What's the trouble with Paris?

To my delight, my school generally has very well behaved students. But this is mainly achieved through tough, consistent punishment and high expectations. So not surprisingly on the Attitudes to School survey, our school rates quite poorly in the student wellbeing category. To combat this, the school has recently introduced a token monthly home group to cover our pastoral care quota for the year. This week's discussion is based around 'working tough', essentially to tell students that even if the work is boring, difficult or purposeless, you just need to sit down and do it. Good advice? Yes. Palatable advice? No.

I was thinking about how to make the concept more attractive and my thoughts were immediately drawn to Mark Sayers' The Trouble with Paris (Paris Hilton that is, seeing that she epitomises the fake, celebrity lifestyle that middle class suburbanites tend to dream about). Here's a quick extract from his website to describe the content of his book and video (which is amazing, by the way).

Doesn't everyone want the good life these days? Our shopping mall world offers us a never-ending array of pleasures to explore. Consumerism promises us a vision of heaven on earth - a reality that's hyper-real. We've all experienced hyperreality: a candy so 'grape-ey' it doesn't taste like grapes any more; a model's photo so manipulated that it doesn't even look like her; a theme park version of life that tells us we can have something better than the real thing. But what if this reality is not all that it's cracked up to be? Admit it, we've been ripped off by our culture and its version of reality that leaves us lonely, bored, and trapped. But what's the alternative?

So the question for my students is: should life always be fun, exciting and pain free? Where does, boredom, death, hard work and washing the dishes fit into life? Do we just run from one exciting experience to the next and everything in between is mundane and void of meaning?

If any of those questions resonate with you, all I can say is, get the video (from me), watch and enjoy. It will be music to your ears.

So in honour of these things, I thought a few photos of my friends at a recent wedding would be fitting. The fleeting, glamorous moments of life that look amazing from the outside, give us sweet memories to cherish, but disappear shortly after with only veiled memories to prove they ever existed.