Saturday 30 May 2015

The difference between teaching and learning

There is a news article doing the rounds reporting how Australia's Prime Minister "doesn't get why kids should learn to code". Further scrutiny however reveals the glaring misunderstanding is not that Tony Abbott fails to appreciate the value of a basic ability to code, but the fundamental misunderstanding common across the world over not what kids should learn, but how.

Not one of my four children have been taught to code. Yet three of them can, and one is extremely adept. For me, coding is on the event horizon of education - or Education (capital E), because we still misunderstand how children learn and persist in seeking to quantify, quality check and present a body of information to be relayed to the next generation as if Gladstonian Liberalism were still the cutting edge of education planning. I believe the Coding question will define how the next generation of children learn, and what is fascinating is that we had the answer all along.

Friday 15 May 2015

Somewhere over the rainbow...

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Kate. She spent much of her time playing with her dolls, imagining the day when she would have real babies of her own. As that little girl grew up, she spent most of her free time baby-sitting, with babies and children, making plans for the future.

But you know what they say about planning too far in advance!

I always wanted a large family, ideally 4 or 5 children. However I hadn’t bargained on the chronic health and developmental issues my brood share between them - or our shared infertility. We managed to delude ourselves that #3 would be free of gastro issues and were utterly in denial over our second son’s Autism at that point, but when #3 turned out to be #3 AND #4 we realised we had as much as we could cope with. Possibly more at times….. It was a no-brainer deciding that we are done!!



That, however is different from "feeling" you're done. I do really miss the tiny baby thing, wish like hell that I could do the early months again with any of them without reflux and pain, I feel really cheated on that score. The constant screaming was a bit wearing when everyone else seemed to get at least 10 minutes a day cuddling their new babies - and unless you have survived on less than 4 hours sleep for months on end you won’t appreciate how much we were “surviving” rather than living.
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