Foreign Perspectives

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 oddities of Northern Ireland is that the almost total lack of cross-over between the Scottish descent population and the Irish descent population imeans that complete lack of comprehension in some areas can still exist even now.

For instance, something like seven or eight years ago a colleague in work happened to mention that he was sure I was wondering why he was wearing a poppy. Frankly I’d never even given it a second thought as it was a commonplace thing in that it was in the period just coming up to the November 11th Remembrance Day when, of course, wearing poppies is fairly common. In fact it wasn’t until some time later that I found out that the poppy was considered by Republicans as a British symbol and therefore political thus something that he “shouldn’t” be wearing since he was a Catholic. I’m sure that I’m not the only one from the Scottish descent community who simply couldn’t understand this reasoning at all.

However, just a few days ago Wendy received this as a final statement on a comment on her blog “And for the record, Northern Irish people are not British.”. Well, actually as far as those of us of Scottish descent goes I don’t think anyone even considered that there was such a thing as “Northern Irish” and actually we ARE British (as indeed, at least legally, are those born in Northern Ireland who consider themselves Irish). It seems peculiar that someone living in Belfast could possibly think that nobody in Northern Ireland was British these days, but there you go.

When a show has been running for a while it generally needs a bit of a refresh to keep the viewers interested but in a change to this approach Big Brother has largely kept the same format but seems to have gone for a different approach in selecting the house mates this time around.

The relative balance from previous shows seems now to have been thrown out and instead what we have are essentially a collection of weirdos which, so far, doesn’t seem to be working overly well if Wendy’s reactions are anything to go by.

Now, I’ll grant you that the potential contestants applying to appear have also had to up the ante each year with their weirdness. After all, after a few years it take something really off the wall to attract the interest of the selection panel. Thus everyone seems to have tried to outdo everyone else in weirdness from names to lifestyles.

Is it going to end up being an interesting show though? Well, just about every random collection of people thrown together do tend to mesh after a while so this group will be no different and perhaps the very different viewpoints this time around will make it that little bit more interesting as the show gets underway.

Seemingly without fail, the social services people lurch from one extreme to another in how they treat cases.

Whilst they obviously failed Baby P very badly, they’re now in the process of going out of their way to fail the babies of Mr & Mrs N. Thanks to a joke remark from Mrs N it seems that the social services feel that the best thing to happen is that her children should be put up for adoption.

Oh, it’s not just the off-hand comment she made, of course. There’s the matter of her being angry that social services took her children from her so she clearly has anger issues. Why were they taken into care? That’s because the first time parents were having difficulty in looking after the premature twins. Well, if that’s the reason then I think that the social services people would be best to take ALL babies born to first-timers into care. What first-time parent could honestly say that they didn’t have trouble looking after their children in the early days?

Of course, as with Baby P, it’s the children that are getting the worst of this. In the critical early days after birth the twins only get to see their parents for ten hours a WEEK. That’s not nearly enough to establish a firm attachment and will almost certainly affect their later development.

Sure parents won’t be perfect carers at the off. How could they be? But they’re almost always the best possible carers that a newborn will ever have. It’s not right for social services to exercise this draconian power with such impunity. One hopes that disciplinary action will ensue WHEN they lose the case over this.