Well Done, Parents

You are doing well.

Being a parent of children or teenagers must feel really hard right now. There is so much illness around, some of it is covid and some is merely a common cold, but it looks like covid, feels like covid and behaves like covid. And the uncertainty of all that, mingled with our social memory of the losses of life through 2020-21, could easily trigger anxiety.

Despite that, you parents really are doing well and partly why I can tell you are doing well is that I can see it expressed in your children’s behaviour at school. Let me explain…

As you are aware, our school has a well-deserved reputation for balancing friendliness with firmness. We are known as a place where our learners are loved, and the rules are respected. We don’t tolerate destructive behaviours or disruptive disturbances, yet at the same time, we guide, redirect and sometimes even punish students but always with the goal of protectively nurturing them.

So, a school that is firm but fair can reasonably expect to be a school where the students are well behaved, and prior to the lockdown years, that is exactly what we did expect and did see. However, since the return to full-time onsite schooling this year, things were not like that. It has been odd. Some of our students were behaving … well, behaving not like our students usually behave.

Perhaps the explanation for the out of character poor behaviour was that some students had forgotten. Some students had perhaps forgotten what it means to wear the MCC uniform. Perhaps they had forgotten who they are as a MCC student. It certainly seemed like a couple of them had ‘lost the plot’.

But I am very pleased to announce that your steady support of the steadying work of our teachers has meant that normalness is returning rapidly. And normalness in a school like this is very good. When peace and calm, purposeful learning and happy children are normal, then normal is what we want.

So, well done parents, and well done teachers. Your combined steadiness and co-supportiveness are accelerating our students’ recovery from the lockdowns. We are seeing week by week that our beautiful learners are regaining their usual great behaviour; behaviour that represents their parents and their school so wonderfully.

David Gleeson, Principal