Wynberg’s Darwin Awards

I was thrilled when after months of email correspondence, Celia Lashlie agreed to be a keynote speaker at the National Boys’ School conference we were organising at school in March this year.  I originally heard her speak in a similar conference in New Zealand some years ago and made a mental note that if the remote chance ever arose that I would be asked to organise a conference,  she would be first on my hit list of potential speakers.

When that remote chance became a reality two years ago, I was soon firing off emails to New Zealand.  Celia had never visited South Africa before and many emails went back and off as I extolled the virtues of Cape Town hospitality which I assured her could match anything the Antipodes could offer.  No suitor was more ardent and I was excited when the following email eventually popped up in my inbox:

Celia Lashlie

‘I would be delighted to be a speaker at your conference in Cape Town on 14/15 March and to add in whatever other speaking engagements might be workable at your end.

I love the description you have chosen for the conference theme and am flattered by your invitation to be part of the discussions about what might constitute new wineskins and new wine.‘

As Wynberg was the host school, we had previously decided that our Conference theme  would take the viticultural slant. Thus ‘New Wine in New Skins’ became our tag line.  The schools  attending  that weekend all have a new, vibrant, challenging and fresh vintage coming into their ranks every year.  Older cynics in our staff rooms might describe this young vintage as  ‘coarse’, ‘complex’, ‘earthy’, ‘spicy’ – maybe even ‘hollow’ – but it is our job as educators to mature these young wines into a vintage which would make their parents proud.

To do this successfully, we have to follow the bibilical injunction not to put ‘new wine into old wineskins’.  If we are to do justice to our annual new vintage,  we have to ensure that we have new skins in place:  i.e.  teaching methods, technological advancements, guidance procedures; counselling practices and cultural traditions.

Celia fitted this bill admirably. ‘This is not to take away from any of the other speakers, but even if we had come down to Cape Town and just heard Celia Lashlie speak, the trip would have been worthwhile,’ enthused one email to me from an upcountry teacher.

She spoke for over an hour to the delegates and afterwards sat on the couch on stage, with our facilitator Dave Williams, fielding questions from the audience.  David Williams, an experienced TV host of business talk shows, was unequivocal that the tea-break was not going to happen on time.  ‘We can have tea any day of the week, but we won’t hear Celia Lashlie again,’ he stated emphatically.  And so the questions were allowed to flow.

When the tea break became an urgent necessity, David Williams gave his thanks. The audience then  stood up as one and gave her a standing ovation.  I have never in all my years of seminars and conferences seen a speaker given such a reception.

Introducing Celia Lashlie to a packed Clegg Hall

We had advertised for some time that she would be giving another talk at the school in a public meeting on the Monday after the conference.  We had hoped that about four hundred people would attend so that we could cover costs.  I don’t think that the nine hundred folk who subsequently squeezed into our hall were disappointed.

‘I am not an academic, just a story teller,’ she said. ‘My fifteen years in the prison services have given me a reasonable insight into the young male mind.’

She was being overly modest. She was the first female officer appointed in a men’s prison in New Zealand and consequently had a unique insight. She eventually left the prison services to pursue what  she called the ‘Good Man’ Project.  Its aim was through extensive research to work out what New Zealand boys thought a ‘Good Man’ was.  She brought all her findings together in her book: ‘He’ll be Okay: Growing gorgeous boys into Good Men.’

Using humour effectively, she challenged parents to rethink the way they handle their teenage boys. ‘Any mother who says that they know their son would never do a particular deed  and that he would definitely be honest with their mother, I always say Yeah, right…’

She made perfect sense to all of us who operate in the world of boys when she said that one boy on his own equals one brain. However, two boys together  equal half a brain with the brain power decreasing exponentially i.e. four boys share a quarter of a brain and so on.  I couldn’t help thinking what the percentage of a brain would be watching on a typical Saturday at a certain football club in Manchester….

No boy wants to disappoint his mother and while he might be readily volunteering information about others, he is most unlikely to expand on his own personal involvement in the group activities.

Celia certainly had every male in the audience reflect on their own past, when she made the comment that in her experience every boy is only a step away from prison or a visit to hospital. ‘All it takes is a few seconds for a thoughtless decision to be made – and a boy’s life can be irreversibly changed.’

Usually, but not always, these decisions are often made when alcohol has nullified the cognitive side of the brain - a swinging fist, a thrown stone,  an unnecessary expletive, a foot pressed down on the accelerator, a reckless dare.

‘Teach consequences early in a boy’s life – because that way you might be saving his life,’ she said. She emphasised that insisting on consequences was possibly the most important role of a mother because when that moment inevitably comes when the traffic light goes orange and the boy’s mates urge him to put his foot down, that drummed-in maternal injunction on ‘consequences’  should then kick in.

There is no doubt that many teenage boys seem to have a death wish.  Jumping from a rock without checking the depth of the pool; charging recklessly through traffic on a bicycle; throwing litres of alcohol down his throat – the list is endless.  Our job as adults is to keep them alive as long as possible.

The risk-taking of adolescent boys certainly seems to qualify many of them for a Darwin Award where they self-select themselves out of the gene pool by killing themselves by some foolish action.  Wikepedia defines it thus: ‘In the spirit of Charles Darwin, the Darwin Awards commemorate individuals who protect our gene pool by making the ultimate sacrifice of their own lives. Darwin Award winners eliminate themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species' chances of long-term survival.’

I doubt hardly a day goes past in the average boy’s school where some boy doesn’t make a really good attempt to be nominated for this award.  After listening to Celia Lashlie, a few of us spent our tea-time trying to outdo one another in Darwin Award nominees from our schools.  After much thought, I narrowed my top three nominees of my tenure  as Headmaster down to the following:

• JP Roussouw  -  who matriculated about fifteen years ago.  I received a phone call one afternoon about a boy in Wynberg uniform on his knees on the roof of the school bus going through Bergvliet.  As the bus was negotiating its way through the traffic,  he was kneeling in the wind at the top of the bus with his arms spread aloft in triumph mimicking an avenging angel.  The caller prefaced her phone call by saying that ‘You won’t believe this, Mr Richardson….’  She was right, I didn’t. 

I always boast I know boys.  I should have known better.

To her credit, his mother instantly acknowledged her son’s culpability when I phoned her. ‘Just the sort of stupid thing he would do,’ she declared.  Having not heard anything to the contrary since then, I presume that the two parts of JP’s male brain are now talking to one another and that he is still part of our gene pool today.

• Then there was the boy who decided to save money on the R10 entrance fee to our school disco years ago.  He climbed (in the dark) onto the roof where the building is a single story and then tile-hopped in unfamiliar territory to where he thought the school hall was.  He arrived on the roof of the C block (three stories high) and looking down at the revellers in the quad -  panicked.  The reactions were immediate.  The girls below screamed and one boy predictably shouted ‘Jump!’  The boy on the roof remained on the tiles, mesmerised.

  

  C Block, as seen from the ground ...

They didn’t prepare us for this sort of situation at university.  Feeling as if I myself would shortly be a nominee for the Darwin Award, I went up and on hands and knees  and led him back from the C block, over the D block,  to the one story A Block where I almost pushed him off the roof into the flower bed outside the staff room.  He recovered quickly and promptly asked if that adventure entitled him to free entry to the disco.

I never found out his name as he was not a Wynberg boy.  No matter  - but it would be interesting to know if he is still contributing to humanity’s gene pool.

• However, the winners in my book are the huge number of the 2014 matrics who volunteered to be paintball targets for anyone who wanted to pay R10 for 15 paintball ‘bullets’ at our recent fundraiser, Night of the Stars.  I was alerted to the mayhem by a mother who asked me pointedly whether I was aware that ‘pieces of flesh’ were being gouged out of the boys at the Paintball shooting range.  Pretending to act nonchalantly, I walked casually across.  The major cause of the mayhem were the matrics fighting for the privilege of going next. ‘You have gone three times, now it is my turn,’ was the first comment I heard.  Never having been involved in paintball, I was under the impression that the paintballs were little sponges daubed with paint.  Judging by the weals they inflicted on the bodies of the matrics, this was clearly not the case.  The damage was somewhere between a sponge and a machine gun bullet –  with the odds marginally on the machine gun bullet side.

Director of Sport, Roland Rudd takes aim at the matrics "Who needs corporal punishment? This is much more fun ..."

Tristan Oschmann - 'Target for Tonight'

The scene, under flickering lights, had attracted the largest crowd of the evening.  The be-masked matrics, unbelievably sans shirts, were running between two shelters about 15 metres from the marksmen.  Well, some ran.  Others sauntered provocatively.  Some pirouetted.  Others, full of bravado, did somersaults.  Every time a victim was hit, an excited cheer went up from the crowd.  I am sure that those ghouls knitting at the foot of the guillotine in 1789 sent up a similar cheer.

The piece de resistance was undoubtedly  offered by Guy Bowden and  Tristan Oschmann.  They reclined themselves like Clive Rice (without cricket bat) on the straw bales - not five metres from the marksmen -  and took bullet after bullet at point blank range until eventually wisdom (or pain..) prevailed and they rolled off  to take refuge behind the bales.

‘You must stop this,’ my horrified wife said to me.  She left shaking her head when I pointed out that both Guy and Tristan had gone back for another turn.

It just proved Celia Lashlie’s argument. Mothers must work hard at understanding boys.