Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘School’ Category

Although we’ve been at the Kip McGrath for a couple of months now, we’ve still not really gotten into the different way of operating it as a system.

So, for example when we found that one of the little guys was racing through a particular section of the homework we were thinking that they’d just up the number of sheets handed out which was the Kumon way of dealing with an easy section. However, in Kip McGrath it triggered a rethink about how best to deal with the issue for James.

What’s happening is that we’re trying him out for a couple of weeks on the spelling sheets a couple of levels above what he’s been doing and, for a week or two, been getting very bored with. Also, she’s had a run-through of a reading comprehension exercise with him with a view to maybe moving him on to that. She’s also starting to up the ante with the maths. Altogether, it’s a change that makes it more interesting for him which in turn should help his progress.

Interestingly, the course was basically changed to suit James rather than requiring him to plough on with work that he was finding boring. There’s also none of the sense of having to work outside the system as happened early on with James in Kumon as the Kip McGrath approach seems more aimed at getting the learning process working through whatever means are required and not getting too hung up on rigidly following “the system” as Kumon did.

When the school that our little guys go to was built it had a street running alongside the school wall so when the number of cars bringing kids increased, it was easy for the kids to get dropped off at the school gate and then go down that street.

Times have moved on somewhat since then though. That street and the one parallel to it where my granny lived have been demolished and replaced with a new housing development. Unfortunately, one of the aspects of the new development is that it’s built more in a courtyard style so neither of those two streets exist and instead there remains only the original street leading down to the school entrance which now is effectively a cul-de-sac.

Net effect? You’d have thought that it would have been obvious to the designers of the new development that creating a cul-de-sac where there previously was a way out was going to create problems and so it has. Every morning and afternoon that street is jammed with traffic going down to the end and attempting to turn.

What’s now happened is that the police have been called in to ensure that the school entrance isn’t blocked with cars and that nobody is parking over the new driveways. What should have happened is that the original exit street should have been preserved.

It’s about to get worse though as there are a couple of new housing developments just adjacent to that cul-de-sac and they’re all coming with little lay-bys for the residents. Naturally, they consider the lay-bys as theirs and don’t want the parents parking in them. The snag is that by the time those developments are complete that will leave nowhere to park at all for anyone but the residents. Somehow I suspect that’s going to cause major friction in the years to come.

Probably the biggest plus point of the Kumon is that you need to sit down five nights a week with the kids to get the homework done. It was, of course, the biggest minus point too as it’s a 365 day a year deal which meant that, in practice, one or other of the little guys threw up the head now and again and so did we. However, homework is important as it shows you how the kids are doing much more directly than any report from the teacher will do. Missing the twice weekly classes wasn’t a problem really as the teacher could hand out sheets to cover any absences on our part or indeed for her own holidays.

It’s quite different at Kip McGrath. For one thing the teacher is a teacher with quite a lot of years of experience. Thus she’s not tied to the Kip McGrath system quite so rigidly as is the case with Kumon. So, in our case, she’s doing a combination of the maths and English programmes each week and we didn’t have to choose between them as we thought at first we would have to do. It’s a 52 week per year system rather than a 365 day per year one so there’s one 80 minute class per week rather than the two 40 minute ones (20 mins per subject) for Kumon. We’ve not hit a holiday period so I don’t know how that works out but John missed a class two weeks ago and so had a “make-up” class last week. Homework isn’t nearly so structured although in practice it’s working out at around five nights a week split between some maths and some English for James.

Which one is better though? In terms of cash, Kumon is £50 a month per subject, Kip McGrath is around £100 so it’s more expensive if you’re only doing one subject. However, we were finding that for John his maths was getting so far ahead of his reading that he was getting to the point that he couldn’t do the maths because he couldn’t read the questions which basically forced us to do two subjects.

In terms of quality of education, Kip McGrath seems streets ahead. The highly repetitive nature of Kumon suits early maths really well though didn’t seem so good on the English. That repetitive nature was leading to a certain amount of boredom for the kids so we’d have been moving on in a year or two. It’s noticeable that very, very few Kumon kids were coming in with year 3 or 4 boxes so it would appear that 2 to 3 years is about the most that the majority of people stay with them. Having said that, Kip McGrath feels more like a 2 or 3 year max programme too in that most of the promo material seems to be aimed at getting kids to where they should be in the class. Now in our case, James needs that help at the moment but John is already where he should be so the Kip classes should be moving him ahead so we’ll be able to compare over the next year.

Will there be a problem with the school if you move the kids too far ahead? That’s something that was mentioned by the Kumon teacher when we enrolled. Some schools do have issues with kids who are well ahead of the rest of the class. The school they’re in at the moment were quite keen that we were helping both the little guys along and seem to have the same basic view as me ie that it’s much better to err on the side of being too far ahead. Having said that, I imagine that if at some point we find ourselves with the guys several years ahead of their class in maths or English that it could create some problems. However, I’m sure that it’s better to have problems like that than to have them well behind their class.

After a bit of arm twisting I managed to persuade Wendy to take up both an English and a maths class at school.

Although the primary school has organised them basically so that the parents attending can in turn help their children with the homework over the coming years, they’re at a much higher level than the kids will reach in that school with the highest level currently on offer going to GCSE equivalent. The Essential Skills classes that they’re doing come in two levels with the first starting at a very low level and it’s only the second level that gets to GCSE.

English was the most popular class going by those signing up for it last week and Wendy reckoned that there was a fairly full turnout this morning. She also reckons that there’ll be quite a dropout over the next few weeks as, by the sound of it, a fair number of those attending weren’t expecting to actually have to do much thinking. Having said that, high drop out rates are par for the course for open-entry courses with 40% being quite typical. That might seem like quite a high rate but there are all kinds of reasons for it and more than most apply to this course: there was little information in advance about course content, it’s open-entry and there was a lot of peer pressure to sign up.

The little information about the course meant that people could easily have expectations about the course which were wildly out of line from what it actually covers. For the English course, that probably means that a number of people will be expecting to read novels for the course but it’s a course about the language rather than the literature so they’ll not be reading novels at all. Being open-entry means that people who’ve had little or no effective schooling will be there along with those who’ve had quite a lot of effective schooling and that’s already causing problems with a small group who never learned that they need to keep quiet in class and particularly so when the teacher is interacting with another student. Finally, the peer pressure means that some people are there who don’t really want to be which will be causing problems too.

Worst of all though she’s got homework so that’s three lots of homework that I’ll need to check now?!?!?!

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.