Jonny McCambridge: The day that all the children wore yellow

For me, the best manifestation of apparent simplicity being replaced by confusion is in education. I struggle to organise and order many aspects of my life, but few things reduce me to a state of witless bewilderment as profoundly as trying to coordinate my son’s schooling.

Homework is terribly daunting (for me rather than him). A heavy bundle of papers, sheets, books and notes appear in my boy’s school bag every day with no obvious instruction of what has to be done or when. When I ask my son to translate the indecipherable scrawls in his homework diary I get an unhelpful shrug of the shoulders and a mumbled ‘I dunno’.

And just in case there is the slightest chance that I may bring some order to the untidy mass of paper, a new and even more treacherous flank has been opened - the digital homework. The exercises which can only be done electronically on an app on a tablet.

Somewhere in my house there is a little bit of paper which was sent home weeks ago with our digital access code. Somewhere.

I don’t remember homework being so perplexing when I was at school. There were less books, fewer bits of paper, no access codes. Usually I was able to do it in the morning on the school bus with minimum fuss and effort. I never had to fear my parents finding out that I had missed a homework through the class WhatsApp group.

All I understand of homework now is that it keeps coming at me, faster than I can process it, the burden expanding like an unpaid debt. I feel the burden more heavily than my son, as if it is my aptitude rather than his which is under examination.

And it is the same across other aspects of schooling. When I was a child there were dinner tickets. Now there is an online payment system which requires the skill and ingenuity of a safe cracker just to access it. There are few things more certain in this world than that I will forget a password within a week.

And then there is the correspondence. The unending, continual, draining stream of letters, notes and missives sent home to be read and reacted to. Forms to be signed, donations to be made, parental consent to be granted. Competitions, fund-raisers, outings, health notices, sporting updates, charity requests, extra-curricular activities galore.

Education is a much broader concept than when I was a child - it is now an incessant, creeping leviathan, forever rolling, evolving, moving in unexpected directions to catch out the dozy parent.

One of the effects of such abundance is to deaden the impact of the specific. When I first saw the note stating that there was to be a non-uniform day and that a £2 charity donation was required, I barely stirred. After all, non-uniform days and charity donations are now as common as rain at the weekend.

I hardly paid any more attention when the note requested that pupils wear a yellow item of clothing. My wife immediately made a dash for the shop to buy suitable garments after my suggestion that he could surely get away with wearing yellow pants was deemed unworthy of response.

It was only when I was again late on the morning school run and was hurriedly bundling my boy into the car that I really noticed his bright yellow coat and jumper and thought to ask him what it was all about.

‘It’s for World Mental Health Day daddy.’

‘What does that mean son?’

So my seven-year-old proceeded to tell me what he had been taught.

‘Well I’m not really sure what the yellow is about but it’s a nice bright colour like the sun. It’s a day where we remember to be happy, and that if we are sad we can tell people about it. We learn that we are allowed to talk about our emotions.’

As we drove to school I again had that feeling of a world changing faster than I can understand. But this time I did not feel disorientated or diminished by the alteration.

There was no talking about emotions when I was a pupil, no day when the teachers encouraged us to speak up if we were feeling sad. And how much worse we were for it.

If such a concept is not instilled in the mind when it is still formative and the thoughts fluid, it is all the more harder to get it to take hold when the direction of thought is set hard.

Often I consider in my writing how best to deal with the stigma of talking openly about mental health. The answer now seems obvious, don’t let the stigma take root in the young mind in the first place.

In a dark year, the appointment of Northern Ireland’s first ever interim Mental Health Champion was one of the most positive news stories, one of the clear signals of our society moving in a progressive direction.

But a deeper progression is achieved when we build a whole society full of young mental health champions, for whom it is the conversations about emotions which are as common as rain at the weekend.

I walked my son to the school gates and hugged him briefly. I stopped to watch as scores of children scurried across the playground towards their classrooms. They were all dressed in yellow and reminded me of little bees returning to their hive. They were all on their way to class to learn about mental health.

It remains my impression that the world seemed a more simple place when I was a child. But perhaps I should make a better attempt to understand it as it is now, to be more like a child in being open to new ideas and concepts, to understand that things are getting better rather than worse.

I took one last look at all the smiling children dressed in yellow before I left the school gates, feeling brighter than I have in a long time.

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