Foreign Perspectives

The P7 class in James’ primary school stop a couple of weeks before the rest of the school in June so he’s only got a few weeks left to go now.

As expected, they’re not really teaching them anything now as they’ve done their bit and it’s the secondary schools which will take the kids on further now. That’s shame in some ways as it would be useful to do some final preparations of them for their new schools as it’s going to be quite a jolt to the system for quite a number of the kids.

At the moment, the homeworks have disappeared and in their place is “the project” which is the final piece of work that they’ll do in primary school. They’ve a totally free choice of subject for the first time ever which I’m sure has left a fair number of kids and their parents floundering. After all, few people would be told to go and do a project – they’d have at least a subject to work with.

Anyway, we’ve talked James into doing his on his school life in France which is probably about ideal as it both gives him a decent subject to work with and it will also give him something to remember his time in France too.

In school, it’s the final assembly and play that the P7 kids are working on with just three weeks to go before the performance. They’re not having a prom this year but instead have a fun day the week after they officially leave primary school. That’s thanks to a vote that the kids were offered months ago, the result of which didn’t go down too well with a number of the parents who were gearing up to top last year’s (Hummers, stretch limos, and little girls made up like stars seemed a bit much for a primary school).

We’re delighted to have James going to what was the favourite school of all of us – Campbell College.

Despite scraping around to find logical reasons to justify the choice to the primary school principal, quite honestly we put it at the top of our list simply because it just felt nice and was somewhere that we all felt at home. As far as logic goes, they offer all the subjects that James is interested in academically, he was fired up by a number of the after school activities and the kids all knew what they were talking about in the demonstrations at the open day.

Although it’s a boys only school, that had nothing to do with our initial reason to go there. However, it does make quite a difference. As the principal said at one of the open days, the school is totally aimed at encouraging boys in everything that they do. Thus, the library is packed with books that boys like to read and the school activities are completely aimed at boys. Less obvious is that in a boys only environment, the boys don’t get turned off by “girly” subjects and activities so the home economics department turned out quite an attractive selection of delights on the open night and rather than having a choir with the typical 115 girls and five boys, it has a choir of 120 boys.

It might seem like a thing all schools would do but everyone (kids, teachers and the former alumni) at the open day took an interest in us and behaved as though we’d be enrolling James. There was none of the “we’re probably wasting our time” attitude that came across in many schools. I can appreciate that in many of the schools, the number of applications can far exceed the number enrolled (eg Lagan gets around 300 applications for 200 places) but behaving as though we would be enrolling in due course really made a big difference to our impression of the school. Even in the trivial interactions, it felt like James was being treated as a pupil there, if only for an afternoon and I guess that feeling of belonging is why it ended up at the top of our list.

One of the things that we wanted to do in each of the schools after the open day was to just have a wander around and rather than being slung out at the end of the open day, as happened in almost all of the schools, we were welcome to have that wander and had a long chat with one of the former pupils too. But the not being slung out was, for us, just another part of the welcoming attitude – “sure, it’s just an open day, but think of yourself as a pupil here if only for today”. Former pupils being there was a nice touch too, giving a connection to the parents as well as to the potential pupils.

On the open days with them, we never felt like they were just doing an open day because that’s what schools do these days but rather that they were showcasing the school – “hey, look at how great our school is”. That’s how it should be, but even among a number of the other excellent schools that we went to, that wasn’t the case and in many cases it felt that an open day was just another chore to do.

The reports on the school are a bit negative on the old class rooms but that’s one of the aspects that makes it feel like a school rather than a modern office block that some of the new build schools feel like. To us, I think that was part of the attraction. In too many cases, the thinking seems to be that a new school building will sort out the school but a school is the teachers and pupils, not the buildings. It was our interactions with the people that encouraged us to put Campbell at the top of our list.

James did the transfer tests at Campbell which was an interesting experience. To be honest, we only chose Campbell for the tests as it was handy for parking and they did both AQE and GL. However, even there, their care towards the pupils was very apparent as they didn’t just dump the kids in a sports hall for the tests as happens elsewhere but put them in proper classrooms and gave us all kinds of advice as to how to make sure that they were relaxed on the day. They didn’t have to do that but it was yet another aspect that appealed to us.

Anyway, we’re delighted that James can treat Campbell as home now and I hope that he can put across that feeling to some other kids out there when he participates in future open days.

The selection process for secondary (or post-primary as they call it) schools in Northern Ireland can be quite a stressful one.

To begin with there are essentially seven types of school to choose from. First, there’s the state school system (largely Protestant) and the Catholic school system (largely, but not exclusively, Catholic), both of which come in high school and grammar school varieties. Then there are the integrated schools which come in high school, grammar school and mixed varieties. Finally, there are a few private or semi-private schools which are mainly a mix of grammar and non-selective with fees ranging from around £500 to £2500 depending on the school and whether you consider “voluntary” contributions to actually be mandatory (which, largely, they are).

In reality, the number of schools is somewhat thinned out due to geography unless you want to live a really complicated life. Thus, in our case, there are within sensible striking distance two non-selective state schools, two state grammar schools, two Catholic grammar schools, two integrated schools and three private/semi-private schools. That’s rather a lot to attempt to visit and in practice we ended up going to see nine of them which is still quite a lot and so we ended up spreading the visits over two years. The two we didn’t bother with were knocked out for us as, frankly, they are rubbish schools and everyone knows that.

Of those that we did visit, some were very easy to eliminate from consideration as we (ie us and the little guy) just didn’t find them appealing. Surprisingly, this included Inst (RBAI) which, on the face of it, seems an excellent school but we just didn’t particularly like it. That was also the case with Wellington though with that we were also none too impressed with the knowledge of the pupils on the open day. Ashfield bit the dust as it has an extremely narrow range of subjects – seemingly only those that are absolutely essential (eg one foreign language because they’re required to teach one).

Which left us with six and there’s only room for five on the form. In practice, you have to put one or two non-selective schools on the list in case the transfer test results don’t come out as you’d hoped but that’s not necessarily so easy a thing to do as the normal default school in our case would be Ashfield which states that you will only get accepted if you put them first or second on the form and this year it needed to be first as they appear to have had a bit of a run of applications.

Anyway, because of the need to put at least one non-selective school on the list, we had to drop Methody which was really nice and would have been third or fourth on our list otherwise. It’s a bit further down largely down to the logistics of getting the little guy there in the mornings and it would have been higher otherwise.

First place went to my old school simply because of that. My parents didn’t have the chance to do the open day experience that we did and I’m not sure that I’d have picked it out of the range of schools that we’ve seen. So it worked out quite well that he didn’t get that but rather the second on the list which in reality was our first choice. We’d have been equally pleased with our third choice which was a thoroughly impressive school full of very knowledgeable pupils on the open day. Fourth choice was the integrated Lagan College which looks like it will one day become one of the great schools but it’s not quite there yet (it’s pretty good at the moment). We could have lived with our fifth choice, Priory College, but wouldn’t have been over the moon with it.

One thing that always amazes me is that parents put down schools that they don’t like at all. This year is no exception if the Facebook comments of some pupils are anything to go by and I think a lot of tears have been shed on Saturday when the school selection letters turned up because of that. Why on earth would anyone put down a school that they know their child will hate? The applications to failing schools also confuse me – why do people apply to schools that are failing so badly that their closure is even announced in the information booklet that all parents get? The zero ambition of some parents is also sad with some really bright kids not getting to even try for a grammar school and instead ending up in also-ran schools when they could have done so much better.

What’s also sad, is how little thought some parents put into choosing which schools they put on their list. Many will only know of the school that they went to but these days there’s heaps of information about schools and they all have open nights. We spent ages pouring over the booklets that are sent out to P7 parents (and you can either download them or ask the primary school for them in P6 as we did). Our “short” list of nine took us two years to get through and we went to our favoured schools at least twice each. Yes, it did take a lot of time and effort but it’s going to be the school that James will be in for the next seven years and one that’ll make a big difference in his future.

This is around the mid-point of the infectious disease (SK320) course so it seems a good time to do a review of the course so far.

It’s one of the new-style online courses so there are no books with it, or rather there are are no formally printed and bound books. What you get is a DVD about a month ahead of the course start which contains PDFs of all the texts from the course, which you can download in PDF, ePub and Word formats when the course officially starts in February. The videos embedded in the ePub files are also recorded on the DVD but as separate FLV and MP4 files.

When it gets going, there are quite a number of online tutorials (none face to face) with getting on for one a week initially. All reasonably short at one hour and easy enough to follow. Recordings of these are made available as MP4 with the presentations usually as PDFs but sometimes as Powerpoint files as well. You can order a printed copy of the course materials which runs to around 1400 A4 pages and costs about £110 for colour.

Block 1 starts off very easy but quickly gets into a range of different diseases with block 2 looking at how the immune system deals with them and block 3 considering public health aspects. There seems to be a massive amount of different processes to learn but I’ve not started the revision yet.

Assessment is via four TMAs, 2 iCMAs and an exam. As is usual these days, you just need to pass the assignments and your grade is solely dependent on the exam. The first TMA is a totally trivial one that most people could expect to get close to 100% with, the next two are structured like the exam with the final one being a research based topic. As usual, the iCMAs seem to be very detailed and you need to refer to the texts to answer the questions; they count for 12% and 10% respectively.

It’s quite an interesting course to follow along, so far anyway, but sometimes gets into long stretches of pathways as S377 did.

At one stage I was running nearly 6 weeks ahead of the course so it’s an easy one to get ahead with but equally it’s easy to drop behind with as the units are very variable in length so it’s difficult to judge just how much reading you have to do.

This is a peculiar little course in many ways being a mix of history and maths, but interesting throughout.

It’s based around the TV series The Story of Maths that the BBC put out a few years ago along with the accompanying book. Both these are tied together with the course guide that’s entirely online these days. Well, it calls itself a course guide but in reality it is the maths portion of the course as it goes through the detail of the various mathematical techniques from counting in ancient Egypt to the developments in the late 20th century. The explanations begin quite detailed but as it approaches the end of the 20th century, the detail drops away in line with the increasing complexity and so it’s more of a story of arithmetic rather than a complete story of maths.

The TV series itself becomes a little peculiar towards the end too. It starts off by visiting the various spots where the mathematical techniques were developed so they’re off to Egypt and Babylon in the early segments but carrying that approach on through to late 20th century maths means that it ends up going to visit the childhood homes of various mathematicians and has one very strange segment where the presenter tries to track down a particularly reclusive Russian mathematician. Some of the maths is touched on but you’d need either the course guide or the book to follow it and the series is more to set the historical background.

The assessment of the maths is via two online multiple choice assignments which have questions ranging from Egyptian counting through to questions covering parts of more recent mathematics. Although there are a few multiple choice historical questions in the online quizzes, the main assessment of the history is via two short essays written at the end of the course.

The book seems to be mainly there as support for the historical side of things and in particular for the essays at the end of the course so I’ve not used that yet as it’s been the maths that I’ve been working on mainly.

Quite a nice little course that neatly integrates the maths and the history so it’s a shame that this is another one of the Open University courses that’s dying this year.