Just 10 Highlights of a Very Busy Week
Just 10 Highlights of a Very Busy Week
Sunday, 5 December 2010
Do you ever have weeks when you get to the end, look back, and feel that the previous weekend was about three or four weeks ago? I’ve just had another of those very busy weeks.
Busy – but enormously satisfying.
Perhaps the best way to give some idea of the diversity of the week is to list just ten of the week’s many highlights.
1.We have been thrilled to welcome Chris Howarth to our campus this week. I first met Chris in July 2008 at a meeting of UWC Asia-Pacific National Committees in Hanoi. Chris was helping to establish the (then) new Cambodian National Committee, and made an impassioned plea for Colleges to offer more places to needy Cambodian students. He must have been quite persuasive, as I have been offering two extra full scholarships to Cambodians every year since that time. Since then, Chris has been helping the UWC Palestinian National Committee with its work, and he has also initiated an exciting project known as United World Schools which aims to build low cost schools to open up educational opportunities to children in countries such as Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Nepal. United World Schools has already built several schools in Cambodia, and we have formed a working relationship between the TraffickLink Group at the College and United World Schools. There will be a meeting with students this evening at 9:15 pm to consider the possibilities of establishing ongoing, sustainable support for United World Schools. As a very practical expression of a key Millennium Development Goal (education for all), I really hope that strong support is expressed.
2.Chris’ visit had a second dimension this week. He is about to become a member of the UWC Council with a special responsibility for “UWC Outreach”, which in the official terminology is defined as “any program/project that enables UWC to deliver transformational learning experiences, which embody the UWC mission and values, to audiences beyond existing UWC communities.” Chris used the opportunity of his visit to Hong Kong to investigate and map the Outreach activities underway in the College, and the photo at the top of this blog shows his discussion on that topic with me in my office on Friday morning. Chris expressed his amazement at the wide-ranging and cutting edge nature of Outreach at Li Po Chun UWC, especially congratulating us on activities such as China Week, TraffickLink, IFP (Initiative for Peace), the North Korean Goodwill Initiative, the Sino-Japan Youth Conference, many of the Project Week activities, and of course most of the 95 Quan Cai activities that we are offering this year.
3.On Tuesday evening, we had the very special privilege of welcoming Mr Matt Friedman. Perhaps the top UN expert in anti-human trafficking in South-east Asia, Matt Friedman is Regional Project Manager of the UN Inter-agency on Human Trafficking (UNAIP), a division of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Bangkok. Organised by our TraffickLink group, this was an amazing and rare opportunity for our students to hear about his work in the field and to understand the challenges encountered in the fight to end human slavery.
5.At the beginning of the week, I concluded the series of discussion lessons in my ToK (Theory of Knowledge) classes on the subject of “Truth”. This is one of my favourite themes in ToK, as we investigate the different types of truth, the reliability of data and information, the responses of different people to uncertainty, and so on. Noting Al Gore’s bold, and perhaps audacious, use of the word “Truth” in the title of his movie on global warming “An Inconvenient Truth”, I had used the claim that “human actions are the major source of global warming” as a focus question to investigate how we might fairly judge the claim as being “truth” using the insights and methodology of ToK. It was perhaps fitting that we were having these discussions at the same time as the COP 16 climate negotiations were underway in Cancun as part of an initiative called UNfairplay. Our College is currently represented at the conference in Cancun by one of our students, Cornelia from Germany, and you can read her daily blog of events at http://lpcatcop16.blogspot.com/.
6.Di and I continued our program of hosting groups of students in our home for dinner this week. These are always among the most pleasant times of our week as we get to know our students at a deeper level than is otherwise possible – while sharing Di’s great cooking! In order to entertain all the students in the College, we need to set aside about 28 evenings for this purpose, but we are well on track to being able to entertain every student in our home over dinner by the end of this academic year.
7.Di and I enjoyed attending two of the Theatre Arts students’ individual projects this week. Last Sunday evening we attended Cristobal’s and Ximena’s production of ‘The Beggar or the Dead Dog’ by Bertolt Brecht. Last night we attended Tim’s production of ‘A Gently Bleeding Mind’, a play he wrote and directed in the tradition of Antonin’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’. Both were extremely ambitious plays that were brilliantly executed. Well done to Cristobal, Ximena, Tim and the actors in both plays!
8.This week’s GIF (Global Issues Forum) was on the topic of Israel and Palestine. Excellent background information was presented by four students from the region – Liat, Maroua, Stephanie and Yara – giving the audience a clear, sensitive and respectful insight into the issues from a range of personal, religious, historical, national and cultural perspectives. The discussion that followed showed an incredibly high level of engagement in the issues by our students, and I was deeply impressed by the insights shown and the questions asked.
9.Part of the busy nature of this week has come from dealing with a media controversy into which we seem to have swept as innocent victims. As background, Li Po Chun United World College is a DSS (Direct Subsidy Scheme) school in Hong Kong, which means we receive some government funding for each of our Hong Kong students. A little over a week ago, the Hong Kong Government’s Audit Bureau issued a report on the administration of the DSS. The report concluded that some government officers may have been been a bit lax in their attention to detail in implementing the scheme, but this was very quickly twisted by Hong Kong’s notorious Chinese language tabloids as alleging extensive malpractice in DSS schools. That was then picked up in the English language press, and LPCUWC received a mention on the grounds that as we are the only international school in the DSS, there “must” have been some wrong-doing on the part of the government in allowing us to stay in the system (a decision that was made legitimately and with full scrutiny back in 1995 as I understand). The controversy reached a peak late last week when Ming Pao (a Chinese language tabloid) published a list of 77 schools (all named) in a table purporting to show the mismanagement in each according to five broad categories. The only DSS school not to be criticised (number 78) opened just two months ago. Most of the "hits" were, however, based on the regulations applying to Hong Kong’s fully aided schools, not DSS schools. In that context, I attended a special meeting of the DSS Schools Council that had been called to respond to the unfounded media allegations. I must confess that I didn't understand every word said, because almost every word was in Cantonese. However, I did get the gist of the discussion. One Head at the meeting mentioned that his school has been criticised because it was charging its students 30 cents (US$0.04) too much for their exercise books. Another mentioned he was criticised for not having any alumni on the board, even though the school is only two years old. Such were the trivial allegations behind the so-called “scandal”! Of course, it is important not to take this controversy too personally, as the issue is DSS-wide and not LPC-specific, and it seems clear that the reporters have been using an aided-schools ruler to measure the performance of DSS schools. Furthermore, the Audit Commission's report is supposed to be an analysis of the Education Bureau's management of the DSS scheme, not an analysis of individual schools as the press has twisted it. As you might imagine, it has been time-consuming nonetheless as reporters keep phoning for comments.
Well, as you can see, it has been quite a busy week. I have always said that one of the best things about the job of a Head of School is the variety inherent in the job.
The variety has been more than abundant this week – which I guess makes this a week full of “best things”!
Meeting with Chris Howarth in my office on Friday morning