Notes from the General Manager

All Change by Diane Jacoutot

As you have no doubt heard, Colonel Gaddafi has been captured and killed. Following Mubarak in Egypt, Hussein in Iraq- it’s clearly not a very good time to be a megalomaniac dictator of an oil rich nation.  All the while, an historic prisoner exchange has been quietly going on between Palestine and Israel. We can all hope that this all might be the start of something good.

It’s human nature to compartmentalise and to categorise – to put things in boxes. Scientists believe this skill is what made us so biologically successful – these plants are good when you are sick, this area has lots of deer in the winter and so forth. Categorisation provides a mental shortcut which has allowed us to leapfrog over other species.   I find that we also think of our lives as a series of stops and starts in little discrete categorised boxes labelled “beginning” and “end”- The ending of one job, the setting of the sun or a break in the weather bringing on a sunny afternoon... with change happening only during those brief transitions.

But in reality change is happening all around us, every day at every second. If you look at a satellite photo of the earth you’ll notice that it’s a swirling mass of change – everywhere at every point in time. All the change might lead up to something finally noticeable to us– the toppling of a dictator, the start of a new job, or a clap of thunder, but in fact, it was all the little steps along the way that really made it happen.  Everything around us, including ourselves, is changing and growing constantly at a rate that’s usually too slow to notice until something finally startles us out of our reverie.

Teachers who are thinking about going abroad need to remember this. I find teachers often feel a sense of panic as the flight date arrives, as if they cannot remember all the little steps that happened to get them to that particular jetway – a longing for change and adventure, a frustration with their current job, a cold and dark night spent thinking about how warm it might be in Thailand right now.. all of these small steps had much more to do with the impending change than did getting a plane ticket in your email inbox from your eager new school.  Change is inevitable, and the end of one thing overlaps with the beginning of another but in a way that’s more like a relay race baton hand off with both racers running side by side than it is anything else.  It’s just that we suddenly wake up when the baton hits our hand even though we’ve been running the whole time.

So let’s raise a coffee mug or tea cup (I am in England after all) to change!  And to hoping that the particular changes in the news, as well as the changes you are making right now by subscribing to this job mailer (and taking the time to read my notes!) will lead, eventually, to something really great.