Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

The kids new school has what they somewhat confusingly call the Community Room. It grew out of an initiative a few years back to establish links with the local community.

It’s different from the PTA in a number of aspects. For one thing, it meets every Wednesday morning for about 90 minutes rather than once in the evening every couple of months. That of itself means that the make-up of the group is largely mothers with a few fathers and grandmothers (not to mention around a dozen pre-school kids). To some extent that almost makes it a parents and toddlers group and it does take a bit of effort to steer things away from that.

The regular meetings mean that relationships are established much more quickly than in the PTA and similar groups but more importantly it means that it’s easier to organise events through this group. Thus, one of the interests at the moment is in setting up some courses to help the parents with the homework that’s starting to arrive in surprisingly large amounts. The courses run over six weeks so a regular setting is required for such things. Somewhat overlapping with the PTA there are a series of events organised by way of this group with the first one being Halloween. That’s a little confusing as there will be two events happening: one directly for the school and one only for the community group and their families.

As well as the larger courses we were treated to a basic first aid for children course this morning which covered a whole bunch of stuff that falls into the category of “stuff that you should know but hope you’ll never need to know”. So, it covered CPR, choking, bleeding, meningitis and what to do with teeth knocked out, which made for a very full 90 minutes! On the meningitis front, the deciders are if your child is getting bad fast and if they’ve cold hands and cold feet: calling 999 is the way to go if that’s happening.

Although the group was established as a means of establishing links with the local community, it seems to have become a kind of “year 8” class for the parents which is no bad thing as it will help with the kids’ education.

We’ve been helping out at the book fair in the school this week which provides a different perspective to some of the money making activities that schools need to get involved in these days.

The first thing that’s noticeable is that the school don’t get cash commission from the sales that they make but instead get that commission in the form of books. Thus what looks like a fairly high rate of commission is actually a good deal less in practice and probably little more than 10% for the company.

The books on offer are from one educational publisher which makes the selection more limited than it really needs to be. Well, seemingly more limited than it needs to be as one of the problems is that the books all need to be suitable for children so they could easily run into difficulties were a general publisher to be used. In fact, a growing problem seems to be that people generally are moving online for their purchases which is particularly understandable this year as the discount vouchers previously issued to the children aren’t there any more whilst the books are all at full price and these days nobody pays full price for books. So, why don’t the schools just put a link on their websites and join the internet sales rush? Basically because the link would have to be to only childrens’ books and there isn’t anything fitting the bill at the moment.

Being tied in to a single supplier is rarely a good idea and this is no exception. For all of the items that I’ve checked, the Scholastic price is around 20% to 30% higher than the Amazon price which probably goes some way to explaining the very low sales at the book fair.

I signed up for this a couple of weeks ago on the basis that it looked like a doable way of updating my skills a little bit in a fairly short time.

It’s part of the Certificate of Web Applications Development which is a series of six related 10 point courses. Normally 10 point courses offer you the chance to do the course over either eight weeks or about five months corresponding roughly to the workload of a 30 point or 10 point course but this one is over a fixed 12 week period which means that it should equate to a 20 point workload. In OU terms, a 20 point workload is around 5 hours a week so if my normal scaling factor applies it should take me a couple of hours a week to get through it.

Although it’s billed as an online course a parcel arrived this afternoon containing the book Principles of Web Design, a DVD full of all kinds of Internet software (Apache, several browsers) and a cute video, and the usual OU applications DVD. Going by my quick flick through the book it’s at a fairly low level although there’s an ebook for the course which may be at a higher level but I’ll not have access to that ’til Thursday. Supposedly you can do the course with Windows, Linux or Mac computers but installing it in Ubuntu didn’t work as seamlessly as that implies. In fact, it didn’t really work at all so I may have to break out the Windows machine at some point or maybe give it a spin in VirtualBox.

I came across a website from a former TT280 student which relates his experiences but also rather interestingly the falling number of students on the various courses in the certificate. Whilst TT280 kicked off with 800 students, towards the end the number dropped to well below 100 which I guess is why this is the last run of the course with no plans to replace it. I’m not sure if I’ll complete the certificate myself at this point as some of the modules will run through rather busy periods in my timetable so I’ve linked it to my open degree that I’m using as a place holder for my miscellaneous courses.

Part of the European Heritage weekend was a trip round the architectural highlights of Belfast. Not much was said about it in the little writeup other than naming four or five places which looked interesting enough. Many freebie events are abbreviated in some way and as this was a one-off bus trip we were expecting something like 40 minutes or so but it ran for a relatively packed two hours of sightseeing or rather site-seeing which is more than a tenners worth of value these days so we’re off to a good start for the weekend.

It started with a couple of orbits around the city hall which highlighted just how historic many of those buildings are. The City Hall itself dates back to 1898 and it built on the site of the Linen Hall, many of the major buildings surrounding it being former linen warehouses. There’s a duplicate of it in Durham, South Africa. In those days linen along with shipbuilding were the major industries of the city. Starting from the city hall many of the public buildings continue to use the Portland stone (from Dorset) which it does. Amongst all the white stone there are a number of sandstone buildings and those two materials are still used in many of the landmark projects to the present.

From there we were off towards the Falls Road passing the former Poor House (now a retirement community) and a little collection of unique buildings around Clifton Street including the heritage listed former Methodist church. Round the corner from that is St Peters cathedral which, despite its age, looks quite modern from the outside. We’ll have a return visit to a number of buildings in that area later on.

Along the way we went past Queen’s University which was the only building that Queen Victoria was brave enough to visit as it was felt safe from the cholera epidemic that was sweeping the city at the time. The plague pit in the Friar’s Bush cemetery is still not considered safe and is the reason why the road narrows at that point.

Heading on out of the city took us past the shipyard and, of course, the newest addition to the city: Titanic Quarter which is adding around 1/3rd to the overall built space of the city so should have quite a major impact once the project is completed. That leg took us to Parliament Buildings which has a lot more symbolism than I imagined: 365 feet wide for the days of the year, 7 stories for the days of the week and six columns for the six counties.

We were getting a little bit overdosed on architecture by then but on the way back into the town picked out a number of unexpectedly unique buildings eg the catholic church close to the halls of residence, the remains of the oldest house in Belfast and, of course, the many Victorian and Georgian buildings that you generally ignore as you pass them.

Definitely a worthwhile trip.

Last year the Kumon class that the little guys go to began the year with they could turn up any time which was handy although in practical terms most people seemed to come at close to the same time all the time. Whilst that was fine for us, the growth in class numbers meant that some times were getting unmanageable with so many people. So, later in the year time slots were allocated and the numbers levelled out quite well.

This year there’s been what appears to be a massive jump in numbers attending the classes with a number of older kids turning up too. The effect of that was that today whereas there’s usually two or three at a table there were four or five at each table for pretty much the whole hours. Moreover, my little guys who normally complete their work in around 30 to 40 minutes were shepherded out before they’d had a chance to finish it “to let other people get a chance” after they’d been there for around an hour. Not only that but John’s English work has been cut in half seemingly only because there was no chance to complete the work in class; that’s work that he normally finishes in around 10-15 minutes at home.

The problem this time around is that there doesn’t seem to be any possibility of either increasing the number of time slots nor of increasing the number of tutors available (because there just ain’t the room to accommodate them). Which implies that it’ll just get worse as the recruitment drive seems to be continuing with even more new students starting on Tuesday.

So it’s looking like we’ll need to look elsewhere for our tutoring. At the moment Kip McGrath looks quite promising as it sets limits on the numbers per class compared to Kumon’s seemingly unlimited student numbers.