Last week Friday was April Fool’s Day and the girls celebrated the occasion by playing practical jokes on their families, friends and teachers. Their pranks included seasoning their siblings’ cereal with salt, teasing their friends with false information (“I am going to live in Cape Town tomorrow”), and “pranking” teacher’s classrooms. My office was no exception. I arrived to an altered room: a trail of toilet paper and balloons – comical faces drawn on with markers – drifted across the carpet and furniture, and my chair was taped tightly to one desk leg.

To say that the mood in the Junior School reception and immediately outside my office was one of excitement would be an understatement. It was one of exhilaration and breathless speculation. Girls congregated inside and outside, pointing and shrieking – a sizeable delegation

of Grade 1s visited the scene of “the crime”, unself-consciously discussing theories, examining the evidence, and interrogating me about

what I knew and had observed. Some seemed to have inside knowledge and spoke darkly of “the Grade 6s and/or 7s” and their implication in events; a group of Grade 0s, arriving later, pronounced on Mrs Fleming’s guilt with forceful certainty.

The point is, the girls were having fun, making mischief, and taking some well-calculated risks – all the time watching our reaction. While I understand the adult desire to contain the girls’ behaviour and resume more productive teaching and learning, days like this give us, teachers and parents, a welcome opportunity to consciously affirm the importance – and I use that word deliberately – of cultivating a sense of humour in our girls.

At Celebration Evening a few years ago I took the question of humour and girls as my topic, quoting from a 2017 Washington Post article that drew compelling connections between empowering girls and affirming them for being funny:

Today we encourage our daughters to be ambitious and athletic, opinionated and outspoken. We want them focused on STEM and outfitted in T-shirts that read, “Who runs the world? Girls.” But what if raising truly empowered girls also means raising funny ones? What if we teach our daughters that humor is their turf – just as much as any boy’s?

The questions I posed that evening about valuing and fostering your daughter’s sense of humour seem almost more urgent in a post-lockdown world preoccupied with making up for what has been characterised forlornly as “lost time” and a season of “missed opportunity”. Instead of dwelling on the merits of that argument – a subject that, like our classrooms, is well ventilated – I do think it is worth observing that one of our most precious resources in times of adversity is the ability to laugh, see the lighter side, and not take ourselves so seriously. There’s a real freedom and power in being able to refuse the world’s terms, even for just a moment, by demonstrating how it could all be otherwise, how we could all be otherwise.

April Fool’s Day, for all its licensed levity and playfulness makes a serious point: our definition of what it means to be a girl needs to expand beyond traditional concepts of kindness and dependability to include the capacity to laugh and make light of our challenges. Learning to laugh together openly, and forgive each other’s imperfections, alleviates the need to sneer behind people’s backs, laugh into our hands at someone else’s expense and roll our eyes. It gives us the opportunity to rewrite the lines of Kate Tempest’s poem and watch “out of the window, in the sunshine,/the [girls] cheering each other on,/ and daring each other to jump higher and higher.”

I wish you an Easter holiday filled with the laughter and love of your family and friends, safe travels, and far-reaching adventures.

SARAH WARNER
JUNIOR SCHOOL HEADMISTRESS