Foreign Perspectives

Archive for June, 2009

By the time you read this, we should be well on the way to our place in France (scheduled posts are wonderful!) and pretty much totally exhausted.

The plan is that on Saturday morning we’ll have gone from Belfast to Rosslare to catch the LD Lines ferry to Le Havre around 5pm. That’s a relatively easy 4 hours drive though it seems to go on forever as we found out doing the route the other way in January.

It’s an overnight ferry trip which is quite relaxing in comparison to the drive from Stranraer to Dover. Cheaper too when you offset the cost of the cabin against the savings in petrol. Unfortunately, that 5pm-ish departure makes for an arrival around the same time the next day in Le Havre.

Our theory is that we’ll relax on the boat and start driving when we get off. Snag is that at this time of year most of the hotels along our route down France will be full so we probably won’t have any choice but to drive on through the night which isn’t altogether appealing to put it mildly.

Sadly, we’ve just heard the news that some ******** have broken into our house in France and trashed the place.

What seems pretty much a cert is that the things that they took (seemingly less than a dozen things in total although we need to do a full check) will be appearing in one of the vide greniers (car boot sales) over this weekend. Some of their customers will be less than pleased with their purchases as they include, among other things, a TV that can’t receive French TV programmes and a number of region 1 DVDs that won’t play on French DVD players.

It isn’t so much the things that they’ve taken which is annoying though: it’s that they simply trashed most rooms in the house looking for stuff that just wasn’t there. Thanks to the high prevalence of the black economy in France, most French households are likely to have quite a pile of cash stashed away but us foreigners just don’t work like that so their cash take amounted to a few euros at best.

In other countries there’d be an insurance claim, of course, but in France the insurance only pays out when you have the original receipts and, for the most part, people don’t have them so you end up paying a whole lot for insurance that realistically you will never be able to claim on.

Anyway, it looks like our notional holiday will be taken up with cleaning up the mess that they’ve left behind and wasting time with the insurance company.

We’ve partly started down the home schooling route by way of the Kumon system recently and are just beginning to settle into it.

Basically we started looking around for options to get James’ reading & writing back on track after the mess that was made of it by the French school system. Although he should now be finishing P3 in fact his reading level is around mid P1 level. The school he’s now in have been doing lots of work with him to get him back on track but clearly he needed a bit more than they were resourced to do which is why we’ve ended up with Kumon.

The Kumon system at first sight doesn’t look like it could possibly work. All that’s required is about 10 minutes a day five days a week and two class days of around 30 minutes each per week. How could that possibly get kids from reading though to calculus?

The thing is though that is does work or at least we are already beginning to see improvements in James’ reading and that’s after just a matter of weeks. How come? Well, the “little and often” approach means that there’s very immediate feedback on the child’s work, it’s marked by their parents (thereby reinforcing the importance placed on it by them) and it’s easy so they succeed almost all of the time.

That last aspect is one of the more important ones as it means that the child gets constant praise and there are all kinds of ways that this is shown from the little stickers that they get for each piece of work they return in class through to large prize giving opportunities for completing a level in the system. Now whilst it might sound crazy to have so many reward systems built-in in fact that’s a very important part of the education: if you receive praise you tend to work to get more of it.

Ah, but it would take forever to learn anything if you could only do the easy stuff, wouldn’t it? Although the Kumon system is designed for the long term in fact it doesn’t take that long before children start performing well above the level of their normal classes. For example, starting pretty much from scratch it’s looking likely that James will start on P4 level work early next year and there’s a chance that John won’t be that far behind him by then.

Of course, the question at that point is whether we should continue on with those classes and potentially see him doing P12 work around the time he’s in P5 or P6? Or for that matter what if he were doing A level maths in the early years of secondary school? Much as it might seem ridiculous to think that the 10 minute a day approach would produce results like that I suspect that it might well do.

The other oddity in this is that Kumon is a 365 day a year approach. Those 10 minute lessons continue right through the year, or at least that’s the idea. We’re currently sitting with about an inch of the worksheets taking us through to the end of July and will be getting another consignment before they run out to take us up to September.

Cost-wise it’s an affordable £50 per subject (they only do maths and English) per month which is around the level that you’d be paying for the local private schools. In the short term we’ll be getting double the value from that as John’s been wanting to do “his homework” after James has finished his although we’ll likely formally enroll him this October.

As usual I ended up putting my previous assignment in at the last minute. That’s not because I didn’t start on it reasonably early this time around but because I always find that there’s some last minute thing that I can do to improve it in some way and I’m always scared of putting it in too early in case I come up with some much better way of answering it at the last minute.

However, despite the pretty much last minute submission all of the previous ones were marked by the next day (top marks to Ken, my tutor!). Staggeringly fast marking but not rushed as you might expect as the comments were both plentiful and helpful too. But, this time as we’re getting ready to head off to France of course the mark isn’t in yet.

This one was a different type of assignment so I’ve really no way of judging where the final mark will fall. Up to now we’ve had two essay assignments (one more to go) for which the mark was more or less as expected and assignment looking at methodology which ended up with a higher mark as it was so much more structured. This particular one is what they bill as a practical for which we had to write what’s essentially a scientific report looking at how two children of different ages think about their identity. Since it is a report style answer there’s a whole lot of structure already fixed which, in principle, might lead to a higher mark than you’d normally get on an essay style question. However, there’s also a couple of semi-essay segments within it and it’s a new style answer format for me so overall it’s anyone’s guess as to where the mark might fall.

Actually, that varying of the answer formats is one of the things that goes to make this course much harder to do than other ones that I’ve done. Usually the assignments require a similar sort of answer so you get used to producing something along those lines. That’s not to say that they’re easier overall but rather that you get to know what’s expected of you which doesn’t really happen in this particular course.

One of the oddities of Northern Ireland is that the almost total lack of cross-over between the Scottish descent population and the Irish descent population imeans that complete lack of comprehension in some areas can still exist even now.

For instance, something like seven or eight years ago a colleague in work happened to mention that he was sure I was wondering why he was wearing a poppy. Frankly I’d never even given it a second thought as it was a commonplace thing in that it was in the period just coming up to the November 11th Remembrance Day when, of course, wearing poppies is fairly common. In fact it wasn’t until some time later that I found out that the poppy was considered by Republicans as a British symbol and therefore political thus something that he “shouldn’t” be wearing since he was a Catholic. I’m sure that I’m not the only one from the Scottish descent community who simply couldn’t understand this reasoning at all.

However, just a few days ago Wendy received this as a final statement on a comment on her blog “And for the record, Northern Irish people are not British.”. Well, actually as far as those of us of Scottish descent goes I don’t think anyone even considered that there was such a thing as “Northern Irish” and actually we ARE British (as indeed, at least legally, are those born in Northern Ireland who consider themselves Irish). It seems peculiar that someone living in Belfast could possibly think that nobody in Northern Ireland was British these days, but there you go.