Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

After booking our day-trip to Glasgow, a promotion for a day-trip to Ayr popped up: £16 for the four of us instead of the usual “cheap-rate” of £40 (or £30 if you book in the Stenaline offices). I’ve passed through Ayr a number of times over the years but never stopped to look around so I hadn’t a clue what there was to see there but at £16 you can’t really go wrong, so we booked it.

As with all day-trips involving any kind of boat or plane, there’s an early start. In this case, you’ve to be there no later than 7am and, of course, allowing for parking and whatnot that really means more like 6.45am. The ship doesn’t depart ’til 7.30 but the cheap trips over the holiday period are very popular so there was quite a line to checkin and it was quite a crowded trip. Arrival in Cairnryan is a little before 10am.

The ship was the quite nice Superfast, although with the trip taking almost 2.5 hours, it didn’t seem that fast. Food in the restaurant isn’t cheap but the prices aren’t too over the top. It’s best to grab a seat as soon as you get on as the available seats are taken up really quickly on the more crowded crossings. There’s the usual arcade games and small cinema (aimed mainly at the kids) with a spa along with assorted treatments for the adults. They’ve a small number of suites (for up to five people) which, at £20, might be worth it after a tiring day though, of course, you’ll only have use of it for a couple of hours.

The two coaches should have been setting off not much after 10 with arrival in Ayr scheduled for 11.15am. However, in practice, the coaches waited around for no apparent reason so we didn’t get into Ayr until more like 11.45 which, together with an earlier than scheduled departure shortened our time there by quite a bit. The coaches are listed as dropping off at the Burns statue but actually drop off near the Stagecoach bus station. That doesn’t really make a lot of difference if you’re only walking around the town but if you want to take a side-trip it is handier to be beside the bus station.

What’s to see? It’s a fairly pretty seaside town with lots of Georgian architecture, quite a number of bridges and a reasonable number of fairly historic buildings (mostly converted to new uses). The narrow streets are quite pleasant to stroll around. On the beach there’s a large childrens’ playground (which could do with a fair bit of maintenance) with an adjoining indoor children’s entertainment centre (about £5 for two hours, depending on age, weekday/weekend/holiday).

Slightly outside the town there are:

1. The Robert Burns museum,  which you can get to easily enough by bus. It costs about £20 for a family and seems to include quite a bit to interest for a couple of hours.
2. The Heads of Ayr Farm Park, seems to have something for everyone and seems easy enough to get to by bus. You’d need to allow a fair chunk of the day to get best value (about £40 for a family).

Catering-wise, the town is well served with lots of decent quality but fairly cheap restaurants all around the town.

The Up series has moved on to look at the 56 year old participants and what’s most interesting is, as always, the enduring influence that the various parents have had on their offspring.

What’s less obvious is how significant that parental support early on had. It was fairly obvious that the upper class kids would end up doing quite well but that’s not necessarily a function of them being upper class but rather that their parents were able to provide a level of support that was more difficult to provide for the less well off parents. Moreover, in the social circles in which they moved, there was the expectation that one would work hard at school, in university and in one’s life thereafter.

The effect of parental support is much more clearly seen in the different lives of Tony and Nick. Although they both started off in very much working class homes (Tony in London, Nick in the country), their lives have turned out quite differently. Where they are now and how they got there seems to reflect the different type of ambitions that their parents supported so many years ago. Nick basically started with what might be termed working-class ambitions (ie he concentrated on getting a particular job) whereas Nick looked beyond that and is now a professor in an American university (ie he concentrated on what might be possible if he worked hard).

The parents aren’t involved in the series but it seems likely that the parents of both Tony and Nick had pressure from friends and family to have their respective children stick to working-class ambitions. Nick’s parents rose above that and so did their son.

Channel 4’s series Child Genius gives an interesting behind the scenes look at how parents prepare their children for the Child Genius competition.

Taken as read is that all the children involved have above average ability or at least if you didn’t see the behind the scenes work you would assume that was the case. However, it’s far from clear cut given the sheer quantity of work that some of their parents put into their children. With the level of work that some of the parents have been putting in, even an average child could be expected to perform quite well.

For example, take the spelling tests. Yes, it will certainly help to have a great memory, but in reality a lot of the spelling of the words comes down to rote learning of the “big words” in the dictionary. Moreover, you can concentrate on those words with irregular spellings as those following the rules are easy to spell. Granted, it would be quite a boring task to learn those words in isolation but it doesn’t require a genius to do it nor is it necessarily a test of genius to do it.

The maths tests surely require genius, don’t they? Well, if they were maths, they might do but they aren’t maths – they are purely arithmetical tests. Therefore, genius isn’t required. What is required, in some cases, is an ability to calculate quickly in one’s head which is a combination of practice and knowledge of the various tricks to simplify calculations.

Surely it’s clear that, say, the pianist is a genius? Well, no, that’s not clear either. What is clear is that he’s put an awful lot of time into practising his music but it’s not clear that an average child couldn’t do the same if they devoted a similar amount of time to the task.

However, the craziest parents are the two psychologists who seem to be devoting their lives to two to one extremely intensive tutoring. On the assumption that the psychological methods they are using actually work, then applying them at that intensity to pretty much any child would easily get them into the competition. Their tutoring appears to be so intense that it raises the question as to whether their daughter would be able to cope in a normal teaching environment.

Now that I’ve pulled together most (not even all!) of the material on which I was planning on basing the book on, I find that I’ve way too much. The first cut was nearly 400,000 words but ruthless weeding has taken that down to a mere 170,000 although that’s before I’ve started to collect together some reference information which will likely add another 50k words or so.

In that the collection process could take forever, I’ve decided to make a small start on the writing more as a trial run to see just how much of the material that I have would fit into the book format. So far, it looks like there won’t be a whole lot taken piecemeal and it’s more likely to be a reference for the material that I’ll be writing for the book. That should make the book fresher than it otherwise would have been which I’m sure is a good thing.

Still, at least I’ve made a start now.

We’ve been meaning to settle down to write our book for years now but have only just gotten going properly on the initial stages of it over the last week or so.

Our working title is that of the original incarnation of this blog: Living in France without a TV crew. We figured that we needed at least a working title to focus our attention on what material would go into the book and what wasn’t really that relevant.

We’ve even got a very broad provisional structure:

1. Choosing a place in France, of which we’ve nothing formally written yet;
2. Moving in which’ll likely draw mainly on the articles here from 2004-2005;
3. Some chapters looking in more detail at various aspects eg learning the language, education, etc.;
4. Moving back, which raised more issues than you’d expect.

To see what we’d already written, I’ve been pulling together the relevant posts from 2004 through to 2009 which, even after loads of deleting, amounts to 322 pages and 180,000 words ie we’ve loads to work with.