Foreign Perspectives

Way back in May we had the idea of giving the Kumon a bit of a boost over the summer months. After all, the kids wouldn’t be tired after a day at school and we’d have more time to fit in the work. So, we added the other subject for each of them. Thus, James started maths and John started English.

What we hadn’t allowed for was that although they’d not be at school all day, they’d be tired out from doing holiday things. So rather than plugging away with ten pages of each subject they’ve mostly been doing five of each with perhaps a few weeks at the full rate on one of the subjects.

Despite that slower pace, both of them have made quite a bit of progress over the summer months. John is still ploughing on with 100% marks on his maths and, after a slow start, has just about completed a level in the English. James has continued to pick up speed on the English and is getting into the swing of the maths too.

Now we have the problem as to what to do when they restart school. We could continue on with both subjects but somehow I don’t think that’ll work too well when they’ve school homeworks to contend with as well. What we’re going to do is to continue on into September and see how it goes before deciding what to do over the remainder of the school year.

Although this is only one of the short courses it’s one of my key ones as I’m using it as a trial to see if I can remember any of my A-level chemistry from years ago. Moreover, it’s a kind of bridging course with mostly chemistry but bits of biology too.

It’s my very first course with one of the famous Open University “kits”, in this case a little kit to build models of molecules. It looks like it’ll be a lot of fun so I’ve hidden it from the kids. Aside from that there’s the usual check list and course text plus a couple of audio CDs which supposedly no longer included with this course.

The plan is that I put this to the one side and don’t look at it ’til I’ve the astronomy exam out of the way but I suspect that I’ll have a peek at it before then. For sure I need to get the three remaining TMAs out of the way first though as two are due in a few weeks time and the other way too close to the astronomy exam to even think about not doing it now.

Somehow or other I seem to have almost completed reading through the course books for S103 and have just started into the final one for now which is on fossils and geology generally. Surprisingly I’m finding it very interesting and it has me thinking about going for the final run of the fossils short course over Christmas.

One thing that you don’t see too much of are online schools or at least those of the children type schools as, of course, there are untold numbers of management schools around.

For a whole bunch of reasons we’d be quite interested were there to be a truly workable online school but, so far, their remit seems to be confined to university level schools. Quite why that is, is presumably down to the relatively low numbers of parents who go in for home schooling as one assumes that they’d be amongst the first group to give online schooling a go for their children.

Oh well, perhaps one day such a thing will turn up.

Stories like the 30k couple with 11 kids are appearing with increasing regularity in the press these days and, as usual, it’s collected the expected collection of comments expressing various degrees of indignation that these people feel that the state (ie us) should pay them to look after their kids full-time.

But, why would they bother to look for work if they were getting 30k coming in for doing nothing? Actually, it’s somewhat more than that as there’s the 15k to add on for the house and together that’s equivalent to a pre-tax salary of at least £60,000. Even with the best will in the world to find work, they’d need great qualifications to find a job paying anything like that level anywhere in the country. Thus, they can quite validly say to the benefits office that they are unable to find suitable work.

As most of these people say, it’s not their fault that they’re entitled to so much. Despite the comments that such cases always attract, they are quite correct once they’ve reached the situation of having double digit numbers of children. That’s not to say that it’s right that they should be entitled to so much though because it just isn’t. Where the benefits system falls down with people like this is that it’s designed for reasonable people who are expected to have the intention to behave in a reasonable way in regards to their family, looking for work, etc. Reasonable people don’t expect other people to pay for enormous families but there is no limitation in the rules that says “five is enough” or anything similar. Thus, in principle, you could have a family with, say, 20 kids pocketing over £100,000 and perhaps there is such a family out there.

How many would be “enough” children though? Would it be, say, three because that’s just over the average for the country? That seems a reasonable point to start reducing benefits for numbers above that. However, what do you do with someone like Miss Shepherd (the case mentioned above) who has had the children to three different fathers? You might think that would be difficult to deal with but it’s not really if you allocate the “reasonable number” of kids to each parent ie not “three per family” but “1 1/2 per parent” so you could quite easily allocate the allowances.

Whatever way such changes come in, as they surely must do, there are going to be screams from those benefiting from all that money now. It’s never going to be easy to get such people to change their attitudes because they’ve built up over such a long period but the “someone else can pay” attitude needs to get stamped out and soon.

One thing that many country park type places seem to have in common is that they work to what seems to be quite a tight timetable.

Thus you’ll find on a sunny day if you’ve not found a parking space by 1pm or so then you can pretty much forget it until after 3pm when it quite suddenly becomes very easy to find a space. The reason is, of course, largely down to the lunchtime BBQ that’s very common in the summer and, by and large, it doesn’t matter a whole lot which day of the week it is although, on the whole, it’s a more mummy crowd during the week and a more equal mix at the weekend.

But what’s confusing is that it seems to happen in all the parks, or at least all those that we go to. We went to the relatively new for us Peaklands Park on Sunday and found the same thing. Arriving around 1pm the car park was relatively empty but seeing as it was nice we thought we’d nip out around 2pm to pick up a heap of BBQ stuff, finding the car park completely full and cars parked right out to the main road. Coming back little more than 40 minutes later there were quite a lot of spaces. When we’d to nip back out to the car a little after 3pm there were loads of spaces and by 5pm it was almost empty.

It wasn’t even that the park activities had closed down at 3pm as it’s basically a country park so the only activity is the delightful (and, for a change, good value) little train which goes on to just after 5pm.

Still, if you’d like a park relatively free of people, 3pm or later seems the time to go.