The Old School Bully

Comments and toon below by conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG.  He is referring to the Federal Minister for Education, Peter Garrett, a notable Green/Left lamebrain



The oxygen was once again sucked out of the room this morning when I saw & heard the Hon. Minister for "SHORT MEMORIES" smugly telling us that he along with the ALP & Facebook will be taking on the cyber bullies and combating this insidious threat to us all !!!!

How will Garrett turn around an issue that was nowhere near as endemic as it now is? ....... He is telling the kids to dob in the bullies.  My God, what are they smoking at his office, this is the best that they can do?

Of course the issue with children being cruel to each other will probably NEVER go away, it is definitely a part of human development. The problem that exists now and didn't when I was a kid is that parents are almost scared to discipline their children, rather than face the wrath of D.O.C.S or worse, the Police.

Teachers, well forget it, their hands have been tied ever since Garrett's do-gooder crowd managed to remove corporal punishment from schools back in the early 80's and even earlier when Comrade Whitlam disbanded the public school cadet corps. This was an establishment where all were made to realise that they were equally weak and strong and that there is no "i" in team. Now everybody has to be a winner and no one is ever wrong, just go along with the consensus of the left.

The PC crowd always tell govt that it is not the child that is at fault but rather society in general is to blame. To a point they are right because of the desensitising masses being bombarded with sex and violence on a daily basis on all communication media along with the fact that the rights of the child to freely express itself in any manner it deems fit, always outweighs the rights of the parent/guardian to raise the child in a manner that they deem correct.

So now we are stuck with a generation of children who not only have no issue with cruelty to each other without consequence but they can do it easily and anonymously via mobile phones and the internet.

Yep , the social engineering has failed and now those who caused it to happen are trying to tell us that they have the answer....... talk about whistling past the cemetery!!!

Nothing in this plan by Garrett discusses what to do with the bullies, how to reform them and how to find out what made them so anti social in the first place. Bloody reactionary policy released by some very reactionary and desperate politicians.






Japanese teaching methods heading to the UK as British pupils look to play catch up

Japanese children can perform mathematical calculations far in advance of their British counterparts just by mastering the abacus, new research has found.

School children as young as five are able to add up five numbers, each running into billions or trillions, in just half a minute - and some Japanese teenagers can add so quickly that scientists are at a loss to explain their skill.

Now British experts, including former Countdown star Carol Vorderman, are saying schools in this country could develop similar techniques to boost Britain’s ‘disgacefully’ low levels of numeracy.

In Japan, use of the abacus - parallel rods each strung with five beads - is taught to all six years olds, and it is widely used in China and other countries in the East which regularly head world numeracy league tables.

Millions of Japanese children also attend the country’s 20,000 after-school clubs, where they learn to add, subtract, multiply and divide much faster than they could with traditional pen and paper -  and advanced users can compete with calculators.

The head of the Academy, Chie Takayanagi, said that whereas people could resort to calculators nowadays, using an abacus sharpened their concentration and memory.

In Japan, the best abacus users can enter competitions and some children do not even need to finger their beads as they can picture the abacus in their heads to make mental calculations.

Japanese teachers said that children in the West often found numbers hard to grasp because they were presented in too abstract a way, while the abacus provided a concrete picture of them.

One said the Japanese method of counting also helped because when children came to words such as eleven, twelve and thirteen they said ‘ten one’, ‘ten two’ and ‘ten three’, which was far more meaningful.

They also learned their times tables like nursery rhymes, and sang them to tunes they remembered into their adult lives.

Ms Vorderman, who was known on the Channel 4 Countdown show for her fast calculations and who has written numerous books on maths, said numeracy in Britain was ‘disgraceful’ partly because schools under-emphasised the visual elements of teaching maths.

She said scientific tests carried out in China using a brain scanner showed those who had been schooled in the West just used the computational side of their brains while those from the East used the visual parts as well,
She said she had learned maths using cuisenaire rods, a Western version of the abacus. ‘That’s how I learnt very very quickly,’ she said.

‘From the age of three I was doing what a lot of six year olds were doing. But everything was simple because it was visual.  ‘Schools are trying to do it with words now, and giving word problems to very young children is completely pointless.  ‘I don’t use an abacus but I wish I did. All aspects of the visual should be encouraged, and the abacus is one.’

SOURCE





American school Staffing Growing Significantly Faster Than Enrollment

A new report by the Friedman Foundation shows hiring of administrative and support staff in government schools has grown seven times faster than student enrollment over the last several decades.  The group found: 

“America’s K-12 public education system has experienced tremendous historical growth in employment, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. Between fiscal year (FY) 1950 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students in the United States increased by 96 percent while the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) school employees grew 386 percent. Public schools grew staffing at a rate four times faster than the increase in students over that time period. Of those personnel, teachers’ numbers increased 252 percent while administrators and other staff experienced growth of 702 percent, more than seven times the increase in students.”

Report author Benjamin Scafidi also noted, “Compared to other nations’ schools, U.S. public schools devote significantly higher fractions of their operating budgets to non-teaching personnel—and lower portions to teachers.”

Unsustainable jobs programs promoted by the federal government have contributed to the problem and politicians have been more interested in job statistics in government schools than actually evaluating what those individuals were accomplishing.

Regardless, Friedman’s analysis shows once again that government schools have a spending problem, not a funding problem.

U.S. News and World Report attempted to obtain comment from the National Education Association, which represents a large chunk of non-instructional employees. The union declined. The magazine noted that the NEA website states, “Support professionals are woefully underpaid, often barely able to afford to live in the communities where they serve.”

Translation: quit your inconvenient analysis and keep the jobs money flowing.

SOURCE