We went to Oscar’s sports day today. It had already been delayed twice due to the temperature, but third time lucky, I guess. It was similar, but a bit different to previous years.
During the last year the school has made a few changes and one of them is that all the kids are now in houses. There are four across the school, and Oscar is in water (the others are, of course, earth, air and fire) and over the year they can earn points for their house and at the end there will presumably be some kind of Harry Potter style ceremony where the winner is announced.
That’s the background and that’s why the teachers and support staff were taking the points more seriously this year. The kids got points for all the events they took part in and you know what I figured out pretty early on? They couldn’t have cared less.
If they actually cared about the points, they could have easily gamed the system by just having the people who were best in each event take part. That kid who could throw the most accurately would have done all the throwing and they would have racked up the points. But that’s not what happened at all.
The kids all wanted to take part in the events because they were fun. It didn’t matter to them whether they were good or not. It didn’t matter to anyone whether they were good or not. They took it in turns, they made sure everyone got a go and they had a great time.
It got me wondering why the school is trying to instigate the whole point system and it was pretty easy to figure out: because that’s what adult life is like. If you’re good at your job then (in theory) you get more points (money) and that kind of makes sense, but we do it to ourselves as well when we don’t pursue something because we perceive ourselves as being no good at it, completely forgetting the most important metric of all: whether we enjoy it.