Having worked in the snow sports’ industry for many years, both in Australia and overseas, I love being up in the mountains. It’s a great place for students to have a unique, challenging and rewarding experience doing something very different from their regular schooling.
 
However, with every trip away there are some significant issues you and your staff need to be aware of. Here’s a few great resources to help get you started on your trip planning!

General Snow Safety www.snowsafe.org.au/
 
Ski Resort Info
 
Thredbo - https://www.thredbo.com.au/schools/
 
Perisher - https://www.perisher.com.au/plan-your-trip/groups/2019-school-groups
 
Falls Creek - https://www.fallscreek.com.au/schoolgroups/
 
Mt Hotham -
https://www.mthotham.com.au/discover/more-options/groups/hotham-school-tertiary-groups
 
Mt Buller -
https://www.mtbuller.com.au/Winter/plan-your-visit/schools-and-groups
 
Happy Skiing! I hope you have a great season!

​Some of you might have noticed that we’ve deleted our Facebook page and I’ve deleted my Facebook account. Whilst I don’t want to make a big deal about it, it was well and truly time for it to go.
 
Whilst for many younger people, it’s a toxic waste dump that’s messing with their emotions and proven to have been attempting to manipulate their behaviour, I just found it such a waste of time and morally questionable given the countless breaches of trust, privacy and the way in which extremists of all types have gotten away with spreading their hate on this global platform.
 
So instead of being one of those pointless user-metrics on Facebook, the business is no longer there and nor am I. The feeling of relief and the time I’ve got back is great and it’s made such a difference to the quality of my attention span and life.
 
Who will miss me online? Mainly advertiser and marketing professionals who will surely be crying themselves to sleep now due to this decision. I just hope they can get the help they need to be able to move on from this.
 
I also deleted my Twitter account, as it was mostly just a lot of people yelling at each other and nobody really listens to any of it. How can you? You need an AI bot to get through all the crap and I think the AI will self-destruct to avoid the boredom of it. Having said that, it’s a great place to make up and randomly change national policy directions and go on random international relations rants, therefore we’ll keep the business account open so we can continue to tell North Korea and the rest of the world what we think of them.
 
It’s great to be able to digitally detox and not just for a short time. You quickly realise that life is far more interesting in person than it is filtered through a device. So why not disconnect today, then you can reconnect with something a bit more real. 

On a visit to the US I took some time out to go skiing in Park City. It's a fantastic resort and an awesome historic township. It now even has an Australian run café, which meant I could have a decent coffee (all the important things being from Australia). I’d prepared myself to go a month without decent coffee, reliant on bitter or burnt espressos as a backup plan. I was however, pleasantly surprised to find myself standing in front of a recognisable Australian business and safely drinking a good cup of coffee.
 
Despite this extremely important tangent, what follows has nothing to do with coffee. It was early in the morning on a crisp crystal clear day over on the Canyons side of the resort. I was skiing past the ski school when a sign caught my attention, “Please, No Parents In The Learning Area!”
 
I laughed, as I knew exactly why there was a need for something like this the moment I saw it. Whilst it's very important for parents to be involved in their child’s education, there's a right way to go about it and a wrong way to go about it. More often than not, parents, generally through a lack of understanding go about things the wrong way and many of them constantly insert themselves into situations where they should just stand back and allow others to teach.
 
From what I’ve seen over my years of involvement with education, Helicopter & Tiger parents, need to relax, find themselves a hobby that doesn’t involve them living vicariously through their children. Whilst the underlying belief these parents have is that they’re ‘helping’ and making sure they get the ‘best’ for the child, the reality is that they’re doing more harm than good and wasting their own life and opportunities at the same time.
 
It’s probably easier to remove the salt from the ocean than it is to remove the helicopter from the parent, but seriously, they need to back off and let their kids breathe and experience a few things in life for themselves. This doesn’t mean that everything should be done at arms’ length, but I can understand the need for the sign as over-involvement of parents can be just as bad, or even worse than under-parenting.
 
I realise it is a challenging balance, but if you look at it from a work point of view, how would everyone feel if someone went from department to department telling everyone how their job should be done. From marketing, to finance and the janitorial services how would everyone feel if your clients hung around giving instructions on how their work should be done? It wouldn’t be long before security was called and the person was ejected from the building.
 
I would have thought the whole point of taking your kids to ski school is so that you could ski somewhere awesome yourself. Hanging around offering suggestions or taking photos would be the last thing on my mind. I would have ditched the kids and headed up the closest double black only lift. Ski school and school in general is a great sort of child minding service, which hopefully employs talented instructors and teachers who will be able to care for your children and teach them something far more effectively than you can. This, of course, eventually pays off later on, as you’ll be able to ski with your kids, until they get way better than you and then leave you for dead, suggesting perhaps you should go and have some lessons.
 
However, from this the most important thing is that sometimes parents need to be able to step away from a situation and allow their children to be taught by others. If they’re not prepared to do that, then why not teach them everything they need to know themselves? This would seem to be preferable for many parents, until they realise the reality of how much time, energy, experience and effort goes into teaching others.
 
At some point, parents must let go and if they haven’t by high-school years, then the damage they’re going to do over the proceeding years is significant. Again this doesn’t mean parents should have no involvement, but appropriate experiences should be looked for where that increasing independence can be gained. Some effective programs I’ve worked on have been medium and long-stay residential programs, in which there was little choice for those helicopter parents but to stay away. If medium and long stay programs aren’t an option for your school, then perhaps erecting a barrier near the entrance is the next best option. At the end of the day, it will enable students to have a far better educational experience than the endless hovering could ever provide.
 
For me, as I said, I’d just leave them at the ski school and allow them to try new things, slip, fall and get back up again all by themselves. It’s the learning through these experiences that make the best skiers and the snowboarders, not the manic parenting and suggestions from the side. Perhaps, as in Park City, a giant sign is just what’s needed for all of our programs to remind parents of the fact that it’s time to let go a bit and let their kids do something a bit ‘risky’ for themselves. 

​In a country of around 200 Million people, Japan is a country which uses just about every piece of space possible. From its cube room hotels which are nothing more than a coffin like space in which to sleep, to their agricultural lands which are found in amongst villages and on the periphery of gigantic mega cities, almost every piece of land is used thoughtfully and carefully.
 
Whilst it’s a necessity given its large sprawling cities and limited land mass, the careful and thoughtful use of space dates far back before mass urbanisation. If Australians could be collectively referred to as ‘laid back’, the French ‘arrogant’ and then Germans ‘blunt’, the Japanese could only be referred to as ‘organised.’
 
Despite sprawling mega cities being as ugly as a Boxing Day shopping spree with stilettos to boot, step inside a Japanese house, shop or any other building and the transformation is stark. From here you can see that organisation goes into everything Japanese. 

​From the way that traditional buildings are designed to the amazing landscaping of Japanese gardens, there’s something relaxing and enjoyable about such order. Now this might be your personal version of hell if you’re an Eastern European Anarchist, but thankfully, not too many of our readers are. Order and organisation seem to go hand in hand with well-being and there is something some find fascinating about that.

Food is another example of the lengths to which the Japanese go to to use space thoughtfully and effectively. In western countries, we’re used to having a meal on a plate with everything heaped on top. However, in Japan, everything has its own bowl, plate, or small dish and fits neatly into the table, or even if travelling, in a bento box. ​

​An interesting thing I started to notice as I travelled throughout Japan, was the use of space and the connectivity with the environment. If there’s a spare space on a city road, a pavement, an alleyway, a small piece of unoccupied land, there will be trees, plants, vegetables or flowers growing in it. What may appear to be a tiny house with a dull front entrance in the middle of a city, often opens up into a wonderful tranquil garden space which we would often not do anything with because it was too small or not worth doing.
 
With a land as vast as Australia, we just don’t do this and instead are quite lazy when it comes to the use of space. Whilst we can get away with it for the moment, as our population and cities continue to grow, how will we address this? Sydney is now limited in its growth outwards by the blue mountains, the Royal National Park and the water between Palm beach and the central coast, so what will our use of space be into the future? Will we just keep going higher and higher and put so many cars on the road that it’s an endless parking lot? Or will we be able to come up with a more suitable and lasting solution?
 
If you look at the connection between humans and natural spaces, then you start to understand the challenge for mega cities and for cities of our own into the future. When development is becoming denser due to population growth, are we going to have the same capacity for thoughtful space as the Japanese?
 
If we bring this back into education, how do you use space with your class? How do you organise everything in your room, or around the school? Are there natural areas with trees, plants and water features? What would be the impact if there were? When we take students out into the wildness, the mood changes, as they’re now in a different space and most people naturally respond to this.
 
If we can start thoughtfully building natural spaces into our schools, especially in inner city schools, maybe a little zen garden, this will help students understand the challenge that they are going to have to face in the coming years and one which Japan might have some great insights already into solving.