Yesterday I had the chance to meet one of our new members of the team on her first day.
Part of our strategy of practice growth and development, some of which we constructed during the first lockdown of covid and others which developed in the year after that, was an aggressive recruitment policy and drive to expand our team as much as we could to protect us from the demand that was coming and the challenges in dentistry and team recruitment.
And so, yesterday I found myself sat in the lab introducing what the lab does to our newest member of the team (I won’t embarrass her by mentioning her by name yet because I don’t know her well enough).
She’s been in dentistry for 7 years, qualified for 3 but the most important thing I was interested in asking her was “what do you want to do when you grow up?”.
Lauren, our extraordinary general manager, was with me at the time and she was laughing because she knows me well, but I was completely serious.
I’m always reminded in these circumstances of Baz Luhrmann in the monologue ‘wear sunscreen’ where he says “The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t”.
I can absolutely tell you that this 50-year-old certainly doesn’t.
At this point in the blog, it’s time that you made a cup of coffee and sit and watch ‘what would you do if money was not object’ by Alan Watts.
It’s too long and you won’t click the link, but you should, and you should watch it about once a month and absolutely show it to your children.
It’s where Alan Watts explains what we should actually do in the lead up to and in the aftermath of results day as opposed to what we do, do.
It’s hard today not to be reminded of a results day around 35 years ago where I was stood in a phone box in the tiny little cathedral village of Dornoch (where Madonna got married) which was my childhood holiday destination 50 miles north east of Inverness.
My girlfriend at the time and I were collecting exam results over the phone for our Highers (think AS level) and my dad and my mum were on the phone and my dad opened the enveloped and tore it horrendously (I still have it) only to find out that I’d scored better in my Highers than my school could ever have imagined (it was still quite mediocre) and I had to try and consider changing tack.
What happened to me on results day 34 years ago was a little bit like winning the academic lottery.
It’s worth pointing out that it’s really unlikely that that would ever happen today in the way we are so analytical with young people’s results and test scores.
And so, I had to find something to do at university because I was now considered ‘university material’ having never been considered that before.
And so, I have to wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t of quite struck so lucky with the results that I got and where I would have ended up.
And these were the conversations I was having with my daughter this week in the lead up to results day.
Our family has had the dubious privilege of 2 A level results days right in the middle of the worst possible covid interventions.
My eldest daughter, Grace, had her A level results 2 years ago in the lockdown summer (Rosie had her GCSE results).
Rosie had her A level results today with the aftermath of 2 years of absolute academic, university admissions and results calculation carnage.
The press is a wash of what’s fair and what isn’t and what percentage of people got A’s and who didn’t and how many courses there are in clearing and where there isn’t and just a deluge of stress related journalism to fuel the fire of young people’s mental health issues.
It’s hard to convince anyone that it doesn’t really matter.
The world is entirely different now.
If you don’t go to university now, it doesn’t matter.
If you start something you don’t like, it doesn’t matter.
If you take a year to do something else, that’s even better.
The thing that makes you likely to succeed in the world is very unlikely to be the thing that you’re good at, at school.
To be brilliant at maths is unlikely to make you successful and happy and satisfied but then of course we come to what is success? And is happiness and contentment and adjustment and satisfaction anything to do with happiness or is it income?
I have the privilege to be a governor at 2 different schools, one a very high achieving state school in an affluent part of town and the other (and chair of governor at this school) is an alternative provision school which is set up to allow education for children who cannot manage in mainstream school for various reasons of behaviour.
There are routes to satisfaction and contentment and fulfilment and creation and contribution out of both of these schools and almost always the people who find the most of these things are the atypical pathway people.
If you were involved in results day today, I wish you all the best.
I hope whoever in your family was involved is not upset or stressed or unhappy and if they did get what they wanted or close to what they wanted, I hope they have the opportunity to look forwards and think ‘what do I want to be when I grow up?”.
If they didn’t, I hope they realise that there are so many different types of intelligence that it’s probably true that school just hasn’t found the one they’re good at yet and with a bit of exploration and curiosity they’ll find a path in something that lets them contribute and make a difference.
We don’t need lots of people with 3 A*’s at A level, we need people who are ready to come alive because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Blog Post Number - 3176
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