Foreign Perspectives

Whilst we all think that we’d like to live in interesting times, of course such times are interesting because they are filled with the unexpected which is usually a sign of trouble.

Thus over the last couple of years we’ve had by far the most interesting time in global economics for many decades. That interest came in the form of banks and economies around the world collapsing and with the corresponding knock-on effect on the real world in terms of jobs lost, businesses closing, houses being repossessed and taxes rising. And it’s not over yet.

Throughout all that global bad news there have been untold numbers of individuals receiving their own bad news ranging from job losses through to families finding themselves out on the street due to reasons outside their control.

I’m sure that many people would prefer to opt for living in really boring times these days.

For guys cosmetics are a major minefield and one that they simple don’t even think of venturing into except around the time of Christmas or birthday presents and even then unless they’re handed a note, chances are that they’ll come back with the wrong thing.

That’s even for relatively simple stuff too. What on earth is night cream for instance? Why should it be different from day cream? When you read the descriptions there seems to be no really good reason for there to be a difference at all.

Of course the real reason for such things is that it allows for more potential marketing to be done. Thus any brand you can name puts out a whole range of stuff with different names largely so that they can sell more stuff.

In case you haven’t notices, the post-war baby boom began to hit retirement age about five years ago and the retirees will continue to rise in numbers for another ten to fifteen years.

This group has been one of the largest target markets since the 1960s and drives much of the marketing and product development spend that you’ll have seen over the last fifty years or so. Thus today we see things like face wrinkle cream hitting the shelves in quantities that would have been unheard of only ten years ago and all because this group are getting to the point where they need such things.

What’ll happen over the next twenty years as they retire will be a shift in marketing towards a much older age group than hitherto we’ve been used to. The cosmetic industry will have a field day naturally but then so will all kinds of medical aids companies and, of course, the financial services people will move to produce products aimed at a more mature market. No more will the example customer be a 30 year old: think 60 year old these days.

All being well this massive shift will let me buy that immortality pill at some point 🙂

One of the most unexpected pieces of news that we received was that John was behind target with his reading and that therefore he’s been recommended for the Special Educational Needs section.

I say unexpected because John has gone from a standing start last September to reading quite well books that are notionally in the P2 age range when he’s actually one of the youngest in the P1 class. Not only that but reading homework that was supposed to take anything up to 20 minutes was gone through pretty much as fast as he could turn the pages.

What’s actually happened is that he’s one of the few kids in the class who hadn’t gone to nursery school so couldn’t read before he started school. We did have a go at teaching him to read but found out that we were totally rubbish at it but in practice he was starting to teach himself to read by way of his little computer before he started school. That he was able to make a start on teaching himself to read shows that he shouldn’t be falling into the special needs category as it’s obviously much harder to begin to teach yourself to read than it is to be taught to read.

Now you might think that this shows the advantage of going to nursery school but all it shows is that it’s more school than nursery. Thanks to the extra couple of years of being full-time with me and Wendy he’s way ahead of the other kids in just about every other area you could name.

The other thing to note is that the target in school is markedly different from that in the books as it assumes that the kids have been in nursery school for a couple of years. In reality the target shouldn’t be changed: there’s an appropriate level of achievement to be reached at the end of P1 and it shouldn’t be trying to account for differences in the starting point.

Anyway, as a consequence of this we’re getting him going on the Kumon reading programme over the summer which seems quite likely to have him ahead of the target by the end of the summer. As it is, his maths level is somewhere in the P3 level.

Quite how the infant school that our little guys go to have managed these over the last couple of weeks is a mystery.

Whilst the French school DVD production of two years back was seriously impressive (three first prizes at the Strasbourg international film festival no less!), that allowed the teachers lots of retakes. The productions of last week and this were live which is always harder on everyone.

To be fair they weren’t 100% flawless but considering that they’d only 5 and 7 year olds to work with they were darned impressive nonetheless.

Last week it was James and Billy no buzz, this week it was the P1 extravaganza which had an exotic animal theme. Naturally just about all concerned have photos and/or videos to blackmail their youngsters with in years to come.