Smithology

Reading back I’ve been a bit negative on the blog posts of late and that is because we have been in a pretty low mood with homesickness and boredom and second guessing ourselves even though we’ve had lots to be happy about as well.

One of those things has been a major milestone for us which was Sol putting on his school uniform for the first time and commencing prep (Actually he’s in a thing called modified prep which is geared towards the younger cohort of the intake and has more play and less spelling).

I may have already mentioned we’ve sent Sol to a state school due to the modified prep offering and our feeling about his readiness for institutional education. Part of this decision was when we enrolled him in a private school and after talking to his would be prep teacher who eventually admitted to us that if Sol was his own kid, he would put him in the modified prep at the state school.

The main issue is not intellectual capacity but his ability to socialise. At a very young age, the differences of even half a year can be much bigger than when they get older. In the prep class at the private school, he was noticeably physically smaller and physically behind the other kids. This would have led to him being left behind by his peers a lot which could detract from his feeling like he truly belongs in the class. With the modified prep class, he is amongst smaller kids and kids who are not as socially advanced so he has a better chance to be heard and to get amongst it rather than being pushed to the back seat.

So we’re really happy and relieved that he has loved every day of his school experience so far and is taking it all in his (small but growing) stride. He is already bonding with his teacher and getting to know the other kids. He is obviously an introvert but he gets a lot out of being with the other kids and loves to interact with them when he’s in his comfort zone.

The only down side is that we have less time now to work on The Adventures of Flossy and Sol but we hope to still hold to a production schedule of one episode a month.

Uncategorized education, fatherhood

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

My Mum gave me a book from my childhood the other day: Leading Little Ones to God. It has an inscription from my Grandmother in the front and though I don’t remember it, Mum tells me she read it to me when I was a kid.

I started reading it to Sol the other day but we didn’t get very far. Sol and I both know that my heart’s not in it and I didn’t even get past the first page “Our Hearts Search For God” before I started stumbling over assertions about the nature of God and the human spirit that I no longer identify with.

Which got me thinking: If I was going to use a book to teach Sol about morality, values and the meaning of life, what would it look like? Christianity has the advantage of being an established codified moral system that is still broadly accepted and endorsed in our society. What else is there? Sol is already a huge Star Wars fan (who would have thought eh?) which comes with a nicely packaged mythology of good, evil and Jungian templates: maybe I could bring Sol up as a jedi? I’ve also noticed some primary schools teaching philosophy as a way to help children develop a number of attributes: logic, respectful rational debate and ethical behaviour.

But then again, I don’t think books have much to do with the promulgation of values. In the early years it is all about modelling and being an example. The significant adults in Sol’s life are the ones from whom he learns how to behave: one of the most simultaneously relieving and terrifying of realisations. Relieving because it means I don’t have the burden of having to analyse and communicate my values which are a jumbled mess of contradiction and confusion. Terrifying because I have already seen some of my faults and weaknesses mirrored back at me.

Fortunately for Sol, he has a number of wise, good hearted adults in his life (including his mother) from whom I hope he’ll learn what he needs to know.

Uncategorized education, fatherhood, religion, spirituality

I’m about half-way through my re-read of The Diamond Age now and have been reminded how much I enjoyed this book and how thought provoking the story is. Now that I have a toddler pre-schooler in our house who is looking at doing prep next year, my thoughts turn to education more frequently and with a certain amount of worry about Sol’s future and the kind of person he will be. How much will our choice of school influence him? We’ve been coming across a few schools which Steph describes as peer insurance. ie You’re not paying for an advanced curriculum or better resources but it seems you’re just forking out cash to ensure that your child grows up with a certain class or group of children. Some of the more radical Protestant Christian schools seem to work along these lines. And there seems to be an aspect of this to all of the mainstream private schools as well.

In The Diamond Age, we see how Nell the main protagonist is transformed through her exposure to The Primer (an advanced electronic educational device that has fallen into her hands). She moves from her neglected and often abusive home to better accommodation and through her education (and with a little financial help from a benefactor) is able to access the upper class of her society.

Yet Stephenson through comparing her with two other girls makes the narrative unfold in such a way that I have to really question who Nell is? Is she a product of the book? Is there a part of her which exists independently of all the class and education she has accessed? I think what the story brings out is that there is something which can’t be manufactured that creates our identity from the experiences and relationships we have.

What we find as the book unfolds is that while Nell makes good use of all the culture and class the book makes accessible to her, it is her relationships that truly form her. At the core of the events in her life are the choices she makes and these in turn are formed by those with whom she has come into contact both good and bad. What makes Nell’s character have more depth than some of the other girls is her exposure to and awareness of violence and disadvantage.

Getting back to my thoughts on education and schools and I’m still very challenged by this idea of peer insurance. I really don’t want Sol to be ignorant of how life works and how our society works, I want him to have compassion and understanding of everyone and their place in society. At the same time, I see the need for him to learn in a safe environment where he is not worried about being teased or bullied to the point that it overshadows his experience of learning.

Uncategorized education, neal stephenson, school, the diamond age

Today is Ada Lovelace Day as explained on The Memes of Production and I would like to participate to such a worthy cause but apart from Ada Lovelace (as made famous to all sci-fi geeks in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s Difference Engine) I can’t think of anyone apart from my grade 11 and 12 maths teacher Mrs Harris. However I think her story (told from my perspective) is illustrative of the challenges faced by women in science and engineering.

Mrs Harris had long brown hair, wore big chunky brown leather sandals and long floral dresses. She was gentle in the classroom which meant that her classes tended to be out of control. I was amazed that she was still teaching after one term at our school. The boys ridiculed her both in and out of the classroom, making fun of her unshaven legs and armpits and parodying her imagined hippy lifestyle.

Of course I was sitting up the front doing my best to get my head around eigenvectors and matrix transformations and I decided then that I wasn’t going to join in the bullying. I think there were just a handful of students that might have kept Mrs Harris at that school and made it worth it for her.

When she formed the gardening group, I joined up and we spent a lunchtime each week in the greenhouse propagating native trees to be planted in the school grounds. I remember one time a student came to the group announcing that the janitor was cutting down our trees. We rushed to the scene to find stumps sticking out of the ground where our trees had once been. Mrs Harris and the big burly male janitor had a stand-off that got pretty heated and we were worried about how Mrs Harris was holding the garden pick that she had happened to be carrying but she made the janitor apologise to us. (A friend remarked later that he thought she was going to pick a fight – har har har)

My involvement in the garden group paid off in the end because Mrs Harris recomended me when one of her friends needed some cheap labour at her native plant nursery. That first job was welcome pocket money which I wasted on Mars Bars, Coca Cola and guitar parts.

I realise Mrs Harris is not exactly a ground-breaker. There are plenty of women maths and science teachers in the world and much of what she faced was as much because she was bit of a hippy than because of her gender. It does show that at least back then, women were expected to remain in some pretty narrow cultural spaces in the workplace. There were male teachers at our school who wore big beards and sandals too (it was North Queensland which has its share of tree huggers) but they didn’t receive half as much derision. I remember asking myself why didn’t she just change the way she dressed and shave and do what she needed to do to fit in? But she didn’t compromise one thing during her time at my school and she knew when to pick a fight and when to leave the swine to their muck.

Uncategorized ada lovelace day, education, gender