Tag Archives: character

Dear Excuse

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I’ve been a teacher for almost 30 years.  I’ve heard a few excuses over those years.  Indeed, the world of education has produced the most famous excuse of all time.  “The dog ate my homework”. 

My favourite pupil excuse was when an A level Philosophy student of mine told me that they had been unable to complete their written assignment because they got had their toe stuck in the bath-tap the night before. Another asked for a deadline extension because their pet iguana had recently experienced a nervous breakdown. More recently, I recall an interview candidate who explained that they were late arriving because they couldn’t find their car. Not an excuse that inspired much confidence.

Traffic wardens hear more excuses than most as people offer the reasons why they should not be given a parking ticket. I know I’ve been guilty of this kind of excuse-making, amongst plentiful others, to my shame. There are many more examples in an amusing little book called called the Complete Excuses Handbook. I was going to bring it into school to read some examples out – but unfortunately my dog ate it.

It’s terribly easy to slide into the habit of excuse-making. For our own short-comings, those of our family, sports team or nation. In times when many are quick with hair-trigger judgments and blame-culture, we may even be encouraging a climate in which having an excuse up your sleeve is a wise precaution. However tempting it may be to retreat into excuse-making, it is a bad habit. As teachers – indeed as parents – we need to challenge and discourage a culture of excuses.

It’s important to distinguish between a reason and an excuse.

… A reason is a rational explanation for why something is the way it is; or a justification for why a specific action or decision was taken.  It involves providing evidence and facts to back up the justification.

… An excuse is something we use to deflect blame – by shifting the focus away from the action or decision and onto external factors such as circumstances, other people, or events.

Essentially, reasons become excuses when they are used to avoid responsibility.

When we shift the blame, we duck responsibility for a failure, and we also avoid the responsibility for learning from that failure. Excuses undermine trust and honesty between people. When we make excuses, we tend to convince ourselves that we could not have changed the outcome, and therefore have no need to adapt for the future. Failure becomes easier to accept in ourselves, and we never grow beyond our current state.

George Washington, the first US president said: “It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one”. Indeed, it is far better to tell the truth and face the consequences, than it is to damage trust or deceive oneself and others.

The ease with which we make excuses is a window into our character.

We have said that the most common reason for excuse-making – or the most common excuse for excuse-making – is the desire to dodge responsibility, to avoid blame and otherwise save face.  In this sense, it is an act of deception. 

The other kind of excuse is when we deceive ourselves.  Rather than facing up to the reality of a challenge or when we have fallen short, we rationalise the problem away. We invent a more comfortable illusion to avoid facing the truth. We may do this when we find tasks difficult and want to give up; or when we know what we are doing is not right.

Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. wisely said: “It seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some rationalization to clothe their act”. Each of us will be able to think of excuses we have used to cover our tracks or explain away our habitual failings.

But my favourite line on the subject of excuses comes from Florence Nightingale.

An epitome of honest good work and courage; a person whose heroic devotion to duty in looking after the injured in the Crimean war has made her name synonymous with the caring profession of nursing.

In a letter to a friend, Florence Nightingale wrote very simply:

“I attribute my success to this – I never gave or took any excuse.”

Florence Nightingale

High performers – people who lead good and constructive lives – tend not to make excuses for themselves – or for others.  They have high standards.  And when they fall short, they look for reasons for the shortfall – and then search out ways put things right or mitigate them. 

At the end of the day, the week, the year, how great would it feel to be able to reflect back with honesty and integrity and say what Florence Nightingale said with such clarity? 

How would it feel to say: “I attribute my success to this: I did not invent excuses or blame others… I sought and accepted personal responsibility.  I did my best – and when it was not good enough – I looked honestly at the reasons. I asked for help and I worked hard to improve.”

So, Dear Excuse – beguilingly tempting though you are – I must continue to do my best to shut the door on you. 

Because, all the wise folk say that reward and fulfilment come most completely to those who train themselves not to make excuses.  

Dear Gerald

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News of your passing has reached me.  You went out smiling, I’m told, and at the very decent age of 81. 

You worked all your life at the same school.  As a caretaker, odd-job-man and general lifter-and-shifter.  You spent over 50 years serving the same school community.  Same in name, but – like a river – always changing and flowing forward into different times with different people.  Yet, you were a constant. 

I remember you from when I was a child, growing up with a teacher for a Dad, in a boarding school where the staff children roamed free in the holidays.  And during term-time, our teacher parents were busy looking after other people’s children.  You were one of the benign constants that held us gently in place.  You were an ever-there. 

With your trademark greeting, unerring in your cheerfulness, you would say to all you met: “Lovely to see you!”.  You’d bellow that greeting in advance from a distance; or boomed it as a valediction – a validation – as you rolled along to your next task, your next greeting.  You were utterly indiscriminate – in the best way.  You showed no judgement.  Yet this greeting did not feel cheap or empty.  It was a simple, joyful affirmation. Your famous wheezy laugh fizzed with gentle mischief.

You wore blue workman’s dungarees, with splashes of paint and oil and grease, over a white string vest (have I made that up?) and always, whatever the weather, a bobble hat.  Yellow, was it?  And lacking the bobble.  

One time, you dropped a large metal radiator on your foot.  It landed like a heavy blade, taking one of your toes off in your shoe.  You wrapped and carried it like a little bug in your huge hands, searching for someone to help you.  The first person you met was my Dad.  He drove you to the hospital and kept you talking.  Something you did willingly, as if you were sharing a routine trip to the shops.  They patched you up somehow.  And you never forgot the kindness. 

From time to time, some of the children at the school would try to find fun in you.  You defused their nuisance with your constant greeting and undefended heart.  Soon, everyone knew that there was no fun to be had in setting traps for you.  Rather, they saw that you were a treasure; an institution; a legend.  Your loyalty; your appetite for hard work; your unearthly strength; your trustworthiness; your sheer reliability: these were qualities that even the most bone-headed of us could see were golden virtues. 

Love came from what you did; and love was the source of it.  And you were loved for being you. 

Rest in peace, Gerald.

Lovely to see you.

Leo Winkley

Of Hope and Despair – reflections on darkness and light in the news. HM Address.

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Of Hope and Despair

At the opening of a new calendar year, I often find myself thinking about the word ‘hope’. Hope is, of course, one of our seven school values depicted in the stained glass of the new window in Chapel. A New Year seems, by its very nature, to trigger a new release of hope and expectation. And yet, as we followed the various global news stories in the final days of 2014, it was difficult to find evidence that the world is a place of hope and progress. Rather, it seemed to me, in large measure to be a place of despair and profound ignorance; darkness rather than light.

This year Boxing Day marked the 10th anniversary of one of the modern world’s worst natural disasters. The Sixth Formers amongst you, and certainly the adults here, will remember the Boxing Day tsunami – a giant wave that swept across the Indian ocean, killing 230,000 people. I remember Boxing Day 2004 as a grim day – even if you were thousands of miles away from the natural disaster. I remember a sense of hollowness; a huge question in my mind about how the previous day we could be cosily in our families, in churches, celebrating the hope embodied in the birth of Jesus, and the next day wake up to a tidal wave of suffering and loss; of the very opposite of hope – deep, dark despair.

Amongst those who died was a pupil who had just left the school at which I was teaching at the time. One individual loss amongst all those tens of thousands: his disappearance devastated his family and swept through the school like an after-shock, as pupils, staff and parents re-gathered after the Christmas holidays. Again, this event came at the cusp of a new year in the western world. It was hard to see hope; still less, to detect the agency of a divine power shining light into the future. The brute force of 70 foot waves swept away lives and left a wake of destruction and despair. Particularly in the face of such indiscriminate and merciless forces of nature, the human light seems very feeble.

This Christmas holiday, on 16th December, the world reeled in shock at the brutal massacre of 132 schoolchildren and 16 of their teachers in the Army School in Peshawar, Pakistan. In this appalling and calculated attack, the deadliest terrorist act in Pakistan’s history, the Pakistani Taliban deliberately targeted the children of army officers; these innocents died in their classrooms, with their teachers, in what must have been panic and abject fear. Surely, no ideology, religion or political cause can justify these killings. It is impossible to condone such an act of pure moral evil inflicted by man on his fellow man and difficult to see the light of anything good coming from it.

And yesterday morning, three masked gunmen walked into the offices of a well-known French satirical magazine and shot the Editor, several cartoonists, a caretaker, a visitor, a police body-guard who was protecting the editor and a policeman involved in the fire-fight as the killers made their escape. This taking of life was calculated, deliberate and meant to send a message: a message in the name of some deeply twisted and politicised interpretation of religious duty. Once again, moderate Islam, a religion that loves peace, has been hijacked and debased to serve political ends and to sow fear and terror.

The wrongs of the world – and there are surely many – cannot be righted by callous blood-letting acts like this? They are acts of terror that strike not just at the individuals involved, and all who love and care for them, but also at the values of a free and caring society. How can we have hope for humans when this is what they can do?

It may or may not be easier to accept the fact of suffering caused by natural events; that the blind power of nature is capable of sweeping all in its path. We may point to the huge compassion and human togetherness that is often shown in the wake of disaster. The remarkable story, for example, of the 11 and 13 year old western children who were orphaned by the Tsunami who now, 10 years later, run a charity for orphans in one of the areas struck by the tidal wave. We may also be able to accept that the price for all the freedoms and technological advantages we enjoy is that accidents and failures can happen: that plans can crash; that new year’s parties in China can end in tragedy and loss of life; that damaged people do damage to others. We may take comfort and see hope in the global sense of outrage at the Peshawar massacre and look for political progress to come from this appalling loss. We may gain some optimism and sense of dignity from the huge turnout on the streets of Paris last night; the show of solidarity and determination to defend and stand tall in the face of terror, to defend liberty and freedom of expression as the French people define them.

But when you lump all this suffering together; when you read all these accounts of sorrow and loss, it is hard not to feel hope ebbing away; to sense the darkness overcoming the light. Indeed, there are times when a sincere hope for a fairer, kinder, gentler world seems to be no more than a comforting and wilful self-delusion.

Theologically speaking, there is, in fact, much that can be offered to reconcile belief in a loving Goodness in the world with the evident evil that we humans do, and the suffering that nature and accident can cause. This is the stuff of a philosophy course and we don’t have time for that now. Irrespective of religious questions, of which there are many, this is a profound human challenge. We could characterise it in terms of a struggle within us as individual human beings; we could characterise it in terms of the struggle in human-kind itself: the struggle between hope and despair.

I suggest today, in the shadow of the dark events I have mentioned, never mind all the others we could mention in our own experience, that we are presented with something that is, at its simplest level, a pragmatic choice between two options. A binary choice between hope. Or despair. This choice amounts to a profound and recurring test of our character. Our own experiences and the evidence of what we see going on around us will inspire, or challenge our hope. Events, disappointments, losses, failures will call us toward despair. Some, sadly, do indeed reach a state of despair. They reach a blank place where there is no hope. Despair is an option.

The other option is hope.    Sometimes I think we get the wrong idea about the word hope.  It’s a word that devalues in its daily use: that it is about crossed fingers; a passive state of anticipation.  At a deeper level, hope is a universal human phenomenon. People hope for peace in time of war; food in time of famine; justice in time of oppression. Hope generates energy and sustains people through difficult times. For some people, hope is so strong that it inspires self-sacrifice to turn hope into reality.  True hope grows in the face of adversity. Because it springs from a trust, religious or otherwise, that the world will become a better place.  For Christians, of course, this hope is based on a deep trust.  A trust that can withstand all the evidence that threatens to undermine it.  For Christians, hope is not always spontaneous or easy. There is work to be done. As well as trusting God, believers have to develop qualities of steadfastness in our own character.  As St Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans: ‘We know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.’  (Romans 5:3-4)

Remarkably, it does seem that however much life throws at human beings, hope is a core, perhaps even irreducible, part of our human nature. Hope springs from character. It responds to stern challenges and is strengthened in the furnace of adversity. Like a cork in a bottle, hope keeps on bubbling up. However low it goes, it only seems to know one way: upwards.