Smithology

You know how I sometimes go on in this blog about how I want Sol to mix with a diversity of people and not be locked into the mindset of valuing wealth above all things and being a snob? Well recently we’ve had a few social engagement that have really challenged that whole notion. It’s not just yesterdays morning tea during which our guests disclosed to us that they’ve had court orders against them from the state child protection system, who claim that the whole thing was a bungle and they’re totally innocent even while their children display some telltale signs of exposure to violent parenting, it’s not just that.

It’s not the way Sol made a friend at the park who I pushed on the swing and we later found out he was on a contact visit with his Mum after being removed by DHS because his parents are druggies.

Maybe the clincher is the kid who adopted Sol today and came over to play with him. As we ate lunch, he told us all about the day his Dad was made to go away because he was an al-caw-holic and he got really mad at mum and his sisters so she got a stick and poked him in the balls. Holy crap, we couldn’t change the subject fast enough!

Our impression of country Victoria after just a couple of weeks is that it’s the place where all the druggies, pedophiles and wife beaters come to get away from it all.

Maybe we’ll make some nice friends at school tomorrow – but at this rate I think I’ll be doing mandatory police checks before any after school play dates are entered into.

Uncategorized fatherhood, sale

Just as we are gearing up for Sol’s first day of school and talking to friends who’ve sent their kids to prep this week, the government has launched myschool.com.au, a website for benchmarking schools. The idea of the site is to just provide information for parents that will help them make decisions about what school they send their kids to (those that have a choice) but there are many concerns about the way this information can be abused or mislead parents who just look at the numbers without an understanding of the nature of statistics.

I’ve been reading The Memes of Production – Transparency and Equity at MySchool and specifically section 5 of the linked paper critiquing the government’s approach to education.

In short, the argument against this system is that it makes us compare schools based on a narrow set of assessments that can be manipulated ie. schools can just target themselves at these assessments to the detriment of other important qualities like having a positive school community – it encourages short sighted thinking. It doesn’t measure the actual quality of the teaching, only the results of the students which vary wildly with the demographic involved. It will be used as a stick to beat schools with ie. bad schools will have their head staff sacked while good schools will get more resources – this amounts to poor areas getting shafted and rich areas getting the good stuff.

I checked out Richlands East in Inala, it has mostly red bars, an ICSEA of 804 (where the range is 900-1100) and 20% indigenous. Obviously the headmaster here should be shot because he/she is crap. Their website says the school values creating a safe learning environment – in other words, the kids here are struggling with family violence, entrenched poverty and racial tensions in the community. What is the federal government going to do about that? In this case I don’t think myschool is going to make a difference, everyone knows who goes to this school. The school for it’s part, promotes a positive learning experience, embracing diversity and enhancing cultural identity, the success of which is not measured by ACARA but is arguably of long term educational benefit for this community.

UPDATE:
I also talked to Steph this morning about our local school and we discussed how it is an apparent success having gone from a bad reputation and having bad results just a few years ago compared to today where it has a good reputation and scores well on My School. Yet we’ve also heard that one way the school principle achieved this was through being tough on parents of under-performing children and possibly and allegedly driving them off to other schools. It is interesting that other previously good state schools in the area have had a decline in the same period. Could it be that our school has improved its benchmarks simply by expelling the students that were bringing it down? That’s good for the remaining students and the school but there is a huge moral issue right there.

I think My School is a fascinating website and it will be really interesting to see how this information affects things if at all but I can’t see how it could have a positive impact: it will just make elite schools more elite, make poor communities more ashamed and increase gaming of the figures. I support making this information available but I’d like to see a more positive approach than just naming and shaming.

As for my family, I’m trying to be even handed about all these issues: Sol starts school next week at a public school which offers a program tailored for students at the younger end of the age cutoff that would be socially behind their peers in a standard prep class. After this year, we’ll decide whether to leave him at that school or move him. In choosing a school, I’m looking at the resources of the school, the culture of the school, the peer group in terms of whether his friends will be a positive influence (when I say I’m thinking about his peer group, I’m considering that I want him to understand diversity and value individual virtues over social status and wealth as social determinants ie. I don’t want him to be a snob) and probably now will look at the My School results. However, I strongly believe his experience of school has to be fun and I’ll be doing my best to encourage him to have fun. I see my participation in his education as just as important as the school he goes to.

But I’ll still probably agonise about all this for the rest of my life anyway…

Uncategorized education, fatherhood

It’s Australia Day eve and the kids are asleep, Steph is watching The Mentalist just because it’s on and I’ve just uploaded the second episode of The Adventures of Flossy and Sol in which we discuss the town of Sale, Victoria.

View at Youtube.com

Notes:

Music is by You Am I: The Applecross Wing Commander from the Hi Fi Way album.

This episode marks my first use of iMovie 9’s greenscreen effect for the title stop motion sequence in which we make some little paper roulettes fly by. I used a small green sheet and some green cardboard which was a slightly different shade and you can see it pretty easily. I also had trouble wrestling a freeze frame of the green screened clip so ended up importing a still which iMovie rendered as a different colour blue. In short, while you can do greenscreen in iMovie 9, you have very little control and it turns out greenscreen needs very careful lighting to avoid shadows and also I probably should have used paint and used the exact same colour on everything.

Last year we bought a harddisk video camera and looking at footage from it here, it looks very blurry and over compressed. I’m not sure if it’s a fault with the camera, the Mac or if it’s just that the camera has always been poor quality – I think it is the latter. It is a pretty low end camera but I was expecting better – my iPhone gives better quality video!

Uncategorized fatherhood, sale, the adventures of flossy and sol

I was just reading the latest ABC news coverage of what seems to be a growing awareness of a child protection crisis in this country.

From my small knowledge of child protection issues, I can see that child abuse cases are an indicator of the health of our society in general being linked with family violence, drug and alcohol abuse and just poverty. So what all these reports are really telling us is that Australia’s underclass is growing in numbers and probably snowballing as todays victims grow up to become perpetrators of abuse on the next generation.

I believe this is the legacy of Australia’s economic boom times over the last ten to fifteen years. Many of us have ridden the wave of housing markets and stock markets while many others of us have been left behind. For those who are excluded from the market, there is low self-esteem and hopelessness.

We as Australians need to find a sense of value that isn’t exclusively linked to our net worth. We need to have a sense of dignity and virtue that doesn’t stem from what the bank thinks of us. In an ideal world, I’m talking about a greater sense of community and less individualism but I don’t know how we can make that happen. Please post your solutions to Australia’s problems in the comments.

Uncategorized politics

I don’t get to listen to podcasts as much as I used to. When I worked full time and drove forty minutes to work, I used to actually plug my macbook into an iPod dock in the car and listen to them. (My colleagues used to joke that the Macbook was a giant iPod)

I’ve got a bit of a new routine now where I can listen to podcasts while I do a bit of housework and also while I put Flossy to sleep. In the latter case, we retreat to her bedroom where we have a comfy chair and I put the headphones in while she has her milk and then drifts off with her head on my chest.

I recently went back to Cory Doctorow’s podcast where he has been reading a short story called Martian Chronicles. It is worth a listen if you also find some time in your day for podcasts and enjoy science fiction. It’s about a teenager going to Mars to be a colonist but also acts as a launching pad (good pun eh?) for a discussion of the nature of success and failure with a focus on economics and society.

I like the way Cory is able to weave his political ideals and thinking into his stories and still keep them entertaining without the feeling that you’re being lectured to too much. It’s something I also admire in Ken Macleod.

At this stage I haven’t finished listening to the story but there has been an interesting twist which is going to force our main character to decide which side of the fence he sits on and how he’s going to live with that.

If anyone else has a listen, I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on it. To listen, you have to get it from his podcast

Uncategorized cory doctorow, scifi

Despite being a pretty agnostic kind of guy, I’ve been brought up going to church and have continued to do so (mostly) over the years. Since coming to Sale, we’ve been hopping along to the local Anglican franchise, partly just to meet some people and partly for some kind of spiritual experience.

Churches in the west are suffering pretty badly in this day and age. It’s the baby boomers: they went to Sunday school and weren’t having a bar of it. Their parents shoved religion down their necks and they spat it out the first chance they got. My generation grew up viewing Christians as a bunch of naive kill-joys who mean well but are ultimately safely ignored. More recently we’ve come to see Christians as part of the larger destructive force in the world called “religion”: the root of all trouble and strife whether it be suicide bombers or homophobic anti abortion lobbyists.

Anglicans tend to fall into the “quirky but harmless” end of the religious spectrum: Congregations of ageing pew warmers or in the more progressive parishes, younger slightly hippie neo-pantheists or fervent evangelicals armed with acoustic guitars and chorus books. Scattered about are the social misfits: a few with mental illnesses, a few with intellectual disabilities and the working poor.

Today we changed the channel and headed up the road to the happy-clappies where you’ve got young hotties praising the Lord with soft-rock and ecstatic hand-waving followed by a guy holding a Bible who talks about how different Christians are because they have God. Everybody then gets in their four wheel drives and heads to their manicured middle class homes where they eat gourmet salad and watch reruns of 7th Heaven ... or something.

So where do we fit in? That’s what I’ve been asking myself for the last ten years. Sometimes we seem to get it right and make great friends who we connect with and who become a kind of extended family but it never seems to last. Other times, well, maybe church is not meant for critical thinkers. If only I had a heart.

Uncategorized religion

It was a bit bloody hot today wasn’t it? Assuming you live in Victoria, if not, just take my word for it: it was hot and humid and mighty unpleasant but then we got a nice tropical storm which whipped up a cool breeze and brightened up the mood.

In other news, our kids had their first day with their family day carer here today. As I might have previously mentioned, I reluctantly went and got myself employed part time which means the kids need someone to look after them. At first we put them in a local day care centre but they hated it so Steph asked around and found us a decent family day carer (being in child protection is sometimes handy because you know people who you can trust with your kids as well as the downside of knowing about all of the people who are a danger to your kids).

I used to think that once Sol was talking, he would be able to tell us all his problems and things like this would go so much smoother. I’m coming to realise that this is not the case. It turns out kids can’t always articulate or have the reflective capacity to give you an evaluation of their situation.

So in this case, Sol was saying that he didn’t like day care. “It goes for too long”, “I go to the door a lot to see if you’ve come to pick me up”.

But how do you know that this isn’t just his reaction to being in day care in general. Surely he would say this no matter what day care arrangement he had because what he wants is to be home with his parents. So while I felt sad that he didn’t like day care, I tended to just ignore the problem. He wasn’t able to specifically tell me why he didn’t like it or to really explain what the problem was.

However, Steph was a bit more critical and I suppose things came to a head when she was having to go into the centre to pick up other peoples kids in her child protection work. Hence the move to family day care today.

Well, what a difference it was today with both the drop-off and the pick-up. We walked into a house where it was relatively quiet and our day carer gave us her full attention while we were there. I chatted with one of the other kids there and helped Sol get to know him and by the time I left, one of the other kids had taken Sol and Flossy under his wing and they were actually happy for Steph and me to leave. Flossy cried for about ten seconds when we handed her over which was a big contrast to still being able to hear her as we left the building at the centre.

When I picked them up, Sol was pretty relaxed and watching a bit of TV while Felicity was chilling with a milk arrowroot and smiling happily. Contrast this with when I usually walk in to the centre and Sol is just standing at the door waiting for me while Felicity is rocking back and forth staring with red rimmed eyes.

On the way home from day care, Sol informed me that he liked that day care and that it wasn’t too long and neither did he wait at the door. He also volunteered that he liked how he and Felicity weren’t separated.

So there you have it, oils aint oils and day cares aint day cares. Unfortunately I can’t say that family day care is always superior to centre based. With family day care, you can have issues if your carer is sick or has a holiday and it is even harder to get one that has the days you need. You also have to be in the know a bit to get the top-notch carers. There are some pretty slack carers about and others who just don’t get it. The whole reason we didn’t get a family day carer as our first option was because we felt it was rare to find a good one but our lesson learned today was that at least with our kids, it’s worth making the effort to track down some good day care so you can have a little peace of mind while you’re off being a wage slave.

Uncategorized fatherhood

In case you haven’t had enough of Christmas, our family has edited up a video for your viewing pleasure documenting our first Christmas away from home / at our new home. As I explain in the video, this is episode 1 of The Adventures of Flossy and Sol but carries on from Matt and Sol’s Favourite Things only Felicity now gets a mention in the title and has some lines (she says ‘that’ during the commentary if you listen carefully)

Watch it on youtube to get the full size.

Music is by Bing Crosby who remains the best Christmas Carols singer of all time.

Uncategorized christmas, fatherhood, the adventures of flossy and sol

This week marks the end of a two month period of being a full time dad. This is different from being unemployed because unlike many unemployed men, we made a decision that I would spend some time at home with the kids while Steph worked. If you’re thinking of doing The Dad thing or just curious to see how I coped, then read on.

For starters, don’t think that just because you spend time with the kids on weekends, that this is the same as being The Dad. Once your wife goes out the front door (or in our case, once we get back from dropping her at work), the rules change. Firstly, you can’t do anything, I mean ANYTHING, without taking the kids with you. No quick trips to the corner shop to pick up some morning tea. Every outing, no matter how small, involves packing the kids into the car, making sure you’ve got shoes and a dummy and some water and a spare nappy and some wipes. Then at the other end you have unload them and make sure they don’t get run over while you’re doing it. Then you have to put up with their winging and boredom if you take too long (but really this is not as bad as you’d think – I can usually get through a substantial grocery shop before they get restless). Anyway, this lack of mobility can create a feeling of being stuck at home.

Next there is the complete lack of structure. At work you have meetings and things you are supposed to be doing and a general idea of when they need to be done. At home you have laundry, dishes, food preparation and cleaning. You also have kids who want you to spend time with them and entertain them. You might dream that you’ll have a morning tea break where you can peacefully catch up on your Facebook without interruptions whilst sipping a coffee / tea. Good luck with that. What I find is you start doing a job but then you have to attend to the kids and then you forget what you were doing and start something else only to realise that the kids haven’t eaten anything or there’s a nappy needs changing and then you kind circle around in a lost fashion trying to think of what needs you most urgent attention until your wife rings to say she needs to be picked up from work.

Finally there is isolation: some of this is because we moved to a new town, but I think I’d have the same problem in Brisbane because I just didn’t know anyone with kids who I could go and hang out with during the day. Being a man makes this more difficult because most full time carers are mums and it’s a bit weird. I went to a few playgroups and that was ok but it’s draining for an introvert like me to make conversation. I would probably keep going but you need continuous involvement to get into your comfort zone and have some friends. I think this will become less of a problem over time but you need to make an effort to get past this as you’re not going to meet and get to know people just sitting at home.

But it’s not all bad. You actually get to really talk to your kids and enjoy them more than you do when you’re working and or course there are all the benefits of not having a boss and being the decision maker. When you make the time, it’s also actually fun to play with your kids and do different activities with them.

My way of coping with the lack of structure and lack of mobility was to plan ahead and create structure for myself. I had a todo list and tried to work through it as well as finding activities for the kids. Some easy activities that you can leave them with are drawing, play dough and general outside play or using toys. I found that things went more smoothly if I played with the kids first and got them involved in some activity. I could then leave them doing that while I did some housework. I would also plan outings and save up tasks to do when we went out so we weren’t making lots of trips. The kids seem to like going on an outing at least once a day and we could always go to the park and then head for the shops after that if we needed anything.

I also tried to do things that would involve the kids like baking with them and although we didn’t start a garden yet, Sol enjoys identifying appropriate materials for the compost.

Things mostly came unstuck if I couldn’t get them interested in anything or if I was too tired and lacking inspiration on things to do or if I just had no plan. Sometimes I’d try and do something with the kids and they’d just not be interested but I would keep persevering instead of moving on to something else. These days would be marked by winging, shouting and not getting anything done.

So as I mentioned, my time being a full time stay-at-home dad has come to an end because I’ve taken a part time job but I will still be The Dad for a couple of days a week so I’ll keep you posted on how that’s going.

Uncategorized fatherhood