Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

The Child Development course has what’s called a “seen question” on the exam paper which is sort-of a misnomer. Yes, they’ve given us the actual question that’ll be asked but it really more of a project than a simple question to answer in that we’ve to research the topic and provide a coherent answer citing research evidence to backup that answer.

That wouldn’t be too bad (says he, not having done it yet!) but the first hurdle is that there are five very different topic areas which we need to choose between first. Going by the study guide that choice should only take a day but that only works if you’ve a strong preference for one of the topics or a dislike for four of them and otherwise you could easily find yourself reading through quite a chunk of stuff just to make that choice.

In practical terms, I found it relatively easy to eliminate three of the topics. The legal one sounds interesting in principle but highlights right at the off that it contains quite upsetting material on child sexual abuse so doesn’t sound like something that would be pleasant to work on to me. The education one is very much a “for teachers” topic and doesn’t grab me. The health psychology one just sounded like a lot of marketing drivel. Which leaves the ones on autism and specific learning difficulties.

I’d thought initially that it would be very much a toss-up between these two but the presentation of them made it quite an easy choice. In practical terms I think that, although the autism one would be very interesting, you’d really need to have some experience of the condition to be able to do it as it’s presented in what seems, to me, to be a very confusing way. To be fair, it’s trying to show what autism is like to those with that affliction but it just served to confuse me as to where it was going with the topic.

Which leaves me with specific learning difficulties and that’s the option that I’ll be running with.

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 problems with the Open University is that up until a year ago they put out a prospectus giving about a paragraph on each of the courses which they run and you’re talking about hundreds of courses over dozens of different subject areas.

Net effect is that I found it very easy to find loads of courses that I’d potentially be interested in over the years but ’twas only a year ago that I finally got around to sitting down and working out a rough masterplan containing all the courses that I might be interested in doing at some point along with a pathway through the resulting maze of courses. Something of a crazy waste of time really as to do all of those on the list would take decades by which time a great deal of them would have long since been replaced by more up to date versions or perhaps completely different ones altogether. That said, it was a useful exercise in working out the medium term sequencing of the courses as there’s mix of February/October and October/June cycle courses and changing between one cycle and the other is something that you don’t want to be doing terribly often.

Anyway, I am technically on the very first of those courses right now (ED209 Child Development) and already there’s a course change in the overall route. What’s happened is that as a result of looking in more detail about the requirements of the courses coming up means that it’s useful to add a completely new course (SK277 Human Biology) into the medium term schedule in order to make it easier to do one that I’ll be getting to in several years time (SD226 Biological Psychology).

That leaves the medium term timetable looking like this:

• October 2009 SK277, Human Biology because that’ll make SD226 (Biological Psychology) a whole lot more doable and because it seems like a fascinating course in its own right;
• October 2010 DSE212, Exploring Psychology which is the psychology course that I really should have done first (along with DXR222, the associated residential);
• September 2011 A251, World Archaeology because it sounds dead interesting and I’ll need 30 points later on;
• January 2012 MST121, Using Mathematics because I need to get my maths back onstream for…
• October 2012 S207, The Physical World and SXR207, the associated residential

Eh? Where did World Archaelogy come from? That’s from my prospectus browsing. Although it’s completely unrelated to everything else I’m currently planning on doing it sounds like a really interesting course.

Where did the maths and physic courses come from? Aren’t you doing a psychology degree? Well, I have a whole host of physics courses on my masterplan simply because they sound fascinating and S207 is the first taster of those. After that I will have completed my October start sequence of courses and that’s when I’ll decide whether to complete the psychology degree or the physics degree first (long term I’ll probably do both). Thus although the course that follows it will definitely be DSE232 Applying Psychology (because it’s a September start and only runs for a few months) the one after that will be either DD307 Social Psychology or MS221 Exploring Mathematics depending on which route I choose at that point.

That brings up an issue that hasn’t arisen before in the form of enabling courses. Although I’m aiming for a physics degree that requires a fair number of maths course to enable me to do the various physics courses and they generally need to be done in a particular sequence.

There’s also the matter of a number of courses I quite fancy that I can’t see me doing a particular degree in. For instance, A207 From Enlightenment to Romanticism c.1780-1830 seems quite interesting and I’ve even read one of the recommended texts for it. Surprisingly S104 Exploring Science, although brilliant by all accounts, is one that I have provisionally dropped from my masterplan on the basis that I don’t seem to need to do it although I might revise that opinion after I’ve done the biology course. And, of course, there’s the MSc in psychology that I’d quite like to do too at some point not to mention the Creative Arts degree that sounds like fun. Still, for the moment I think I’ll just potter along through my medium term plan….

Sounds an easy solution to the pornography issue for sure although it obviously doesn’t solve the abuse angle in this case.

However, there’s a problem with this approach. For one thing it’s a child safety measure yet many parents give their children phones for child safety too and these days most phones come with cameras. Is eliminating the possibility of inappropriate photos more important than knowing that your kids can call you for help? Given the relative rarity of these cases I suspect that being able to call is probably more important.

OK, so let’s just make photos of naked children illegal then. That’s easy, isn’t it? Not really because for one thing you’d need to arrest all the paedeatric doctors as, of course, they have textbooks containing photos of children, some of whom are naked. OK, so we can make an exception for doctors then. Well, I’m currently doing a child development course and next year will be doing one on human biology. Are you going to arrest students for having photos of children? Then there are the parents who drag out the cute photos of their little girl or boy in the bath and I’m sure that most parents have such photos these days. Finally, there’s the relatively new phenomena of sexting to consider. Somehow it doesn’t seem right for it to be illegal to take a photo of yourself, regardless of what age you might be at the time.

How many more exceptions will you need to make?

What we need to remember in all this is that it’s not the photos per se that are the issue. It’s the people who “get off” on seeing inappropriate photos of children and for them the Mothercare catalogue is their equivalent of Playboy.