furtherandfaster

Distance learning - distance communication

I have spent part of today getting familiar with a distance learning site. I have to teach a course in a week's time to a class in Madrid and this involves using a blend of bulletin boards, chatrooms and email. It is a challenge getting used to the idea, and the interface and then figuring out how to optimise it when I have got the hang of it. But suddenly I have realised that I have other resources at my disposal - I don't need to be dependent on text - even a phone or a digital camera can be used to make quick films which can be uploaded very easily. So I'm trying to do more of that.

Rubbish training

I had been concerned that too much emphasis was being given to surfing the web to 'research' markets instead of using rather more oldfashioned methods. So to emphasise my point I had asked Costin to locate me the rubbish from two households. Complete with a pair of yellow marigold gloves I had purloined from my own household - I went through them to the mild consternation of the students on the course. Part of the fun of course was that the offices were brand new so dumping rubbish on the floor was hardly likely to endear me. But it turned out to be a very useful exercise. The households were from different economic groups - we had a good idea who and how many were in each household though it was difficult to estimate age.  And one of the households had been doing some redecorating - we even found this out because of the old dried up papers and cement dust. It was interesting the amount of skin care and medications which were being put out as well. It is very hot in Romania at present so headeaches, dry skin - the symptoms were all present in the rubbish. They had also removed a lot of the rubbish as well (but gave us a list of what they had taken out) research information in its own right.

Making Strong Propositions course

Thursday I began the training with a sore head - too many dark beers in the Green Hours bar with Costin and Diana the night before. We were in the brand new offices of the Romanian IAA - the formal opening was due the Tuesday after I left. I had done my best to customise the casestudies. I've taught this course at the IDM half a dozen times now so it was interesting to adapt it to the Romanian setting- the practical exercises I set them were for mineral water and selling all in one printers to local businesses.

First refusal

Yesterday my daughter refused to go to school - too miserable to go. This has been building off and on for a couple of years. This is the critical (and horrible) teenage time when friends become all important and there aren't any. The constant forming and reforming of cliques and gangs takes its toll even if no one is grabbing her by the shoulders and banging her up against a wall.

I don't know how to deal with mutiny. When Corporal Deadline blows the whistle I fix the bayonet, walk to the firing step and heave myself over the top of the trench and start running through no man's land. To refuse is annhilation - I do it if for no other reason than conditioning. And my memory is probably faulty but it felt like that at school when I was a kid - I just got on with it - even the unpleasant stuff, stayed out of trouble but refusal was not an option. We could bully her into going to school but that would be temporary. It has gone past bribes.

This is what it means to live in Blairite (nearly Brownite) Britain. Now somehow we have to find the time to go to the school and have a meeting with the student support unit. To tell a stressed member of staff that our daughter is too stressed to come to school. Only that now its mental stress rather than physical stress. Someone somewhere will have to draft a plan and log it. We will apply to have her transferred to another local school. The overworked and stressed appeal board must listen to it because every parent has a choice. Then they will turn us down because there aren't any school places. And we will appeal because we have no alternative. And persuade the GP to refer us to the paediatrician, and persuade the paediatrician to write a letter in support of our appeal. At some point I will try to involve the local MP who is in opposition so will jump on the case as an example of the failure of the education system. And the piece of grit will continue to irritate and grow until the system rearranges to get rid of the friction. But my daughter isn't a piece of grit - she's a person - and she deserves better than this.

Its a relief to have to put this Kafkaesque world all to one side. And walk towards the sound of the guns. If you understand this say a prayer for us.