DCC Tribes
As a secondary school teacher and principal who spent over 32 years in the job, one of the real pleasures that kept me in it was watching the kids under my care grow and develop. Kids come in all shapes and sizes and in the course of those years they never ceased to surprise and sometimes amaze me with the heights they’d achieve, the skills they displayed and the things they’d come out with. However, as we’d all be aware, more often than not the focus of the broader community and the media tends to be on the negative aspects of young people and being young: mental health issues, loutish behaviour, bullying (both online and face-to-face), drugs, video game violence: the list goes on.
As someone in the business of educating young people I saw it as my job to try to counterbalance this negative focus whenever I was given the opportunity. However, I have to admit that on a daily basis my colleagues and I were forced to confront some of the more negative aspects of the adolescent mind-set. Trying to convince a distraught 13 year old girl in floods of tears that everyone doesn’t hate her and that they aren’t all talking about her is no easy task! I don’t like oversimplifying the way kids behave toward each other, but it’s been my experience that the root of many problems that occur in the playground often tend to revolve around acceptance, friendship and belonging to a ‘tribe’ (for want of a better term).
We all like to
