Learning to live with pain, whether physical or emotional, is an essential skill, and while life isn't a bed of roses, pain has led to a lot of great art. That's the message two pioneering secondary-school teachers are hoping will capture the imaginations of transition-year students.
Noel Buckley is the ASTI's convener of transition-year teachers and transition-year co-ordinator at Presentation Secondary School in Clonmel, Co Tipperary. Siobhβn Alley is a music teacher at the school. Both have arthritis, but instead of letting it get them down, they have used it to develop a multidisciplinary transition-year module that they hope will involve students in 100 schools, jointly funded by Pharmacia Corporation and Pfizer Ireland.
Science teachers will look at the disease process of arthritis. PE teachers will emphasise the importance of warming up before exercise and warming down afterwards, as sports injuries can lead to arthritis in later life. Home-economics teachers will help students look at the importance of eating healthily, as some forms of arthritis appear to be related to diet.
Under the theme of "ain't nothing gonna break my stride", a lyric from a 1984 pop song by Matthew Wilder, English teachers will share the work of writers who have explored pain, while students will take part in a creative-writing competition on the subject of coping with pain.
In music classes, students will become acquainted with the theme of pain in artists' lives and works. Five of them will get the chance to collaborate on a reworking of the Wilder song, which will be recorded and mixed in a Dublin studio. Art classes will look at the global theme of pain throughout the visual arts, culminating in a £1,000 prize and a national exhibition.
Too often, we focus our values in school, in the family and in the workplace on material achievement. The truly successful, however, are those who have learned to cope confidently with challenges.
"We live in a society which would like us to think you can take a tablet to make pain go away," says Buckley. "But the answer isn't always in a tablet - or in street drugs and alcohol.
"When you experience pain, there are two responses you can have: lie down, and be buried under it, or use your creative responses to find another way of living . . . Through literature, poetry and film, teachers will help transition-year students explore how people have dealt with pain and how they have refused to allow pain to stop the creative process and the human spirit."
The exhibition of students' artwork will be held in Dublin next April, while their writing will be published as a book. And 2,000 students will try to get into Guinness World Records by forming a huge moving caterpillar.
They will have to travel 30 metres in a straight line, without breaking up and with one leg tied to the other, in the Phoenix Park on April 30th. The event's organisers hope the students will raise more than £100,000 on behalf of the Arthritis Foundation.
The transition-year module is contained in a "Caterpillar Pack" that will be sent to secondary schools next month