents as human beings in the strict sense of the word, more as simple conduits for their own desires. This is precisely what we as parents have been encouraging for the previous 13 years, delighting in the fact that these are ‘our’ children, who we take pride in caring for. Teenage boys coming to boarding school are starting to think of themselves less as ‘ours’ and more as ‘theirs’, but the apron strings still pertain when they cannot make something happen on their own. This needs to be borne in mind when having telephone conversations with teenage boys – there is usually a reason for the phone call, and it is rarely just to have a nice chat!

My advice for dealing with the above is as follows:

If they want something, try to resist giving it to them straight away (be it something physical or your support to make something happen). They have come to boarding school to become more independent and there are channels within the school to sort out any issues they have. If they do not have something, or are not able to do something, there is usually a credible reason for it (bad organisation, rules etc). Most teenage boys have an over-developed sense of injustice and a complete inability to see things from any point of view other than their own. I lost count of the irate calls from parents claiming that a member of staff had ‘unfairly’ prevented a boy from going down to Blandford or that ‘everyone’ had a new pair of Beats headphones and it was ‘social suicide’ not to have them. These were the teenagers’ words being projected back to me. In these cases, the purpose of the call home was evident: they wanted their parents to put pressure on the school to allow the trip to Blandford or they wanted new headphones. Simple. All the surrounding hyperbole was aimed at tugging at the parental heartstrings. There is a danger here, for the moment the teenager senses that parents are ‘on their team’ against the school the slippery slope becomes precipitous.

When it comes to your son offloading negativity, please try not to worry too much. This tends to be something that lands on mothers and makes them feel wretched. If boys have worries they are not great at talking them through with their friends. They phone their mothers, offload all their negative thoughts, then get back to life as normal, happily relieved of the burden. This is a coping mechanism for them and they spare not a single thought for the worrying that is going on at home. In my experience, most boys do not phone up when things are going well, or if they are having a good time with their friends. In these cases their emotional needs are already being met so why bother to seek any added validation from their parents? This may sound harsh but, from what I have seen, it is truly the way that most of their minds work.

This treatment of parents by teenagers shocks some at first. We at boarding school are in the privileged position of seeing the very best of the teenagers that we look after. This is because they know that they have to work at gaining our trust and liking (or that of their friends) and pour all their efforts into this. A parent’s love is unconditional, and they know that, so often by the time they get home they have exhausted their reservoirs of pleasantness. I think that as long as we parents can be sure that our teenagers behave well with other adults, then we can celebrate that.

In part two of his blog Simon will look at Snowplough Parents, the importance for teenagers to learn self-reliance and the need for consistency from parents and other adults around them.

• "I wanted to see what would happen!" part two
• "I wanted to see what would happen!" part three

Keep talking

As the new school year gets well under way, Bryanston Head Sarah Thomas reflects on the importance of a good relationship between school and home, including her own experiences of this as a parent. 

Each year when I welcome new parents to the school at the beginning of September I talk about the importance of communication. It matters a lot that we, who look after pupils for the majority of time during term time, know what we need to know. It matters too that we as a school are in touch with parents to keep them in the picture. So I tell a series of silly stories to the new and slightly anxious parents sitting in front of me, leaving their 13-year-old in our tender care for the first time, in order to underline the fact that we are listening and will keep communicating and that we rely upon our parents to do the same.

I learned this lesson at Uppingham when I worked with the legendary Headmaster, Stephen Winkley. He told me of the time he was standing at the Leavers’ Ball watching the fireworks with particular parents whose child had been not entirely straightforward for the two sixth-form years. The parents turned to him and told him that their child was adopted and Stephen said to me, “In that moment, all of the previous two years made sudden, blinding sense.” Since then, even though I cannot nowadays imagine such an example happening, I learned his mantra: tell us what we need to know.

Some schools tell new parents to go away and leave them alone. That they are the experts and parents should leave it all to them. I have limited sympathies with this approach, but think it’s quite wrong. It can, of course, be very galling indeed to have a parent tell you how to run a school based entirely upon their knowledge (sometimes biased; often partial) of their own child and upon the fact that they once went to a school themselves. And we honestly do believe at Bryanston that we are pretty expert in the ways of adolescence. But, we also know that parents know quite a lot about their own child, that we will find this information extremely useful in terms of helping us do our job of looking after them as well as we possibly can, and that the relationship between parents and school is, at its best, a collaborative one. I’m pretty certain that the tutorial system at Bryanston allows for this collaboration to be done at a very individual level.

When my two girls were at school here they had two exceptional (now retired) housemistresses and two very different, exceptional tutors. What it’s worth making clear at this point is that as the Head of their school as well as their mother, I easily won the prize of the most embarrassing mother in the world. The elder daughter, who is and always has been the most gripped up of the four of us (which is another way of saying she is a force of nature), was tutored by Neil Boulton who did not allow her just to sail through academically but ensured, which neither my husband or I could have, that she represented the school at sport. He also got her out of various moments of hot water and I will always be deeply grateful to him for the way in which he did not allow me to be part of the problem. My younger daughter, who not once was in hot water, was tutored by the remarkable Hannah Fearnley, aka Doccy F, now housemistress of Greenleaves, and when my daughter was unsure or wobbly (I brought them up the same, I promise, and their parental genetic make-up was identical), Hannah kept her (and me) sane. She further ensured that this quiet and clever, uncertain and ambitious little girl more than fulfilled her potential. She is now a confident and happy young woman and I will always bless Hannah for her (ongoing) part in that. I know how lucky I have been. But it is this sort of support, direction, kindness, toughness, and honesty which I firmly believe is the basis of a grown-up relationship between school and both child and home, and I know how very highly I valued the support I had from these wonderful professionals.

Bryanston and Bryanstonians, present and past, make me more and more often sentimental. It must be my advancing age. It’s to do, I reckon, with the fact that the job of teacher, tutor, housemaster/housemistress, Head is a hugely privileged one. Certainly I know that my role allows me to spend time with such vibrant pupil talent and energy; and that sense of connection is never-ending, year on year, and goes on way beyond 18 and for a lifetime. What will our children end up doing in their lives? It may not be clear at 11,12,13 (at least I rather hope it’s not!), but with the sort of relationship between home and school that we’re aiming for here, you can know that these things will begin to become clear over the course of five years and that as your child (and yourself vicariously) pass through the occasional turbulence of adolescence, there will always be both a strong line in to your child and an ocean of professional support and love along the way.