Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

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.

In the midst of school terms, you can depend on traffic jams each day at 9am and from before 3pm through to around 4pm followed by a minor lull before the next traffic jam gets going around 5pm.

It’s radically different over the summer. Gone is that 9am traffic jam and, around here anyway, the jam kicks in around 30 minutes earlier and presumably is a bit worse as you’ve got the normal work traffic plus the people who’d have been on the road after dropping off the kids. Thankfully, the 3pm-4pm peak is gone though the latter jam also seems to be that much worse as the school pickup people are also on the road in the latter slot.

The plus point for me is that my earlier start means that the flexi time clocks up quite a bit over the summer which in turn means that I can take an extra couple of days off over that period. That’s if I stick to my normal school-run wake-up time and don’t start lying in, of course.

Every year in Northern Ireland, there’s a Somme commemoration parade on the evening of the first of July.

It’s not such a major production as the parades on the 12th and, since it’s not on a public holiday, it has to be in the evening. Net effect of all that is that it’s a simple round-trip parade with none of the speeches that you get on the 12th day in the “field” and because of that it’s quite a bit shorter. That said, every year it seems to throw a number of people who aren’t expecting roads to be closed along the route with the loop format tending to strand a number of cars in the middle for 20-30 minutes.

In Belfast, the parade starts and finishes around Templemore Avenue, moving along Beersbridge Road, turning up the Bloomfield Road (with the road-works stopped for the day for the second year in a row), then on the North Road, taking a diversion along Kirkliston before heading down the Newtownards Road to the starting point.Since it’s a Somme commemoration, a number of those in the bands or lodges taking part dress in period costume.

The one earlier in the week was surprisingly short. In years gone by, it’s run for over an hour but it seemed to be more like 40 minutes this time around. That wasn’t particularly due to there being fewer bands or lodges but that they seemed much more organised this year and there were none of the regular stops due to other bands or lodges grinding to a halt. It was also a relatively late start and it was starting to get dark towards the half-way mark.