Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Channel 4’s series Child Genius gives an interesting behind the scenes look at how parents prepare their children for the Child Genius competition.

Taken as read is that all the children involved have above average ability or at least if you didn’t see the behind the scenes work you would assume that was the case. However, it’s far from clear cut given the sheer quantity of work that some of their parents put into their children. With the level of work that some of the parents have been putting in, even an average child could be expected to perform quite well.

For example, take the spelling tests. Yes, it will certainly help to have a great memory, but in reality a lot of the spelling of the words comes down to rote learning of the “big words” in the dictionary. Moreover, you can concentrate on those words with irregular spellings as those following the rules are easy to spell. Granted, it would be quite a boring task to learn those words in isolation but it doesn’t require a genius to do it nor is it necessarily a test of genius to do it.

The maths tests surely require genius, don’t they? Well, if they were maths, they might do but they aren’t maths – they are purely arithmetical tests. Therefore, genius isn’t required. What is required, in some cases, is an ability to calculate quickly in one’s head which is a combination of practice and knowledge of the various tricks to simplify calculations.

Surely it’s clear that, say, the pianist is a genius? Well, no, that’s not clear either. What is clear is that he’s put an awful lot of time into practising his music but it’s not clear that an average child couldn’t do the same if they devoted a similar amount of time to the task.

However, the craziest parents are the two psychologists who seem to be devoting their lives to two to one extremely intensive tutoring. On the assumption that the psychological methods they are using actually work, then applying them at that intensity to pretty much any child would easily get them into the competition. Their tutoring appears to be so intense that it raises the question as to whether their daughter would be able to cope in a normal teaching environment.

In the midst of school terms, you can depend on traffic jams each day at 9am and from before 3pm through to around 4pm followed by a minor lull before the next traffic jam gets going around 5pm.

It’s radically different over the summer. Gone is that 9am traffic jam and, around here anyway, the jam kicks in around 30 minutes earlier and presumably is a bit worse as you’ve got the normal work traffic plus the people who’d have been on the road after dropping off the kids. Thankfully, the 3pm-4pm peak is gone though the latter jam also seems to be that much worse as the school pickup people are also on the road in the latter slot.

The plus point for me is that my earlier start means that the flexi time clocks up quite a bit over the summer which in turn means that I can take an extra couple of days off over that period. That’s if I stick to my normal school-run wake-up time and don’t start lying in, of course.

With James leaving primary school, his school uniform has changed from a relatively simple affair to something considerably more complex and expensive.

In its place there’s:

• a Blazer (badged)
• Black trousers (OK, no big change there)
• White Shirt
• House tie (new addition)
• Black socks
• Black shoes (by which they mean “proper” shoes)
• An overcoat or raincoat of formal style (gone is the anorak)

The PE kit has gone from a really simple t-shirt, shorts and gutties to the somewhat more involved:

• Canterbury games shirt (badged)*
• Canterbury games shorts (badged)*
• Canterbury games socks (badged)*
• Canterbury tracksuit (badged)*
• Canterbury PE t-shirt (badged)*
• Canterbury PE shorts (badged)*
• Plain white socks
• Trainers (non marking)
• Rugby boots

And the price has gone from something like £50 or so to £273 which doesn’t even include the shoes, trainers, rugby boots or overcoat. That said, supposedly many of the items will last him a few years so it’s not an annual expensive, though neither was the £50. We suspect that at least part of that price rise is down to the significant reduction in the number of outlets offering the uniform as compared to the primary school but there is a whole lot more stuff that he needs too.

We’ve decided to leave purchase of the trousers until August as he generally grows out of those every year so we’ll likely end up getting a size larger than we would if we’d bought it now.

I’ve a few things that I’ve been toying with pulling together into book shape so last week I thought I’d see what was involved in putting them on Amazon. As I’d James’ school project sitting on the computer in good shape, that turned out to be the easiest thing as our first attempt in publishing.

So, step 1, get the book into an appropriate format. They accept a whole range of formats including the normal wordprocessing (e.g. DOC) ones, ebook formats and PDF. I list PDF separately as it’s probably the worst format to use if you’re publishing to Kindle since they have to run their OCR software on it to pick out the words which is asking for trouble as they don’t need to do that for any of the other formats. In theory, your best bet is an ebook format as that’ll let you add the appropriate chapter and section headings to be included in the table of contents but I think you can do that via the DOC format too. For our first attempt, I took the lazy approach and used DOC and didn’t bother with a clickable table of contents, though I will add one later.

Step 2, is to register with the Amazon publishing platform for which you can use your existing Amazon account. A related stage to that is to register for tax which you may as well do upfront though you could wait until the payments start rolling in.

Once you’ve registered, you’re set to upload your first book. The first step asks you to create a cover for it and they’ve a rudimentary cover creation application to do that online which was certainly good enough for our first attempt but you’d want to put more effort into it if you were publishing a more serious book. Next, you upload your book and finally you set the price and format. Everything’s priced in dollars by default but you can set prices for individual countries. If the price is above £2.99 you can set a 70% commission rate but otherwise you get 35%. You can even add an optional print on demand option which will let you produce a paperback version when someone orders it but they charge $2.50 for that so obviously your price needs to be more than that; in practice I just ran with the Kindle version as it’s just a trial.

Finally, you click on “save and publish”, wait a few seconds and you’re away. Well, it puts your book in the system but it takes about 12 hours before it appears on the site.

So, if you want to buy James’ book, just click on Une Année en France.

The UU insight evening last week was a little odd for a variety of reasons.

For a start, it wasn’t held in the university premises so there was no opportunity to have a look around where we might be studying, nor was there the depth of teaching staff who can be available when such events are on campus. That meant that it didn’t really feel like we were getting a realistic protrayal of what it would be like to study there.

To counteract that lack of university ambience, they had three of the former postgraduate students talk a bit about their experience but in practice they spoke more about where their various degrees took them rather than what it was really like to study there. That wasn’t there fault as the initial presentation by one of the university staff was also more about where you could go with a postgrad qualification form them than about what the study experience would be like.

The target audience was largely those who want to do their postgraduate study part-time so you’d expect that the mix of people attending would be quite different than were at the Queen’s postgraduate event a few months ago. In practice though, it seemed like a very similar group, albeit a much, much smaller group.

So, although billed as an evening to give you some insight of study at the university, in reality it didn’t do that.

The next series of events with them are based at the various campuses so should be rather different experiences and give more of an idea of what studying there would be like.