Bonjour Friend, my name is András and I help schools and education businesses work smarter, calmer, and with greater impact.
The power of saying hello.
This morning, I walked down to the ground floor to fix my bike in this moderately modernist residential building that I'm lucky to call home now in Paris.
Well aware of all the grime that's built up on my bike, I was all gloved up and ready for the job with an unreasonably large can of WD-40.
So no, the state of my vehicle did not take me by surprise.
What did though, was the loud 'Bonjour, Monsieur' from a little boy who I am devastated to report was about one tenth of my age.
In the five minutes that followed, another three little humans (of differing ratios of my age) did the same: they just politely said hello as they walked past me.
I did wonder if this was a warning sign of some sort of a cult operating in the building, or perhaps it was all the doing of Rambo, the guardian's grey cat who's always there, looking... but I had to conclude that saying 'Bonjour' was just normal here.
Children just say hello to you. Happily. And politely.
The power of not saying hello.
Completely unrelated to the above, at some point in the past weeks I had the pleasure of sitting at a school reception for some time. Let's say, for ten minutes.
Now, if you've ever observed lessons, you will know that you can get a good feel of a class within about five seconds, and a very good sense of the kind of teaching in there in about five minutes.
And so, in my humble experience, ten minutes spent anywhere in a school with decent footfall is plenty of time to get an idea of what's going on.
Now, while I was sitting there, roughly thirty students walked in and out of the building.
How many hellos, smiles, looks or any other means of acknowledgement do you think I and the receptionist received, combined?
You've guessed correctly.
No brownie points though, sorry.
You know where this is going...
Schools have such a difficult job in choosing what to focus on today. Should it be soft skills? Career skills? Twenty-first century skills? (What's that, by the way?!) AI? Language? Sports? Character?
There's obviously no simple answer to that.
But if students in your school (or your friend's school, for that matter) don't know how to say hello to people, I suggest you (or your friend, for that matter) deal with that first.
Not because that's what our parents and grandparents used to do, but because we, mankind, simply can't afford for a 'hello' to come as a surprise.
Want to say hello?
I'm always happy to chat – and we can definitely go beyond saying hello. Although that's a good start.
And then, who knows, I might even be able to help your school or educational business do even better.
