Integrity

So I was reading a tumblr post that said "Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is watching." And I thought this was interesting. An interesting idea.

Awhile ago, I saw a person throw an apple core away except he missed the bin. Someone was like "dude go pick it up", and he's like "I'll do it later", despite the fact that it was obvious he wouldn't. At this moment I was considering the potential consequence of picking it up myself before Harvard beat me to it.

I was surprised. I thought, "integrity!". He didn't know that I was watching him and the apple core.

So next time when the bin was missed, driven by Harvard's own lack of inhibitions, I went to do the same thing as him. Except this time the core rolled pretty far next to this little person (I find it hard to differentiate between junior grades) and they, driven by some incomprehensible primal impulse, stepped on it until it broke into pieces. Anyway, at that point it wasn't as if I could go back and leave the mashed-up apple there or anything, so I went to pick it up anyway. And the kid looked at me like I was weird. But I didn't really expect anything else. Perhaps I have low expectations of people. Maybe that's why nice people make me so happy.

Next time you see a bit of rubbish on the ground, and you're on the way to the bin, pick it up! You can contribute to the cleanliness of the school. And you never know what younger kid might be watching and they'd be influenced by your example and everything would lead to a clean school.

Or maybe the consensus is that it doesn't matter because the cleaners will clean everything up anyway. If it is, then I think it's a retarded consensus.

This mini-rant leads me onto my next mini-rant. I guess they're not really rants. They're more like...philosophical reflections of internal and external phenomena.

What I was going to say is that you shouldn't be angry at people. I guess disliking someone or something someone does it out of your control, but I believe it is always good to make people happy, whoever they are. Because happiness makes happiness. I like being someone that can make other people happier, don't you? Even if you don't, it's important to realise that everyone is human. You could have been any of the people around you.

So instead of feeling a sense of annoyance at the person who refuses to pick that apple core up, or feeling angry at that person who didn't contribute a secret santa present because they couldn't be bothered, try to understand what they feel. Empathise. Because you can't judge someone's actions as bad before you even try to understand their motivations, their aspirations. I think people like Harvard or Eunice have good empathy. Reading their blogs, I've noticed a strict lack of judgemental statements and general negativity towards other people. Which is pretty cool! At least cooler than my irritated rants.

And this applies to wider everything too. Take all the hate directed towards politicians, without comprehension of their situation or their circumstances. Because if you don't know what they're doing and how they're doing it, you shouldn't have any right to judge them negatively. Because if you haven't even talked to them before, if you take everything from subjective media representations, you only create unneeded discord.

But yet, never forget that the people who judge others as mentioned in the previous paragraph aren't bad people either. I can understand their words and thoughts perfectly, I've often made such hasty comments without thought. They are just the same as you or me. But what if you can show one of those people their own lack of knowledge? What if you can argue with them without a trace of prejudice or judgement, and nicely convince them that it would be better to make less hasty judgements?

Then you are doing good, because you're reducing the conflict and general annoyance throughout the world.

Maybe you'll tell me I'm crazy, maybe you'll tell me I'm mad to think I can reduce the anger in the world by any amount. And I don't care. Perhaps you would give me percentages, tell me that if I worked for my whole life towards this cause, I'd change barely 0.001% of the world's population. And I'll simply reaffirm my lack of care. Because when it comes down to your own heart, your own purpose, numbers don't matter anymore. Do you think you really know the difference between 1 million and 10 million people? I know that I don't. My mind has no clue how many people 1 million is. Because when it comes down to my purpose, there are no numbers.

There is just hope.

Goodwill!

Posting BB article if you wanted to read it again:

Different High Schools

Have you ever stopped to consider the qualities about our school that we take for granted? I bet you just did. I transferred to this school in this year (Year 11). As a person that has been to an exclusive, private, single-sex boys’ school (the most expensive school in Sydney, $22,000/year last time I checked) located in a super-metropolitan suburb with a train station barely 200m from the school and an exclusive, selective, co-ed school located in a semi-suburbia where trains do not even reach, I feel as if I should be able to present a valid judgement on the unique characteristics of the two schools. I shall put them into a list format to make them easier for you to read.

1.      Discipline and strictness. You think Dr. Bathgate complains too much about our uniform standard? Imagine prefects being put on roster at the front gate of the school giving detentions to people whose compulsory straw hats are not being worn parallel to the ground. To give you an idea of what it’s like in a private schools:

a.      Instant detentions upon being late to class

b.      Compulsory ties and blazers all year around

c.       Compulsory hats worn during recesses and lunches

d.      Uniform must be perfect at all times, even outside of school. Shoes must be polished, belt must be a school belt, and bag must be a school bag. Compulsory straw hats called boaters costing $50 each.

e.      Saturday detention upon mobile phone ringing in class

The list could go on and on.

2.      Teachers. When I was in year 8 (in the private school) I distinctly recall having a male teacher for Maths, English, Science, History, PDHPE, Music, Design/Technology, Visual Art, and Latin. In other words, every single one of my subjects. When I started here in year 11, I had a female teacher for Maths, English, English Extension, Physics, Biology, and Ancient History. In other words, every single one of my subjects. Unfortunately (or fortunately) this year I picked up 4-unit maths which means I now have one male teacher (shoutout Mr. Simmons!) (I also picked up 4u English and History extension which means I have 3 more female teachers as well).

But I’ve heard a lot of people cite the teachers of private schools as a reason to send their children to them. And this is logical. If teachers are paid higher in private schools, it follows that they should be better. However, I disagree with this. I’ve seen good and bad teachers at both schools, in my experience there is no correlation. However, I must also put this down to the students. A teacher will find it infinitely harder to teach when s/he needs to consistently tell the class to be quiet, and engaging teachers are simply rare. At my old school I had one brilliant Maths teacher, one brilliant French teacher, and three terrible English teachers.  There is simply no consistency.

3.      Girls.  Of course, I’m unable to comment on single-sex schools in general, since I’ve obviously never been to a single-sex girls’ school, but I think this is a massive consideration.

To consider this from a comprehensive perspective, the reason most schools are single-sex is because it’s traditional. In some countries it’s even religious. If you accept the main arguments put forward by advocates and opponents of single-sex education, the advantages of single-sex education lie mainly in distractions of sexual attraction post-puberty and that boys and girls require different methods of education and the disadvantages lie in decreased social skills and the generation of sexist attitudes.

Well, guess what? I understand none of this at all. Well, except maybe the sexist attitudes. From my view, all the above arguments are complete twaddle (except, as I’ve said, possibly the sexist attitudes), and all the university theses are being retarded. I’m not sure exactly how much of it I can attribute to the school, but I can mention some things that I suspect are due to lack or presence of girls.

a.      As I previously mentioned, sexism. While I’ve believe that many pubescent males and post-pubescent males are sexist regardless of school, I must mention that a lack of contact with girls likely causes boys to more often objectify females and consider them more as sexual receptacles than as similar people. If you were to hear the late-night camp discussions of single-sex school boys, you would imagine that their idea of a girl was a collection of body parts rather than a human. Of course, there’s some male sexism in this school as well, but it’s not nearly as prominent. I think contact with females helps teenage boys deal with girls as people.

b.      Once my French teacher (the brilliant one) said that the boys in the class would be a lot nicer and less generally annoying if there were girls in the class. I suspect that it is indeed, true. I remember one particular ridiculous incident that would be censored if I put it here. Nevertheless, the reasoning behind this claim is that the guys would get cut down by the girls when they did mean things to them or each other. And that reasoning sounds quite valid to me. But more on how nice people are later.

c.       Focus. It is also logical and probably inevitable that boys will concentrate more on the opposite gender when in a school with more than a third of the people there being that opposite gender. At the point you might say “But Davy! You just told me that that argument was complete rubbish! You lied to me!” But no, I say, I am still arguing that that argument is rubbish. While from my own experience, I probably do think about girl(s) more, it’s hardly a hindrance to my schoolwork.  I suppose heartbreak and love problems can have an effect, but it’s only temporary and counterbalanced by an associated increase in motivation and competitiveness.

4.      Events and Activities. Do you believe that we don’t have enough mufti days? Well, imagine having no mufti days at all, for every single one of the ~200 days of the school year.  Something I have previously thought about is the role of the prefects. In this school the prefects run interesting and fun activities for everyone and make life better, basically. High Resolves, the SRC, prefects, everything! But I think private schools lack the idea of “fun”. There was nothing to make my schooling life better each day, it was the monotony of class day in, day out. No one ever bothered to organise events for Christmas, for Halloween, for Easter. There was no one to look out for how happy the students were besides a lone school councillor who I got sent to once for practising alliteration of D-words in my diary (i.e. death, destruction, disease, despair, the list ended up being about 60 words long). And so my schooling life became focused around achievement, and I got my fun from sitting in front of a computer screen playing games all day. The lack of fun made school such a restricting place, a place where you simply cannot relax.

5.      The people. I left the main one to last, as it is interlinked with all the others. Its importance is supreme. A school is, at its very foundations, made up by the students that attend it. I believe everything above: the rules, the teachers, the events are all just secondary (see what I did there?). It’s difficult to consider all the people I know at once (try doing it. It’s actually pretty hard) but my conclusion is that little minority of people who bother to go out and be friendly to that new kid looking a bit lost (shoutout to those people, you know who you are) revitalise the school entirely.  

And the more I think about it, the more I realise that the people in the school are everything to it. Year 8 camp would have been awesome and not a hell of lost items and endless hiking if the less nice people in my group had been replaced by some from this school. I would have struggled through the ridiculously long hikes and stuff with a joyful spirit. I shall paraphrase a certain person here, who told me that everything’s fun when you’re with your friends. Never a truer statement. I like this school. I look forward to going to school, but only because there are nice people here.

Perhaps you still fail to understand the absolutely massive magnitude of the importance of the people in the school to how much you like it. Imagine you came to school and it was just you. You’d solo all your classes, you’d eat recess and lunch alone, and you’d be the only person on the bus home. Well, that’s what happens if you don’t feel a sense of *ahem* belonging with the other people in the school. That’s what happens when you don’t have marvellously nice people in the school. I mean, when a new kid came to our school one day and came to all our classes I’m pretty sure no-one said a single word to him at all. No one asked what school he came from, no one asked him if he liked the school until the teacher deigned to at the end of the history lesson.

And there are so many nice people in this school. It might be something to do with the beneficial presence of both genders, I don’t know, but there is something about this school where suddenly so many people are nice to me, giving me a friendly wave or hello. I thought about this one for a long while, and concluded that nice people generate nice people. Seeing other people being friendly encourages you to be friendly, because being friendly is the thing to do at this school. If everyone around you is in their own little circle of friends, you’re going to either feel left out or you’re going to join your own circle of friends and that other dude who doesn’t know anyone is going to be sad.

I can’t help you understand what private school boys are like. It’s hard to understand a group of people, because unless you want to overgeneralise you’re going to have to simultaneously understand each and every person in that group and then understand them all together. And I doubt even Jason Ma could simultaneously comprehend many thousands of people at the same time. Therefore, I shall firstly inform you that the popular “stuck-up” image of private school people that I seem to be getting from some people’s understandings is misguided. I shall paint an image for you of the typical private school boy. He isn’t stuck up, he simply takes money and monetary security for granted, as many of you might. Because he only knows similar people - that is, rich, European-descended, upper-class sex-driven teenage boys, he misconceives girls, poorer people, Asians, academically talented people and the other general minorities such as homosexuals,  physically or mentally disabled people, etc. He isn’t a nice person that will stop to help someone else who has dropped their books. He’s a normal person, a normal person influenced by the restrictions of his school.

But of course, I am doing exactly the thing I thought I was meant to avoid, and I am overgeneralising people. There are nice people in private schools too, I guess it’s just the atmosphere of this specific school that allows the people to be nicer, more accepting, and more friendly towards each other. I sense that the people of this school are simply more willing to be friends with me.

Or maybe, as some people have suggested to me, it’s just my grade that’s nice and all the year 7s and year 8s are immature freaks that fell out of the sky after they decided to jump out of an airplane for fun (I hope you realised that that was a joke). Obviously I choose not to believe that.

To conclude I believe I shall give my opinion about the two schools and then about private/non-selective/single-sex schools in general as opposed to public/selective/co-ed. As you can probably tell from the overarching tone of this article, I really like this school and believe single-sex  expensive private schools are evil devil’s spawn from the deepest ocean trench imaginable, but I will attempt to present an objective, un-biased judgement of the schools.

About my old school. I felt not a trace of sadness when I left it. I waved goodbye to the school name (which I’m not mentioning for obvious reasons) above the main gate and felt not a trace of regret at leaving the place despite its familiarity. But I have the feeling that leaving this school, I will be seriously sad. Incredibly, devastatingly, mind-numbingly sad. Because the your friends and nice people are the ones most important to you. Because for the first time since primary school, I was happy going to school. Isn’t that funny? This school inspires me.

And you know what? I was kidding about the objective judgement about schools. I’m going to tell you private schools are completely terrible AND ONLY SEND YOUR CHILDREN TO THEM IF YOU WANT THEM TO DIE A TERRIBLE TERRIBLE DEATH IN THE DEPTHS OF THE HELL FROM WHICH THOSE PRIVATE SCHOOLS SPAWNED!

I’m glad I’m here. Go Baulko!

By Davy Jones, Year 12

I guess it's time to fix my NaNoWriMo so I can upload it in a semi-okay state, and prepare my Viva Voce and do stuff that I've written that I would do on my little to-do sheet.

Today I wandered around Parramatta shopping centre for a long time. I never realised it was so big. I also never realised that the information terminals were for information. I wandered around for a long time. I think I like shopping more when I'm wandering around, questing for my next objective. Questing is exciting.