Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘School’ Category

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.

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.

Both the little guys are very happy that they’ve not received any homework from their new school but I think that they’re about to be disappointed on that score.

Aside from that, John still isn’t too happy with the school. It’s probably the biggest change for him as the previous school was run very much as a creche for older children rather than a school as such. The new one is very much a school rather than a creche which will likely mean more of a feeling of school work for him rather than of play.

James isn’t so bad at the moment as at the last school he ended up quite overloaded with teachers and he hasn’t gotten into that treadmill aspect in this school yet.

We’ll see more of how they’re doing in a week or so when we’ve the first official meeting with the teachers.

We’re not quite fully back into the swing of the school run yet as we have yet to adjust to the different route to the new school though we managed to get there on time today for a change.

The kids are fully into their new school uniform now with the bags properly full of the appropriate things for school rather than the accumulated junk that they had acquired over the course of the previous school year. James seems content enough which I suspect is mainly down to him knowing that he’d have to go to a new school anyway. John still isn’t too happy about the change so it’ll likely be another week or two before he adjusts.

It’s a little strange for me too with the kids going to my old school. Although it’s been 39 years since I was there it hasn’t changed a whole lot. They’ve updated the entrance and the desks aren’t the little school desks any more but the biggest practical changes are that they boys don’t wear short trousers now and there’s a roof on the toilets.

Parking-wise we can’t use the old parking space as my granny’s street was demolished 10 years ago and replaced with a totally different arrangement of housing which has messed up everyone as it’s no longer possible to swing down the street and there’s a bit of dodgy three point turns required every morning and afternoon these days.

We set out for there this morning and even skipped out on the tailback into Ballycastle by going down a side road as soon as we reached the end of the traffic jam so were pretty much right in the thick of it at the off.

The problem was that “in the thick of it” meant that we could see just how packed the crowds were before we needed to decide on car parking. Way too packed to make it any kind of a pleasurable visit so instead we changed tack and had a nice BBQ along the coast road and had the BBQ area pretty much to ourselves the whole time. Much nicer than packed solid into a mass of people.

The problem with the Auld Lammas Fair is that it was pretty much at full capacity a few years ago yet there are lots more people in Northern Ireland these days and so it looks very much over capacity now. Time for a change to add a few days to it and spread the crowds over a longer period I think.

Anyway, tomorrow is back to school day for the little guys (though John is feeling poorly so perhaps not for him). That means hunting out the uniform (done), labelling it (not done yet), trying to remember where the school bags were dumped a couple of months ago and getting back into the buying something for their snack.