At our Friday ‘Singing for Health’, we often sing ‘It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it’ with subsequent verses, ‘It ain’t what you do; it’s the time that you do it’ and, ‘It ain’t what you do; it’s the place that you do it’.
In Ella Fitzgerald’s version of the song, between verses she sings:
You’ve learned your A B C’s
You’ve learned your D F G’s
But this is something you don’t learn in school.
If I admit to once being a maths teacher, I often get the response, ‘I was no good at maths at school.’ Then I hear stories from men who became experts in the mathematical calculations of the engineer or the navigational skills of the sailor. They didn’t learn that in school… …Or gents who learnt quick, accurate number skills playing snooker, darts, cribbage… or the ex-drug addict, cutting and dealing, buying and selling drugs. That’s certainly something he didn’t learn at school.
We were enjoying yesterday afternoon with some friends. A couple of flies in the room led to a discussion about successfully swatting flies, and the confident statement, ‘Flies always take off backwards’. Someone else agreed – with conviction!
I wasn’t convinced. Do flies have a backward flying gear and a forward flying gear? I asked Mr Google. As I understand it, flies can jump in any direction away from danger before flying away forwards. It wasn’t something I’d learnt at school.
This morning, I read Jesus’ answer to the question ‘Who is my neighbour?’. He tells of a lone traveller who’s attacked by bandits, left for dead, ignored by religious men and helped by an unlikely foreigner – a Samaritan ‘neighbour’…
I like the summary: The robbers said, ‘What’s yours is mine – I’m taking it’; the religious men said. ‘What’s mine is mine – I’m keeping it.’ The Samaritan said, ‘What’s mine is yours – I’m giving it.’ Perhaps the wisdom to know when to take, when to keep, and when to give isn’t learnt in school.
