Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

I thought the results for the Understanding cardiovascular diseases and Maths for science weren’t to be out until towards the end of this month so it was a nice surprise to see the Your result for … is now available messages in the inbox this afternoon.

They’re both level one courses so they’re just pass/fail rather than coming with a grading. In both cases there’s supposed to be more information about the course result arriving in the post in a couple of months time.

The cardiovascular course is one of the OU’s medical style courses with heaps of medical terminology to pick up quite early on in the course. It’s also exclusively online tutoring which I could have done with for this particular course but the promised weekly tutorials only ran for two weeks which was a real shame as they were the kind of style which made you think deeper about the course. Nothing at all really on the Maths for science course as it’s one of the short science courses which only offer you a forum to ask questions on although having said that, it’s much more than was on offer the last time I did a science short course.

Anyway that’s another 25 points in the bag for the degree.

Bullying policies are at the sharp end of schooling in that they are there to deal with situations that essentially schools and parents would rather not think about. After all, who wouldn’t like to think of children as being essentially good but maybe needing a little guidance now and again?

With that in mind many of the solutions proposed are based around showing the bully that they’re wrong and talking them back onto the right path. These involve everything from the simple talking to the child through to revealing to them the effect on the feelings of their victim in various ways. Whilst talking does seem the best platform to start with, moving to having the victim reveal their feelings can give a committed bully more ammunition to use against their victim which obviously is less than ideal in the enclosed environment that is a school.

In fact the most effective method of dealing with them appears to be simply telling on the bullies. Thanks to the intimidation that bullies create this needs to go so far as to create a “telling school” whereby everyone feels empowered to tell the teachers about bullying activities. Thus, the victim can rely on someone other than themselves to tell about the bullying they’re subjected to. Downsides are that it could lead to a tell-tale culture if taken to extremes and takes some getting used to.

The other problem that bullying policies can run contrary to some other policies in the school. For instance, what would you do if you saw a child being pounded by another one (ie not a fight)? Most of us would attempt to stop it verbally but that doesn’t always work with a bully so might find themselves needing to pull a bully off a victim but child protection policies often have a “no touching of a child by an adult” clause, so what do you do? That “no touching” clause can sometimes be so strong that if one were to apply it to the letter one would have to allow the bullying to continue until the bully decided to stop. That might sound crazy but is exactly how it’s applied in the school our little guys go to.

You might think that sense would prevail but that “sense” should really be built-in to the policies. After all, if a child were to pull out a knife and start stabbing other kids it seems obvious that you’d intervene to stop them. Doing so is directly contrary to the school policy on child protection though so strictly speaking you’d be required to let the child carry on until they decided to stop. Isn’t that crazy?

The basic problem is that many of these policies are single level with no escalation mechanism built-in. That seems to be largely down to the feeling that policies need to be easy to understand plus parents simply don’t even want to think about the potential of what are essentially junior thugs and how they might need to be dealt with though some process of escalation. In effect, they create policies to deal with their own nice children and don’t allow for those that might not be quite so nice.

What’s really required is an integrated policy with escalation processes built-in that protects victims and potential victims.

We’ve been meaning to take the kids to Streamvale Farm for a while now but in practice the first, and last, time we went was last week on a school trip.

The charge even for the school trip was £4.80 per child ie the full price. To be fair that did include a tour guide although I’m sure that any of us who’ve lived in the country for any period of time would have done at least as well; certainly, for me, she didn’t add any value so it was a full £4.80. That’s unless you count the “mid-morning break” as a discount but even then 10p worth of watery orange and a small biscuit is hardly the level of discount that a school would ordinarily expect for these things.

So what’s included in the tour? We began with a look at a non-working milking parlour with no practical demonstration and merely one photograph of what a cow getting milked looked like. Granted, dawn milkings aren’t conducive to school trips but I’m sure that they could have managed a video at least. It went downhill from there as we walked along the lane to the badger set with it’s very small sign marking the spot. Badgers are nocturnal so nothing to see there though a proper display would have been possible. From there it was on past the duck pond to the field with the deer which the children were allowed to feed through the fence (by far the high point of this part of the visit) before circling round to have that mid-morning break. The next stretch gave the kids a chance to feed some of the chickens and ducks although with no background explanations as to what they ate or whatever ie just a stop for amusement rather than education.

From there we were off past the couple of dogs in a pen to the “petting zoo” (for want of a better description). This should have been the highlight of the trip as there were getting on for a dozen different animals. However, in practice the only interaction with them was the guinea pig hastily handed around the kids (with no consideration for its welfare) and the goat roughly dragged from one child to another for a suck on a bottle. It could have been so much better and it was no surprise that the kids preferred the small playground inside the “zoo” which seemed to be there for no other reason than to create some interest for children.

We finished up the tour with a go at milking a dummy cow (which would have been better placed in the milking parlour) and a chance for a hurried feel of some chicks with the customary lack of consideration for their welfare.

With the tour over, it was time for lunch (not included in the price, of course) and then it was off to sample the playgrounds. The first one for us featured one of those zip slides that made no allowance for safety and I was amazed that one of the kids didn’t end up in hospital. That was the only feature as the other playground items were rather cheap productions (one of which states quite clearly that it is only for home use) and the positioning of the tyre swing far too close to one of the diggers is another accident waiting to happen. Finally, it was off to the second playground where there were loads of little tractors and trailers although the trailers couldn’t be used as none of the attachment pins was to be found and on the whole everything was rather run down.

None of the weekend rides were running which was odd as some of them sound like the kids would have loved them. They’re all at extra charge though, as is everything here.

Overall, very poor value and dangerous to boot.

One of the biggest problems with planning out a science degree with the Open University at the moment is that they’re in the process of completely revamping the entire science degree programme which in turn means that expiry dates for courses have been changing and start dates for new courses are being juggled too.

At the simplest level they’re basically cancelling all but one of the science summer schools with the final year for the level 2 schools being 2011 and 2012 for the level 3 schools. That’s caused a whole bunch of upheaval in degree schedules for many people who want a named science degree (BSc physical sciences, BSc life sciences, etc.). Since for those named degrees you generally need one L2 and two L3 summer schools there’s going to be something of a fire-sale atmosphere around the October booking time this year and next.

Next, there’s the problem that in a number of degree programmes there’s a fair number of courses expiring in 2011 and 2012. Normally, these courses would be replaced with an updated version but that’s not happening this time around. Thus the excellent S320 Infectious Disease course has one final run in 2011 and the landmark S204 biology course also finishes in 2011. For infectious diseases, it’s the end of the road with no replacement in prospect but even the main biology course isn’t getting fully replaced and instead there’s only going to be a shorter course covering part of the ground.

Oddly there’s been a lot of development around some areas, notably biology which has acquired four 15 point biology cum medical courses (which, if the cardiology course is anything to go by, are excellent).

However, with all the upheaval recently, hardly a month has gone by without me having to rejig my plans for the next couple of years.

As it stands, I suspect not and ironically the problem is because it tries to frame what’s essentially a belief system in terms that could be put across as science.

The biggest problem with it in scientific terms is that it starts from the premise that everything that exists now was created out of nothing about 6000 years ago. This causes the direct conflict with science in that there are proofs that show that life existed on earth for many millions of years and that the universe has been around for billions of years. The scientific theories that show those ages are inter-linked and many of the underlying principles behind them are used to make 21st century life work too: just about every piece of technology in your house (including the house construction itself) relies on at least some of those scientific principles.

However, supposing that instead of a creator (or rather Creator), there were a race of beings with a civilisation billions of years old. Could such a bunch of people simply create an earth with all the pseudo-history in the form of things like fossils that appeared to be millions of years old? I suspect that the answer would be a clear “yes”. Asking whether or not they would bother to do that is no more relevant than it would be for bacteria to attempt to understand our own reasons for doing things.

Science basically ignores that possibility and attempts to explain things as they are (or appear to be) and goes on to use that knowledge to improve things. Creationism assumes that there’s no point in attempting to understand it and would leave us in the dark ages.