A tranquil day today which saw the last visit to the Olympic Port for our budding sailors in Year 9.
The tranquillity was not, however the primary starting position of our pupils when they arrived in the sailing school and were given their marked theory papers back.
I do not know if this is normal in other schools in Catalonia, but in ours everything that the kids value has to have a mark out of 10 on it. If it does not have a mark then, by definition it does not matter. And if it does have a mark out of 10 and therefore matters then it is worth moving heaven and earth to get a higher mark than the one you were given.
I have never known a school in which cheating is such an institutionalized part of the curriculum. The kids cheat as easily as breathing and think no more about it that they think about getting oxygen into their lungs.
I was shown a Tippex bottle which had had its label exchanged for a downloaded version from the internet which was the same in every detail as the commercial one except that where ingredients or contents should have been listed there was, instead, a selection of mathematical formulae printed to ‘help’ students in their testing examinations!
Kids lift up their papers as if perusing them, but actually allowing those pupils behind them to copy. They drape their copies over the side of the desk allowing pupils to the side of them to see their answers. And so it goes on.
If cheating fails then there is also the budding lawyer approach which questions every mark and every correction on their papers. Calculators at the ready and hurried conferences to compare and contrast papers ensure that the handing back of test papers is a moral and legal free for all!
The poor instructors at the sailing centre were assailed by hordes of pupils who were not satisfied with their marks and demanded recounts and full explanations about why marks had been denied them. Almost a quarter of their ‘sailing’ time was taken up with the justification of their marks by increasingly flustered looking sailors!
I must admit that I took the opportunity of my enforced presence in the Olympic Port during my free afternoon to start reading one of the reading books that is used as part of one of the English courses.
I have read all the spare books on the course and was left with one that I had previously rejected because of its totally uninspiring cover photograph.
The book was ‘Ironman’ by Chris Crutcher. This takes the usual dysfunctional American family with a remarkable sibling with an outstanding ability coming to terms with life, the universe and everything.
I approached this book with something approaching dread and was pleasantly surprised to find it nothing like as depressingly anodyne as its cover but rather an engaging and witty, hard hitting and thoughtful depiction of teenage angst with not one, but two philosophically inclined mentors to help our hero on his way to fulfilment.
The action of the story charts the rocky relationship of Bo Brewster with his father and his training for a Triathlon which may or may not resolve some of the issues which he faces.
This is superior writing with a confident exploration of the territory not only of a troubled teenager but also of the more worrying world of physical obsession.
This is a highly structured story with what amounts to an emotional and psychological commentary on the action provided by the ‘mentor’ characters. But if this novel is moralistic, then it at least has the positive quality of providing morality in a readable and convincing form.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and I am inclined to search out ‘King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography’ by the same author. It should be revealing.
Tomorrow is not only the end of the week (with no meeting on Saturday) but also the start of a four day break.
O Joy!
The tranquillity was not, however the primary starting position of our pupils when they arrived in the sailing school and were given their marked theory papers back.
I do not know if this is normal in other schools in Catalonia, but in ours everything that the kids value has to have a mark out of 10 on it. If it does not have a mark then, by definition it does not matter. And if it does have a mark out of 10 and therefore matters then it is worth moving heaven and earth to get a higher mark than the one you were given.
I have never known a school in which cheating is such an institutionalized part of the curriculum. The kids cheat as easily as breathing and think no more about it that they think about getting oxygen into their lungs.
I was shown a Tippex bottle which had had its label exchanged for a downloaded version from the internet which was the same in every detail as the commercial one except that where ingredients or contents should have been listed there was, instead, a selection of mathematical formulae printed to ‘help’ students in their testing examinations!
Kids lift up their papers as if perusing them, but actually allowing those pupils behind them to copy. They drape their copies over the side of the desk allowing pupils to the side of them to see their answers. And so it goes on.
If cheating fails then there is also the budding lawyer approach which questions every mark and every correction on their papers. Calculators at the ready and hurried conferences to compare and contrast papers ensure that the handing back of test papers is a moral and legal free for all!
The poor instructors at the sailing centre were assailed by hordes of pupils who were not satisfied with their marks and demanded recounts and full explanations about why marks had been denied them. Almost a quarter of their ‘sailing’ time was taken up with the justification of their marks by increasingly flustered looking sailors!
I must admit that I took the opportunity of my enforced presence in the Olympic Port during my free afternoon to start reading one of the reading books that is used as part of one of the English courses.
I have read all the spare books on the course and was left with one that I had previously rejected because of its totally uninspiring cover photograph.
The book was ‘Ironman’ by Chris Crutcher. This takes the usual dysfunctional American family with a remarkable sibling with an outstanding ability coming to terms with life, the universe and everything.
I approached this book with something approaching dread and was pleasantly surprised to find it nothing like as depressingly anodyne as its cover but rather an engaging and witty, hard hitting and thoughtful depiction of teenage angst with not one, but two philosophically inclined mentors to help our hero on his way to fulfilment.
The action of the story charts the rocky relationship of Bo Brewster with his father and his training for a Triathlon which may or may not resolve some of the issues which he faces.
This is superior writing with a confident exploration of the territory not only of a troubled teenager but also of the more worrying world of physical obsession.
This is a highly structured story with what amounts to an emotional and psychological commentary on the action provided by the ‘mentor’ characters. But if this novel is moralistic, then it at least has the positive quality of providing morality in a readable and convincing form.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and I am inclined to search out ‘King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography’ by the same author. It should be revealing.
Tomorrow is not only the end of the week (with no meeting on Saturday) but also the start of a four day break.
O Joy!
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