I start teaching this course on Saturday. So here is a....
Short extract from my intro to : Working with Children & Adolescents

I have also maintained my interest in Working with Children & Adolescents as I have progressed through my professional life and find some of the readings I have encountered in my ongoing professional development in the field are some of the most valuable and moving in my experience (yes, chuckle, just in case you didn’t have enough reading to do already).

So I look forward to introducing you to some old friends, Dibs In Search of Self by Virginia Axline, Building the Bonds of Attachment : Awakening Love in deeply Troubled Children By Daniel A. Hughes (the best book I have ever read on Working with Children & Adolescents), and new ones, Facebook and Podcasts, with, and at the same time as you. If you will help me I will try to help you, after all, it is my job to help you.

1. What is Working with Children & Adolescents ?
Working with Children & Adolescents is a crash course in remembering who we were as we grew up and going through a strange process of wish fulfilment that somehow human development will have changed in between the time we ourselves were children and adolescents and now when it is our job to professionally meet children and adolescents.

The wish fulfilment part is where we pretend that somehow all those experiences which invoked an absolute terror of the unknown in ourselves will have been replaced by a calm and coherent structured experience which we can wisely dip into in the face of the sometimes sheer panic of our clients. Well, as they say in the best jokes, we have some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that there have been some enormous progresses made in fields such as neuropsychology so that we now know an awful lot more than we did even ten years ago about the neurochemical processes that so involve the development of the brain during childhood and adolescence and all those raging hormones, what they are, how they interact and how they affect our behaviour.

The bad news is that the huge anxiety that accompanies these multiple changes that actually constitute the human experience that is childhood and adolescence remains essentially exactly the same as when we ourselves experienced it. So the experience of childhood and adolescence, working with it as a professional, and the course will be a rollercoaster of a ride and I will be joyfully accompanying you on that ride.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody can reach in this life to feeling immortal. - John Berger, BENTO'S SKETCHBOOK, p.27.

As long as a person is affected by the image of anything, they regard the thing as present, although it may not exist, nor will they regard it as past or future in so far as its image is connected with the image of time past or future. - Spinoza, ETHICS, Part III, Proposition XVIII, Proof.

Page One – Inside The New York Times – Film:
Last night I took a little break from marking and met my daughter for dinner in Carlton and then went to a movie. We were both tired and just chose the one that we liked the best that was starting soonest after we arrived at the theatre. This just happened to be: Page One – Inside The New York Times.
A wonderful and intriguing little doco which traces a path of some very traditional and then very unlikely journalistic characters through their life and times and various assignments at the New York Times newspaper within the context of both the Global Financial Crisis and the reflexive impact of new technology on the sales, impact and culture of newspapers now.
I have just told the story over lunch and a friend has described my rendition as powerful and beautiful and moving but I gave away lots of secrets (including the ending) in the telling so I do not intend to do that again here. What I do intend to do is recommend that you see this little gem, majorly for the humanity and edge of the seat ride through the experiences of young and old, stars and unknown, and unknown who are stars by the end of the film. We were both tired when we began to watch this but energised and enthused by the end.