{"id":1,"date":"2019-01-28T09:15:24","date_gmt":"2019-01-28T09:15:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rosalindhaslett\/?p=1"},"modified":"2019-01-25T16:19:44","modified_gmt":"2019-01-25T16:19:44","slug":"hello-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rosalindhaslett\/2019\/01\/28\/hello-world\/","title":{"rendered":"The rules of the game"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Playground games (from playgroundfunforkids.com)<\/p><\/div>\n

My son started primary school this year. Watching him walking into the classroom on his own for the first time was terrifying because\u00a0I really didn’t know how he was going to manage somewhere which requires so much conformity and where there are so many rules. <\/span>As it turns out it\u00a0was\u00a0playtime, the only bit of\u00a0unscheduled time in the whole school day,\u00a0that he\u00a0had most difficulty with in those first few weeks. And this was\u00a0precisely because\u00a0it’s the\u00a0time of the day\u00a0when there\u00a0seem to be\u00a0fewest ‘rules’ in place.\u00a0This is the part of the day\u00a0when children are not required to do their lessons, be quiet, or sit down with their arms crossed and their fingers on their lips. Instead they’re left to manage themselves and their friendships on their own.\u00a0It’s the part of the day where all the pushing and the teasing and the raspberry-blowing and the chasing and the wee-your-pants social anxiety happens. <\/span>I’m sure that if we reach back into our own memories we can all remember at least one terrifying\u00a0moment in\u00a0a huge, dangerous\u00a0playground without a best friend beside us.\u00a0It’s the kind of memory\u00a0that your body holds on to in spite of you and so even if you can’t recall the details I’m willing to bet you\u00a0can still feel\u00a0it in your stomach. It’s a deep-seated fear because what we’re really scared of is ourselves: we don’t trust ourselves to be able to communicate with other people and to make ourselves understood without losing something — an eye, a friend, our dignity — in the process. <\/span>I heard another parent describe playtime at my son’s school as being ‘like the Wild West’, because of its lawlessness: who will\u00a0protect our children from the rustlers, outlaws, and gunslingers that they become when left to their own devices?\u00a0The playground\u00a0is scary, because play is scary.\u00a0And who wants to play a game when they don’t know the rules?\u00a0But one of the best things my son’s\u00a0school does to help new children settle in is to set them up with ‘play buddies’ (usually children from some of the older years) who will teach them the rules of playground games\u00a0— things like ‘grandmother’s footsteps’,\u00a0‘what’s the time Mr Wolf?’ and the\u00a0unpromisingly-named ‘toilet tag’.\u00a0My son\u00a0loves playing these structured\u00a0games, and I am so relieved that they all have rules to help the children to play without injuring one another. Rules, it seems,\u00a0can\u00a0help lots of situations seem less scary for everybody involved. Rules\u00a0are not only for telling us what not to do, they can also\u00a0help us to work out what we should be doing, where, when, how and with whom. Rules can help us to\u00a0learn how to relax, have fun, enjoy ourselves. And, once we understand how they work, rules can be stretched, manipulated and embellished in all sorts of exciting ways.<\/span><\/p>\n

Starting school for the first time is\u00a0for many people\u00a0the first really big change\u00a0they experience in\u00a0their lives,\u00a0and in\u00a0certain respects\u00a0it’s not so very different to starting as a first year undergraduate. I can remember how I felt when I\u00a0registered at university, when I sat in my first lecture and when I joined my first seminar group\u00a0— it gives me\u00a0the same sort of visceral feeling as those stomach-churning playground memories. And I think I can imagine how it must feel to be a parent whose child is leaving home to go off and study. But I’ve been teaching in universities for over a decade now and so it can sometimes be difficult to remember that what seems so obvious and natural to me\u00a0— the shape and structure of lectures, seminars, workshops — \u00a0might be unfamiliar to all of you. Seminars and workshops, in particular, rely upon student participation and it can be frustrating for staff when a class don’t seem to want to take part. But it’s difficult to get involved, isn’t it, when you don’t know the rules of the game? Part of what we’re hoping to do in this module, is to help you to think about what is required of you as a participant on a humanities degree, and how you can make the most of all the resources that are available to you. Yes, you can learn a lot from attending lectures and making good use of the library, but perhaps\u00a0the most important resource available to you is one another — there’s so much that you can learn\u00a0by asking questions of your peers,\u00a0talking to one another about what’ve been\u00a0reading, and\u00a0finding ways to test out your ideas as a group. So I hope you’ll think of all the staff teaching on this module as ‘play buddies’ like those in my son’s school — we’re here to show you how you can participate and to help you work\u00a0out what the rules are,\u00a0all the rest of it\u00a0is up to you.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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My son started primary school this year. Watching him walking into the classroom on his own for the first time was terrifying because\u00a0I really didn’t know how he was going to manage somewhere which requires so much conformity and where … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7876,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","hentry","category-uncategorised","post_format-post-format-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rosalindhaslett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rosalindhaslett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rosalindhaslett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rosalindhaslett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7876"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rosalindhaslett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rosalindhaslett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rosalindhaslett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/45"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rosalindhaslett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rosalindhaslett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rosalindhaslett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}