On Making A Discover and Chapter Two

I think I have had a breakthrough. I was reading one of the NUT union magazines that gets mailed to me, when I stumbled upon an article about Assertive Behaviour Management. It was a very brief article, that summed up what it meant to use assertive language to control a classroom. Instead of losing your temper, and saying "What are you doing?" or "Is that what I asked you to do!?" (in essense, asking questions), you need to take a more assertive role. They gave a few examples, such as saying "I realize that you would prefer to talk right now, but I need you to do [insert task here], thank you".

By doing it this way, you're taking away the option factor that comes with a question, and making in a very personal demand; I NEED and THANK YOU are more assertive, and clue the students into the fact that you are in control.

All day today I practiced talking this way. I can't even count the number of times I said "I need you to" and "thank you".

And guess what. It worked.

I will try it again tomorrow, and let you know how it went.

For now, have a read of the second chapter that I've just completed.

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When I was twelve years old my family moved house. There were a lot of reasons behind the move, one of which was so that we could be closer to my Nana, who was at this point starting to get weaker. At the time my mum wasn’t working full-time, so she could go over and help Nana with the housework. That wasn’t the number one reason why we moved, not initially, but it was definitely something that helped to tip the scales. Mostly, we moved because my parents had fallen in love with this great, old red-brick century home.

It makes me laugh now to think of the house as old. Living in England has really opened my eyes about the concept of ‘time’ and ‘age’. Time is something we have a very warped perspective of in Canada, and America too, I reckon. We look at a Victorian home, with its wooden trim, smooth wood floors, grand rooms and ceilings, and hard brick exteriors, and see a ‘fixer-upper’; a house with a lot of ‘character’, as I remember my mother saying once. We take pride in having our houses look fabulous after one hundred years of hard living, when really the amount of time that has passed since the home was first inhabited to present time is nothing more than a drop in the hat. You could easily trace the different families and generations that passed through its doors.

In England, time is something completely different; it’s something truly grand and wonderful. For one thing, Victorian homes are situated in relatively new areas of a town or city. You’ll often find the city centres are filled with the older buildings with quaint thatch roofing, cobbled stones and narrow streets. As you move further away from the centre, you’ll start to find newer and newer homes (though the ability to maximize the space available has never seems to have changed). Time in England, and I’d venture out to say in all of Europe, is part of a much grander history. When you see a castle, situated on a lonely country bluff, or a village church steeple from miles away, or the thatching on a home being replaced on a bright summers day, you suddenly are struck with how old things truly are; how life carries on, buildings carry on, centuries after they were initially conceived.

As a child, even if you are a mature-for-your-age twelve year old, the fact that you are moving into an ‘old’ house makes the act of moving ten times worse. As your parents wax poetical about all the work they’re going to do on the house to improve it, all you can see is the house as it currently stands; crusty, crumbly and possibly haunted. The stairs creak as you walk up them, and the wind seems to whistle in a different tone than at your former house.

In fact, the house you’re leaving behind didn’t even have trees for the wind to whistle through. It was ideally situated in a brand-new subdivision; one of those early 1990 build suburbs; the ones that were constructed during a renewed emphasis on the working class living in clean, cookie-cutter subdivisions. A new school was built in the area to cater to the increased population, a grocery store went in, and the process of moving away from the centre of town was prolonged once more.

I couldn’t understand why my parents wanted to leave our nice ‘new’ house, in our nice ‘new’ area of town to live in some old, musty smelling house on the main street of a town a half hours drive away. I just did not see the appeal. I tried to understand their reasoning; I really did. There were things I liked about the house. For one thing, I had loved walking confidently around one of the upstairs bedrooms, proclaiming it ‘MINE’ should my parents (stupidly) decide to buy the dump. It was big, drafty and had a HUGE front window, which the reader in me thought would be perfect for Saturday morning snuggles in bed with a book. I also liked the idea of the in-ground pool. No kid can resist the allure of a pool; all summers leading up to the move were constantly spent trying to make friends with people who had pools. If we moved here, we’d be the cool kids with the pool. I’d be rolling in friends (the idea that people would use me for the pool had never occurred to me at the time).

I also liked the spacious back yard. It had apple trees, mulberry trees, raspberry bushes, and lilacs in the spring. It was so picturesque, like a quaint home in the country, and it was on the main street! I had more than one day-dream about setting up for a picnic back there, with a gaggle of little girls around me, sharing whatever girly gossip young girls of that age share.

Despite all these positives though, I detested having to leave my friends behind. When the move finally happened, I took it badly. I spent the first few weekends having sleepovers with my old friends; they’d come to me one weekend, and I’d go to then the next. It must have been hard on my parents, to watch me struggle with the change so poorly. I’m not sure can say I’d be particularly good at watching my own child suffer, but then again I’ve not had to deal with that yet; I’m still too young to even consider children (despite the fact that my mother was my age when she had me).

Things may have gone a bit smoother for me if the town we’d moved to had been at all accepting of ‘new-blood’ (as I affectionately started to call myself). Perhaps it is phenomenon that exists in all small towns, or perhaps it is a product of this particular small town; whatever it was, integrating myself into the youth culture of the town proved to be more trouble than nought. I still don’t think I’ve managed it, thirteen years down the line.

Sure I made friends; I think the element of ‘newness’ played on my side for a few days. On my first day, I remember asking my mum to do my hair in a French braid, because I felt that I was at my most attractive with my hair plaited back; it allowed me to show off my teeny tiny ears, which for some bizarre reason I felt were my best feature. I also took ages picking out a suitable outfit. I can only vaguely remember what it was at the time, but I think it was something like thick green corduroy trousers and a striped green top. I could be wrong, but that sounds like something I’d wear when I was twelve and looking to impress.

Recess on that first day I had a circle of girls around me. They were firing questions at me one at a time.

“Where are you from?”
“When is your birthday?”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“What do you like to watch on TV?”
“What are you wearing?!”
“Did you mummy do your hair for you?”

I struggled to answer each of them, and felt supremely overwhelmed by the whole experience. I was also struggling to decide whether some of the meaner questions had been intentionally malicious or were just the product of a young and honest mind trying to suss out a new presence on the playground. After recess I followed one of the girls back inside, and she led me to our French lesson. I remember sitting at the back of the room, fighting back tears as I struggled to control my emotions. Moving house had been hard enough, but to be thrown into a school and have the girls at me like hounds was too much for my frail mind to take.

As the days started to wear on, my timidness seemed to intensify. Where I had been bubbly, cheery and popular in my old school, I found it really hard to be that person in my new school. I tried to get on friendly terms with a few of the girls, but was mostly met with not-so-subtle rebuffs. They just didn’t seem interested in me. I felt as if I were a bother to them. It was hard to deal with, and slowly my self-esteem seemed to shrink into itself.

I think a lot of my self-image issues in my later teen years started with the poor start I had at my new school. I was made to feel ‘uninteresting’ and worthless, stupid, ugly and immature. The things I was interested in were mocked, the way that I dressed was a constant source of laughter, and the things I said were pointless drivel.

Despite all the hardships, I eventually managed to associate myself with a very talkative, very chatty young girl who physically (but certainly not mentally) was a lot like myself; small, slim, with pale skin and light hair. However, where I was quiet and reserved, she was loud and boisterous. She had a laugh that one can only describe as weird. It bubbled up in these odd, irregular bursts. It was unique, bizarre, and undoubtedly loud. She was just Jenny. Crazy, goofy, unpredictable Jenny.

We were joined at the hip, inseparable, for about a year. Slowly I stopped pining for my old mates, and was content to spend time with Jenny. She helped me to open up, and brought me out of my new-found shyness. I owe a lot of Jenny, because being around her brought out my own sunny interior once more.

In hindsight, there were a lot of things that could have signalled to me that things with Jenny were not as great as they seemed. For one thing, my Nana never took a fancy to her. She’d sit and listen to me as I nattered on and on about our exploits, but she remained uncharacteristically silent for the most part.
It also never occurred to me to ask Jenny what she did when we were apart. I never thought that on these occasions she’d be back with the other girls, but she was. Perhaps she was friends with me out of pity, I am not sure. I didn’t get invited to most of the big get-togethers, but I was never really made aware of this fact. I had a good relationship with my younger sister, and when I wasn’t playing with Jenny I would spend time playing with her and her friends. A few times I remember going to big group sleepovers at Jenny’s, but these always went fairly poorly. I always felt out of place unless it were just Jenny and I. Her attention seemed elsewhere when the other girls were around.

I remember telling my Nana about this, during one of our tea-time chats. I must have mentioned it in passing, which surely signalled to her my own subconscious discontent. She took a sip of her tea, savouring the warmth of it for a moment before she replied to me.

“Why do you suppose that is?” she asked me.

“I don’t know? Maybe I’m just being silly,” I said, already doubting myself. Doubt was an emotion I was becoming good friends with.

“No, I don’t think that’s it. I think you may be on to something,” she said, pausing. “True friends are hard to find.”

“I think I had true friends once...but then we moved. Except...doesn’t that mean that ...that they weren’t true friends after all? Cuz if they were, well, we’re not friends now, right?” I said, thinking out loud. The slow realisation of it was a bit troubling to me. No true friends? How dire!

“You’ll make a lot of friends in your life, my dear, but few will ever count as true friends,” she mused. “True friends will be the ones you keep for life. They’re the ones that stand by you through thick and thin. You could do something catastrophically stupid, and they’d be there to pick you up afterwards.”

“Uh huh,” I said, deep in thought.

“Do you think that Jenny is there for you?” she asked me, point blank.

“YES,” I said, steadfastly. “Of course she is. She is my best friend!”

I fingered my half of the Ying-Yang friendship necklace I’d given to Jenny. Of course she was my true friend. She wouldn’t have accepted the necklace if she wasn’t. Right?

Nana smiled at me.“Of course she is,” she said.

I don’t remember much else about that conversation. The one thing I do remember, looking back, is that she seemed to be warning me about Jenny and about people in general. It wasn’t that she was telling me not to trust people; that more often than not you’ll meet a lot of ‘duds’. I think the thing she was trying to get across to me was that I had to be selective; to see people for who they really were. Obviously I’ve learnt that a true friend, like my Nana had said, is someone who will hold your hand through the really tough times, even if they don’t agree with what you’re doing. They’ll never say a bad word against you, and when bad words are said about you, they’ll be the first to beat them down with their own words of retaliation.
I think my Nana knew all along that Jenny was a dud. I think she could see where that friendship was going to go right from the start. I wish I’d have know it as well, or failing that, that she’d have given me better warning. However, we all know that life’s lessons are best learnt the hard way.