The most common context for these spats between their boys seems to be sport.
Some of these schools are considering extra yard duties for staff so that somebody can umpire each cricketing grudge match.
Some are re-writing and publishing the international laws of cricket for their own playgrounds, and a few are considering shorter lunchtimes to prevent the worst of the verbal stoushes, which Murphy’s Law insists will happen in the two minutes before the bell sounds.
Don’t do any of that. In fact, don’t get involved at all.
Short of major injuries, there’s no need for you to even be present when boys disagree about who bats next or whether Jacko’s LBW appeal was out or not.
These unsupervised collisions of personal ambition are exactly what we need our boys engaged in.
In these valuable moments of synchronous angst, these kids are learning the arts of awkward compromise and ugly cooperation.
These are skills that lead to increased student compassion and self-regulation. The benefits to your staff of this are rather obvious.
The most you need to do is have a chat beforehand about how they might make cricket work today and a curiosity focused chat afterward about how it all went. That’ll do.
Your obsession with perfection and comfort in personal interactions is stunting your boys’ ability to grow and develop emotional intelligence.
So… stop it.
In fact, if your school isn’t using every minute legally available for recess and lunch breaks so you can cultivate more, not less, opportunities for cricket induced differences of opinion, then you need to extend recess without increasing your yard duty presence.
