Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Yesterday morning saw the presentation on what courses the local tech (OK, Belfast Metropolitan College) can offer in the school for the parents or at least those participating in the community group anyway.

It turns out that English was the most popular option with 18, followed by computing with about 15 and with maths trailing at 11. Those numbers appear to reflect the perceived difficulty of the three courses although I suspect that particular perception could turn out to be somewhat flawed if comments by the prospective tutor for the English and computing courses after the numbers were collected are anything to go by. What it also reflects is the almost exclusively female nature of the group which is why English had no trouble getting the numbers whilst maths had problems even getting to 11.

Anyway, Wendy’s signed up for maths and English which’ll keep her busy in the mornings ’til sometime in June.

The prices for the Kip McGrath tutoring are incredibly confusing and quite off-putting but it turns out that they’re substantially less than I had expected.

Basically what it says is that it’s £25 per student per subject which would mean £100 a week for our two little guys or around £400 a month. In fact, it’s £25 per student per day but as we’re only running with one day and are getting a 20% discount it’s working out at £40 a week for both little guys which is actually around £1.50 a week cheaper than Kumon. Thus, although the original plan was to run with Kip for James who definitely needs it and Kumon for John who’s just sailing through it all, we ended up signing them both up for it and they start this Friday.

Although the website implies that the classes are always five in fact our little guys will be in a class by themselves to begin with at what’s currently the perfect time too. By going right after school on Friday afternoon, they’ll be finishing relatively early which, hopefully, will mean that John won’t be as exhausted as he was sometimes after the Kumon classes.

According to the tutor, James should be where he should be school-wise in around a year or so although I suspect he’ll get there sooner with the Kip McGrath plus all the extra help he’s getting in school. I’m rather dubious about her assessment for John and I’d say that he’ll be way ahead of the rest of his class before the school year is finished.

We’re already getting withdrawal symptoms from the Kumon though. It’s peculiar not to be doing the worksheets every night.

With the kids going to the same primary school as I did many years ago, I’ve been checking out how things have changed over the years.

Strangely, going into school works exactly the same as it did over 40 years ago, right down to them lining up behind the very same P2 and P4 painted on the playground as I did. Coming out is the same for the junior school as it was but the senior kids don’t have to hold hands whilst walking down the path and there’s a new front gate too though just as many people use the original gate.

The naff playground at Clara is much better than it was with the single roundabout and swings having been updated and a climbing frame added. It’s not in the top league of playgrounds but it’s definitely moved up in the world. Last week we ventured out to find the other nearby playground which has seen quite a lot of rebuilding of houses all around it. In my day it was by far the best playground around with cycle paths laid out with proper road markings around a well-equipped playground so I had high hopes for it. Sadly, it’s gone downhill somewhat since then with none of the cycle paths in its latest incarnation and not so many pieces of play equipment either.

Missing these days is Woodlee Street which used to run down the side of the school. In those days nearly everyone walked to school so the street was little used but it was demolished a decade or so ago (and still isn’t rebuilt!) with the new houses of Fashoda Street extending over where it used to be which gives rise to a major hassle for cars turning round after dropping off the kids. You’d think the developers would consider how streets approaching a school were going to be used before blocking of exits like that, wouldn’t you?

In a typical tutor group forum out of a possible 25-30 users you’re lucky if you get four or five people participating and even then that participation is generally limited to an introductory comment at the start of the course and perhaps one or two replies later on.

Thus in my current astronomy course there are 60 forum comments of which 46 are from the tutor, seven from me and one from each of six other people. In fact, nobody replied to anyone else’s comment over the eight months of the course. Although we’re down to around 15 students now that should still be enough to get some responses.

However, TT280 is at the other extreme. For that the “tutor group” encompasses the entire course (several hundred people I think) which is far too many to keep track of. For instance, the week one seminar which only opened yesterday now has getting on for 200 messages on it. Somehow I doubt that many people have read them all or have any intention of trying to.

Where there does, so far, seem to be a happy medium is in the fast track forum which has only 13 messages on it so far. It’s the one aimed at people who are running up to three weeks ahead of the course timetable. I had sort-of expected that there would be more people participating in that but it would appear that it’s something like 50-ish out of the 1000-ish people on the course (taking the seemingly typical 20% forum participation rate as a guideline) or around 5% of the student cohort.

Already there’s a sign that some people are going to miss the wood for the trees in a big way. For instance, on the accessibility thread everyone is trying to find reasons why you should bother making websites accessible to (mainly) the blind and has totally missed what is by far the most important commercial reason which is that search engines are effectively blind. Thus, if you run up a site entirely in flash (which is surprisingly commonly done), then it’s basically invisible to google et al. From the other end, the tutors are trumpeting the OU rule that assignments can’t be distributed or published in any form yet 1) Nick Athanasiou, one of the students on the Advanced Creative Writing course has had the play written for his assignment performed (and this is even mentioned by the OU) and 2) the main reason for not publishing was related to the potential for plagiarism by future students which can’t happen for TT280 as this is the final run of the course.

Normally I’d be working on TT280 at this point but thanks to the drip-feeding of material I’m as far ahead as I can really go. Well, aside from the first computer marked assignment but I can’t submit that for another week or two anyway so I’ll finish it off during the week.

The two little guys get assessed at the Kip centre this afternoon for both maths and English though we’ve not actually decided on jumping ship from Kumon as yet.

Whereas Kumon is by and large a franchised very standardised system, Kip is supposed to be more tuned to the child and is much more of a franchised tutoring system than Kumon. That in itself brings significant differences eg the Kumon franchisees can come from any walk of life whereas the Kip people are generally from a teaching background. I suspect there’s probably more variability between Kip franchises as a result of that but that’s something that you’d not notice unless you changed from one to another at some stage.

The standardisation in Kumon should make it more scalable but, as we’ve seen, there are limits to that. Since Kip sets limits to the class size there’s an overall maximum number of students that can be taken on by a single franchise eg given that it’s an after school thing, there’s a maximum of around four classes a day (they’re 80 minutes long) ie around 25 kids per day.

As with Kumon, they only do maths and English but rather than a single fixed sequence of things to go through, there are a range of classes from pre-school through to university level and special interest ones too like English as a second language and intensive versions.

At this point, I think we’ll likely move James over to Kip completely and probably leave John doing just the English with Kumon but we’ll see how the assessment and costs pan out.