Posts Tagged ‘Education’

I never really gave a great deal of thought to what I wanted to “be” when I grew up. When I was around 14, in 2nd year of secondary school, we were asked to fill in a form about possible subject choice in 3rd year and one of the questions was, “What do you want to be?”. With hindsight I should have answered “thin and happy” since they are the two things I seem to have spent my adult live striving for. But no, I fancied myself as psychiatrist and that’s what I wrote down, impressed with my spelling ability if nothing else.

In the end I chose a strange set of subjects, Physics and Chemistry, Accounting, Engineering Drawing, French and Maths alongside compulsory Arithmetic and English. I crammed in History, Biology and Modern Studies in 6th year and my results saw me offered a place on a 4 year MA, Psychology course when I left school at 18. To be honest apart from skimming a beginner’s guide to Freud I didn’t given it much more thought then than I had at 14 and unsurprisingly it all went pear shaped within 3 months. Faced with the reality of independent study, statistics (yeugh!), maintaining friendships with my mates who all worked and living at home rather than in student halls… it was doomed from the start. Obviously I was destined for a career in computer programming.

Unike 14 year old me, some 14 year olds know exactly where they want to go in life. My kids tell me of classmates who know they want to be vets, lawyers or pharmacists, footballers, lottery winners or WAGS. A psychometric questionnaire indicated that my daughter’s strengths tended towards psychology, social work and teaching, and primary teaching has always been there or thereabouts when she’s talked about any future career. My son says he hasn’t filled it in yet.

My daughter surprised me, totally resistant to languages after 2 years of French she nevertheless chose it, along with a host of “traditional” subjects like History, Chemistry and Biology. She has a single aim, get into university, since MrW and I are discouraging her from narrowing her potential by studying primary education. She’s open to the idea of studying a subject she enjoys and is good at followed by a teaching qualification. Her desire to teach hasn’t really wavered in the 9 years since she first played at classrooms with her friends but there’s still time.

My elder son’s strengths are less evenly spread, but I think that could well be his own doing. I strongly suspect he’d be good at anything if he just decided to be good at it. It’s frustrating as a parent to foster that desire. For now he is toying with French and Italian, Music and Art, Chemistry and Computing. Talk about beating his own drum. I look at these subjects and try to imagine where they could take him, where these skills could lead him if he chooses to exploit them. I have visions of my TESOL qualified son travelling the world, ordering nut-free food in a multitude of languages, programming in Japan or Korea, busking on beaches with people of all nations… my imagination runs riot. Sometimes I share but my enthusiasm for this imagined future of his just gets me funny “Shut UP Mum” looks. So mostly I don’t.

Mostly I keep quiet and dream about where their lives could take them pretty much the same way I dreamt about mine.

And no doubt I’ll be just as wrong!

Did you map your future out at school?

Or like me, do you still have no idea what you want to be when you “grow up” and dream vicariously of your children’s future instead?

I’ve attended a couple of online safety presentations over the years, the first being back in October 2007 delivered by Ollie Bray at Musselburgh High School, and more recently at my local school delivered by my esteemed OH himself, Neil Winton. Both these guys are CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre) trained and Ollie’s presentation was the first to use CEOP’s, at the time new, parent training materials.

What struck me is that despite the two year gap between these presentations how similar were the questions raised by parents. There is clearly a need for continually delivering this type of thing, in waves perhaps, as I think many parents don’t really think about teaching their children how to take responsibility for their own safety online until they are already hacking the cyber-sitting software and resisting constant parental supervision.

I’ve always considered myself a fairly well informed parent when it comes to the intertube highway, I have a 20 year career in IT behind me and introduced all my children to computers and the online word at around 18 months. Even the clunky version back when my fast approaching 15 year old was but a baby (ouchie!). My initial reaction to the CEOP material was to dismiss it as over dramatic sensationalism. It focusses quite narrowly on child sexual exploitation online and I would argue that the figures for this particular and specific crime don’t support the privileged position it holds. As we know, most sexual exploitation of children is perpetrated in the home by “trusted” adults.  But until there are no children falling victim to online predators, CEOP’s work teaching parents and children how to stay safe will remain sadly essential.

For an insight into some of the issues faced by both parents and children regarding online safety, a quick browse through the ConnectSafely forums is quite an eye-opener.

The last couple of days have revealed to me that even adult online communites can experience a bit of a hiccup when it comes to balancing privacy and safety. Without going into any details, since they are not really the important thing here, a debate began about the wisdom of sharing personal details with online contacts for use in emergency situations. The motivation for raising the issue was undoubtedly sincere and well intentioned but I seem to be alone in questioning raising the idea in a public space.

Kidsmart UK have a 5 point Smart Plan that encourages children to stay safe online but I think it’s something we should all bear in mind, whatever age we are.

Top of the list is not to share your personal details with people you “meet” online. If this is a rule we think suitable for children we adults should at least give this advice some consideration. Of course, we would hope to be better placed and have more  experience and skills to judge people than children, but the bottom line is that  we can never be sure that the people we form friendships with online are actually who they say they are. Apart from the people who know me in meat space, nobody reading this knows for a fact that I even exist! That these are my children…

…or that I live in the village I say I live in with the man I say I live with. I could be a complete virtual construct who has trawled cyber space for details of a family to front my fake persona. I might not even be female.

Why would I put so much effort into a charade like that? Many people would jump to the conclusion that a fake online person must be a monster, a predator, a deviant… but I could just as easily be a marketing front for a company who wishes to target any one of the online communities I participate in.

I’m not!

But I could be.

And that alone reveals a multitude of forseeable and avoidable scenarios facing an unsecure online community that openly discusses the sharing of personal details. When talk takes place in a community, it’s easy to feel there’s a degree of security, that the community is a contained unit, but all it takes is one monster, one predator, one deviant to inveigle their way into that community, to pose as a valid, valuable member and take advantage of that community’s openness… with just a little bit of imagination…

An open community that publicly voices its willingness to share the same information we encourage our children to protect opens itself up to any number of cyber attacks, identity theft, manipulation and exploitation. As adults there is even more information about us online than our children. We are on the electoral role, details of our property, maps and purchase history are just a couple of clicks away. Even the best of friends can fall-out and once the information is shared it cannot be un-shared.

Most crime is directed at adults, not children, and we do our children no favours if we insist that they protect their privacy without at least thinking about how much we want to protect it ourselves.

In an endeavour to be as transparent as possible, and ensure that my validity as an actual human being bearing a close resemblance to the one I project online isn’t questionable, I myself break many of the rules we would normally apply to children. I use our real names, I post photographs and I link my social spaces to each other to create that “bigger picture”. MrW blogs in his capacity as a professional educator so our rough location is no secret. In fact our exact location wouldn’t take anyone with a bit of Googling skill longer than 5 minutes to find out. I chose for it to be that way after considering all of the above so  I’m sure as Sherlock not advising anyone, anywhere, to chose differently! I heartily endorse online transparency but I can only endorse it for me. I would never suggest it for anyone else without also pointing out the possible downside. And I do my best not to tinker with anyone else’s privacy comfort zone.

You didn’t think I really knew people called Jemima and Tallulah did you?

I’m real enough.

I think it’s you guys that are all madey-uppy!

How do the English stand it? All the political back and forth and back and… aargh! How do people switch from supporting a right-wing ideology, to socialism and back again? Over and over?

I’m not naive, I know there’s barely anything socialist about the current bunch waving the red flag, but what in the name of all sense and reason encourages anyone who previously voted for Labour to believe that the Conservatives are a better option? If Labour have “strayed further right to get into your heart” the Tories must have taken up residence in a very dark place indeed, bum-chumming it round Europe with anti-semitic Holocaust apologists.

The 2010 general election will be the 6th I vote in, but certainly not the first I bear witness to. I didn’t think I was a particularly politicised child, not at the time, I vaguely remember the rapid fire elections of February and October 1974 as well as the Common Market referendum of 1975. I was off school sick and watching BBC2 the day Harold Wilson made his resignation speech (I was 9!) and will never forget the day that fucking woman won in 1979. By 1983 I was desperate for a vote but had to wait until 1987 and I was 21 before I got a chance to make my mark on a general election ballot form.

On 11th June 1987 MrW and I sat, somewhat pickled and optimistic, on the steps of Perth City Hall awaiting a change of regime. For some reason we’d thought that fair and transparent elections included the right for members of the public to witness the count and announcement of the results. I still think it should be that way, but it’s not, so outside on the steps we sat. That was the first night, but certainly not the last, I went to sleep full of hope for the new day approaching, only to wake, stare in shock, weep at the foolish, fickle, selfish, short-term me mine hands-off mine me gimme fix ME! electorate.

If it had been at all feasible for me to emigrate on 10th April 1992…

I lost all hope for Britain the day John Smith died.

I fear what 2010 may bring.

In recent years the Scottish government has been a cushion from the follies of the Even Newer Right (Labour) and the selfish, racist, extremists of the Righter than Right (Conservatives, UKIP, BNP) and I’ve largely ignored English politics. But it’s looking increasingly like the English are in danger of taking yet another “step to the ri-i-i-i-i-ight” and once more dragging Scotland not so much kicking and screaming as whimpering into the darkness. This was a scary enough prospect when I was a school pupil and student, it’s an unbelievably nightmarish prospect as a parent.

I think we can all agree that the financial institutions in Britain have royally fucked us over. There’s no escaping the fact that our children, the third generation baby-boomers, have been landed with national debts of gargantuan proportions and frankly I don’t differentiate between those who de-regulated the banks or those bankers who took the unregulated risks that caused this mess – they’re all to blame. The next government, whatever its hue, will cut public spending and raise tax. For the next five months (please don’t let it be longer) they are each going to try and convince us that where they propose to cut spending and raise tax is the best option.

The Conservatives have declared themselves the party of the NHS (excuse me while I throw up). John Major single handedly dismantled what was left of our NHS when he defiled it with free market economics in the 1990s. Education is the traditional Tory soft target for sweeping cuts in public spending and this time round it looks like business as usual. I don’t get it. The days of mass educating the working classes for a life in the textile mills or pits are long gone Mr Middle-England Tory. You can’t reduce the number of children, all you can do is reduce the teachers, crank up the class sizes and slash budgets back to the good old 1980s when schools could barely provide paper for pupils to write on. Labour have already sold off a whack of the education infrastructure to PPP/PFI/Piss It Into The Wind “Partnerships” who can sell our schools off in 25-30 years to the highest bidding property developer, so what’s left to cut? Heat? Light? Food?

I’l never “get” the right. They complain at the number of non-British doctors and nurses working in the NHS yet target spending cuts at the education of future generations of potential professionals. It’s short-term, it’s short-sighted and it makes me utterly sick to think of it happening. Again. They want to charge foreign nationals for health care – the same foreign nationals who staff our bloody hospitals. In a country with an ageing, falling population they want to drag children from their beds in dawn raids and deport them back to something that must be pretty appalling if living here as an immigrant minority is preferable.

I remember being told before I was old enough to vote that if I wasn’t a socialist at 18 I had no heart and if I wasn’t a conservative by 30 I had no brain. It was the singularly most pessimistic outlook on adulthood I had ever heard and it still offends me.

No I’ll never “get” the right.

But I’ll still be able to look myself in the mirror.

Another school holiday and another couple of homework assignments. During this two week break my daughter (S3) has been set an essay for English and a worksheet for Computing as well as revision for a test in French to be taken the second day back after the holidays. My reaction has been the same (but with lower blood pressure) as the one I had to summer holiday homework… “Don’t do it, you are on a break”.

I’m seriously considering that this becomes my stock response to ALL homework. I’ve never seen a single benefit to homework, either as a pupil or a parent. Every week for seven years of their primary schooling, my children were assigned the exact same homework, spelling and sentences. I reckon 14 years worth of sentences is enough and have no intention of suffering a further 7 year stretch with child three. I have decided I will not tolerate such lazy, unimaginative and boring tasks taking up my time with Paul.

Secondary school has seen this problem multiply 13-fold. We have even experienced 2 teachers sharing a class both set homework at the same time. Madness!

Up until now the only reason I have taken any interest in their homework has been to keep them out of trouble with their teachers. But I’ve had enough. Holiday homework is the final straw. What benefit to my children is there in repeating work they have completed and understood in the classroom? What benefit to them is there in attempting work they have NOT understood in the classroom without the teacher there to explain it again?  If they “got” it then homework is just a boring waste of their time . If they didn’t “get” it then homework is a horribly frustrating task they have to struggle with unsupported. I have a whole bunch of “O” Grades and Highers but they didn’t endow me with any tutoring skills. I can kind of remember most of it, enough to have some stonking good debates with them, but I can’t teach it . That’s why teaching is a profession, it’s NOT something we can all do (although I would argue our stonking good debates are teaching them something!).

Any way you look at it homework, as it is currently set for my children, is useless.

So who wants homework? My children would certainly rather be doing something else, and given that the something else’s that they do are worthwhile I fully support them. Do teacher’s want it? Do parents?

At the end of September we were invited to the school to meet and greet the new rector, Andy Smith. Not wishing to pass up the opportunity at having a captive audience we parents were asked to fill in an anonymous questionnaire citing three things we considered strengths of the school and three things we’d like to see improved. Before leaving we were each given 4 votes and asked to mark what we considered the most important issues from the full list we had generated.

The top 5 were…

1. Get rid of the vans selling food at the school gates
2. Provision of lockers for the pupils
3. Discipline (no details unfortuntately so not sure what people were “voting” for there!)
4. Pupil motivation and stretching the more “able” pupils
5. Improved communication with Guidance staff

I found this list quite funny and it got funnier the further down you went. Surreal even.  Four people were concerned about the issue of “infection control” (???!).

We’d just sat through a short talk from Mr Smith in which, amongst other things, he highlighted the school’s academic achievements. They are in fact bucking the national trend with boys getting great results at Higher level that not only outperform the girls, but place the school in the top 10% in the country. And that’s including private fee paying schools. Despite knowing this, over a third of those parents still used their votes to support the view that the school isn’t pushing and motivating pupils enough! How hard exactly do they want them pushed? How hard and how far is enough? Top 5% in the country or til they break perhaps? I laughed, but really, it’s not funny.

The van ban really got my goat too. If half a sample of polled parents don’t want their children eating from the vans then I respectfully request they tell them not to eat from the vans and refrain from imposing this decision on the other half who don’t particularly care either way. If their children won’t abide by their wishes I suggest they don’t provide them with cash to spend at the vans. They can either give them a packed lunch or pay funds into their school vending card account by cheque through the office. If they do give their child money and they spend it somewhere they have forbid them to then that’s a problem they have with their child. Not me and not mine.

Homework was 8th on the list with 15% of parents selecting it as a point for improvement. Now I’m not sure what “improvement” means in this sense. Banning it would be an improvement if you ask me but I’m guessing that’s not where they were coming from. 15% isn’t a lot really, but I suspect they are a vocal minority… the first to complain if little Josh or Chloe isn’t getting the right quantity or quality of homework. I don’t get this. If they are so concerned that their child spend great swathes of time out of school learning then shouldn’t they be actively involved in this themselves? I try and I’m pretty crap at it (no patience!). They way I see it teachers have enough time to influence and guide my child’s learning while they are at school, I’ll take over in the evenings, at weekends and during holidays if that’s OK?

Parents who push for harder and more homework probably consider themselves strong supporters of their child’s learning but I think they’re just a bunch of lazy sods who are unwilling to take any personal role in their child’s learning.  As soon as they get their child enrolled in school it’s up to the teachers to teach…all the time. They’ve done their bit by the time their child is 5. I once had a rather heated argument with the Mum of a 7 year old who was practically screaming at me in response to my moaning about the nightly reading homework… “So YOU don’t think you’re children should read out of school?” (and it wasn’t only the loud music in the pub that got her yelling). Well DUH. Of course I do, it’s why I buy them books and why they have had library cards since aged 3. The difference between me and her? I’m happy to, in fact I insist on, encouraging them myself. I enjoy trawling libraries and book shops with my kids searching out material that will engage them and encourage them to want to read. She, on the other hand, is quite content to have it handed to her by the school, no matter how dire or boring the material. She didn’t get it (and not just because of the loud music, my guess).

I think parents who demand homework really have to ask themselves why. I’m sure there are some who lack the confidence to complement school education with their own input, which is a shame if it results in them demanding the school do more rather than asking the school what more they could be doing themselves. I’m equally sure there are some parents who just don’t want to get so personally involved in their child’s education, who are quite happy to have homework that keeps them out of trouble and out of their hair.  I am under no illusion that there are parents and children who just don’t give a damn and see no value in school work of any kind. I’m not sure homework is the great leveller in those situations either and presumably generates more chasing of homework, punishment exercises, chasing of punishment exercises and detention than it’s worth.  Unsupported kids who are keen to learn will do homework… the repetitious boredom of work they understand and the struggle with work they don’t understand applies to children in supportive and non-supportive homes alike.

That’s not to say that all homework lacks value. It’s just that the homework my children are given clearly does. I can think of two types of out of school work I don’t have too many issues with. Firstly finishing off. Sadly the timetabling at their school doesn’t feature such a thing as a double-period. Remember them? A whole 80 minutes to play a decently long game of hockey, or write a decently long creative piece, or see the paint almost dry on a piece of art. No lesson my children attend is longer than 55 minutes. They can’t even cook anything bigger than a fairy cake in that time, let alone jump on a bus to the pool, change, swim, dry, change and get back in time for the next lesson. It’s nonsense.  Cooking, art, PE, English and sciences all warranted double-periods when I was at school, which meant way less taking home and finishing of work. I don’t have a huge issue with this type of homework simply because the teachers have no choice.

The other type of homework I could live with is home preparation. Rather than having them repeat stuff they’ve already done in school why not have them preparing ahead of a lesson? Even if it’s just reading a passage or a chapter of a text book they will arrive in the class either well prepared having understood the task or in need of help and (this is the good bit) in the classroom with a teacher there to help. It sure takes the pressure of failing to grasp homework if the point of it isn’t to get a mark for it. Who knows, they might even delve a bit further, they might even ask their parents. How refreshing would it be to have homework where a parent couldn’t simply say “show me the question” and tell them the answer. How much more would a teacher learn about their pupils if they arrived in their class with questions rather than leaving their class with questions.

Just some long rambling thoughts.

Our littlie was only 3 in July08 and we are already facing a decision on his education that I for one am just not ready to make. Primary enrolment forms are out now and the pre-school ones will be out, I am told, next month. I was walking him to playgroup a few weeks ago and it was non-stop “what’s that?  I know this!” and “why? why? why?” and I was sucked back eight years in time… he is so like his big brother in many ways and so different. I think it took less than 6 weeks for school to destroy Sprog 2’s “what’s that? I know this!” and “why? why? why?” and the thought of witnessing that spark die again makes me feel physically sick. Neither of my boys sit down and shut up, they never listen but they hear and even one to one they drive me nuts. They are, I suspect, challenged in the amygdala department. They make me question how I value schooling in ways my daughter never has. I’m not an uninformed parent and I don’t have the certainty of a one-sided view on education (more’s the pity). I lurk in Home Ed forums, I read TESS, I (occasionally) talk to Neil (when I can unplug him) and I titter a bit when people pay for Steiner when ACfE is free (although I have yet to experience it as anything more than another discourse of education). I am surrounded by people who work in education or with children in some capacity and I feel a bit left out with my long dead career in extinct and ancient IT. And I think, maybe, I have too many answers.

I procrastinate as this question of enrolment is a decision I feel was taken from me with Sprog 2. Being a December boy he really shouldn’t have started school until he was nearly 6, but on the advice of his pre-school teachers he started when he was 4. I too was  gobsmacked at the article in TESS suggesting pupils should be allowed (read: encouraged) to leave school after 4 years of secondary education whatever their age, though from a more personal pov and with way more swearing than my esteemed OH.  I don’t anticipate Sprog 2 being one of those boys who wishes to escape education (read: education wishes to escape from) at the tender age of 15, but he could easily have been given his rocky start, disrupted education, bullying and eventual transfer. I honestly do not know from where he musters the enthusiasm for school after his primary experience, but he does and he’s a smart cookie so I hear. It’s just a pity he will have a limited choice of universities at the end of S6 or an enforced gap year (maybe no bad thing?).

I hold in my imagination the child he could have been if he’d started school a year later and, to a lesser extent,  the one he could have been if  he’d been home educated. Both are becoming increasingly vague as the years pass and we move further away from the choice that set him on this path (see how I made it all impersonal there – “the” choice! like I’m not culpable). I am in grave danger of using  the education of Sprog 3 as my redemption (he should also be the subject of my redemption from poor parenting but it isn’t quite working out the way I thought 10 years of experience would – ah well).  Then again, maybe I am simply in danger of making what I believe is the right educational choice rather than the popular educational choice.

We shall make these Sprog 3 decisions one at a time.

Decision – he is absolutely not no way ever going to our local village primary school.

breathing space

Aaaaahhh

(that was an easy one).