Where there is a rotten fruit there is often a rotten root

One of the things that I find difficult to accept about our society today is how we are often so quick to judge. Many of us are guilty of making judgements based on first impressions and don’t take in to account the back story. As I spend time on board our double decker buses I find that I’m sometimes meeting young people who, if I am not careful, I can make an incorrect judgement on. I tried to do this the other day with a young boy who was struggling to concentrate in one of my workshops before uncovering more about his back story.

His mother was a prostitute and his father, as far as I could work out, was dealing drugs. There would be no books in their home, I established that they’d never been on holiday and so many things that would be normal for so many people would not have been normal for this boy.  So with this knowledge of what his life was like at home, I immediately felt so much more compassion towards trying to help him.

It’s so important in the world of teaching and education that we try hard to work out what is going on in the lives of the young people we care for before making a judgement.  We should try to avoid our young people having to take on our negative judgement as well as having to deal with any challenges in their home lives.