In At The Deep End

wed 15th - reading morning, drama
thurs 16th - P&T, B&L (doodle art)
fri 17th - Friday club (& just realised totally forgot R’s b’day tea - hope M will forgive me if I grovel. No brain!!)
sat 18th - ??? sure there was something…
sun 19th - Sunday school (prep for Christingle service)
mon 20th - CHEF Africa day, J&E, yogacise in evening
tues 21st - MSLC, French club
wed 22nd - reading morning, drama
thurs 23rd - P&T, B&L, Bob to cinema
fri 24th - Rodena, Ikea
sat 25th - slingmeet, angry rat party, service prep
sun 16th - service (J to usual church for Sunday School - plus did sound system!), lunch, Transporters
mon 17th - J&E, scratchcard art, hama beads (and ironing!)

here

Spooky quote from an article about a Microsoft researcher logging everything he does or sees onto a computer. It’s quite long, but thought provoking.

Sorry - pointless post really - I just want to get it out somewhere.
I was preaching today at the chapel just down the road (ie the one we ought to go to, really, if we followed the support your local church rule rather than sticking to the one we were already at when we moved because we feel comfortable there) and was confirmed in the rightness of our decision.
We live on the edge of a fairly deprived estate, with lots of council/social housing and lots of young families nearby. The church decided a while ago that it was time to reach out to some of these families, which is great. The traditional morning service has been replaced by breakfast at 10, then Sunday school from 10:30 -11, with three age groups: children, teens and adults, then a time of “altogether worship” after which the children go back out to Sunday school and the adults stay in for the rest of the service. The preacher is now invited to take over the service after the worship time, ie to do readings, sermon and intercessions but nothing else. I find this difficult for a start, as I prefer to plan my services so that everything adds together iyswim and if I don’t know what will be in the worship bit then I can’t use that to feed into the sermon etc. I also miss having a children’s address to do, as I feel that can often be really helpful for the adults too, and a good way to set up the theme.
Anyway, the scheme has worked really well at doing what they set out to do. They have gone from having a handful of children at about half the services to consistently having 15 or 20 children and a good sprinkling of teenagers, the worship time is led by the young people’s band, modern songs are presented in a lively way, with lots of use of powerpoint, the children are enthusiastic and the average age of the congregation has dropped considerably. All very encouraging.
But… looking around the church my heart bled. I was quite shocked to see how many familiar faces were missing and how out of place the few older members of the congregation who still come seemed to feel. The music was loud - too loud to sing to much of the time; there was no lead singer to follow and many of the songs were unfamiliar. The prayers sounded good, but had little content. A few people hid at the back until the end of the altogether worship time then just snuck in as late as they dared for the end bit; others stood, looking acutely uncomfortable, through the songs. It was really sad - and tbh I was right there with them. When I turned over the page of the song sheet and saw that we were to sing “Be thou my vision”, one of my favourite hymns, I was so pleased to see one I knew - then almost burst into tears as we sang it because it was butchered and rendered almost unsingable by inappropriate use of rhythms and accompaniment.
Maybe I’m just an old fogey, maybe it’s because of people like me that the church is losing contact with society, maybe I’m looking for a compromise which doesn’t exist, but while I can see all the good the changes they have made are doing it also makes me terribly sad that people are being alienated by them. If only the type of service we had today could have been put in as well as the traditional one, rather than replacing it, then those who have been coming for years might have felt comfortable to continue coming. The argument is that they can come to the evening service, which remains unchanged in format, but at this time of year many of them can’t. It’s too dark for them to come out in the evenings and too far for them to go elsewhere in the mornings and they are left feeling pushed out of their own community
No idea what the answer could be, or even if there is one, but just wanted to get my confused feelings down somehow.
At the moment it feels as though everybody is only seeing the good (which I know is considerable) and ignoring the downsides, because the people affected have just quietly faded away…

The title comes from the front page of the G2 bit of the Guardian from a few years back. It was the caption to a photo showing rows and rows of people in a call centre. The article to go with it was about the decline of heavy industry (ship building, in particular) in the North East, and the boom in call centre work due to the common liking for a Geordie accent. It’s stuck with me and I was reminded of it today. I apologise if this turns into a waffly ill-informed bit of nonsense - it’s partly my trying to exorcise something.

I left my last company for many reasons, one of which was the product I was working on was increasingly being marketed as a job killer. We were even asked to look in the local paper for the right kind of job adverts and our slimy sales and marketing people would phone up and invite the potential employer to buy our kit instead.

The job I’ve got now is largely neutral ethically - it doesn’t save lives but it doesn’t put people out of a job either. The company I work for is now looking into putting more automation into call centres, which is what reminded me of the G2 thing and the job killing. I shan’t go into this in any detail because it’s likely to be boring to outsiders and also I don’t want to worry about intellectual property.

But the general point (yes, there is a point) is technology, automation, rubbish jobs and so on - nice and precise (I did warn you this might be waffly). I think the best I can do is to fire out a load of questions, as I definitely don’t have solid answers to them. Any thoughts you have would be very welcome as I’m wrestling with this and have been for many years.

Is the UK always going to have a set of jobs that unskilled or low-skilled people can do? I.e. as automation (and even outsourcing and so on) mops up one kind of low-skilled job, will technological advances, changes in society and so on always create a new one? I’ve heard it said that if just banking lost all its computers, then it the entire working population of the country would have to start working for the banks to sustain the kind of banking we have now. I’m not sure how true this is, but true enough I suspect. Some of the jobs that computers do now have never been done by people, or at least haven’t for so long that we don’t notice it any more - large companies don’t have rooms full of computers adding up on machines (by “computer” I mean the old sense, which was “a person who computes”). We don’t have banks of typists any more as most people who produce documents do so themselves on a word processor. So far I can’t see a lack of jobs, but am I ignorant, and will the supply of jobs continue?

Are we always going to have unskilled people, and do we want to? This is the politically sensitive one, but is linked to the first one. If there is always going to be a need for unskilled people, then will there be enough people to meet that need? Are our society, our education and welfare structures, rigged to maintain this, and is this fair? The head of my sixth form was a very interesting man, who said that the traditional education system in this country mirrored the classical division of society into three: the intellectuals (good brains), the soldiers (good hearts) and the labourers (good hands). I hope that any teachers or ex-teachers reading this can give me chapter and verse about this. Given that we fortunately don’t need large conventional armies any more, do we still need the people who used to be no more than cannon fodder? Or, putting it less snobbishly, do we still need people to be like that?

The late night student debating point is this one - the big question about what potential does a given person have, can we all be super-stars, or are some people more equal than others? I don’t pretend for a moment that all young people should go to university - if I want a new boiler put in I’d much rather have someone skilled in plumbing than someone with an Oxford degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Someone who has problem solving skills, spatial awareness, physical dexterity and skill, the relevant practical bits of physics and chemistry and not someone who can tell me where Keynes got it wrong.

Before I get too glum or my head explodes with the enormity of it all, I am grateful for a little flash of Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A society got fed up with the useless third within itself - the telephone sanitisers and so on and cooked up a huge hoax that convinced everyone that some massive calamity was about to fall on their planet, and that they must all abandon it in 3 massive spaceships. The ‘useless’ third went first and eventually settled on another planet (the rebuilt Earth, I think). The other two thirds never had any intention of leaving as they were in on the hoax and stayed put. They got their just desserts when they were all wiped out by a very nasty disease from a particularly dirty telephone box.

K is going through that exciting stage (with much help from Katy) - learning to read and write! He had reading the numbers 1-9 at nursery school, but he’s doing the proper stuff now. He holds the pencil in a slightly odd way - like people do who are left-handed, even though he writes with his right hand. We’re not sure if he’s ambi-dextrous or just a bit confused!

Katy uses a Montessori trick (I think) of pouring about a 1cm thick layer of salt into a flat dish and writing in that with your finger. You get the muscle memory, nice tactile response, you see what you’ve done (unlike just moving your finger about on the table) and then you can shake the dish to rub it out and start again. I took some lovely photos (not my camera work or equipment, just the subject) of Katy and J showing him how to do a 4 and then him trying. He’s also doing the repetitive copying in a book stuff with a pencil, which he has so far enjoyed.

On the reading front he’s got an excellent phonics desk thing. I’m normally far from the world’s greatest fan of kids’ computers as they’re too often tacky, have poor recordings of over-excited American voices and just generally poor. This one is great - Katy got it cheap/free on eBay or Freecycle and it’s missing the letter V, but it still works OK. Maybe he’ll go through life with a blind-spot for words like “vat” and “vet” but able to read “palaeodendrology”!

There’s a flat area that you cover up with a card from the set that comes with the desk. The card fits into a bit of the desk so it knows which one it is by something at the card’s edge and so it says the word on the card. The card has a picture of the word e.g. Bus, and holes for the letters to go in. You then pick up the letters from their normal home on the desk and put them into the holes. As you put each one in it says its name and sound, and then when they’re all in the holes it says the whole word. He loves it and it seems to help him a lot!

It’s great to watch him enter this new world of words, and it will help so much with home educating more than one child at once as he’ll be able to at least read the instructions in books or on the computer even if he can’t do the task itself. When we went round the Fitzwilliam Museum* at the weekend (we were passing and decided to pop in for a bit as it’s free ) J could have a go at the labels on the exhibits (although things like Mesopotamia were a bit beyond him!) and it will be nice when K is at that stage as he’ll get more out of things.

I know that one of the reasons why Katy was unsure about home educating J in Reception was the responsibility of teaching reading and writing (so we stuck out school for a bit longer), but so far K seems to be doing fine so I think she must be doing her usual good job of things.

* We might not have the sea or nice (any?) hills, but we do have a decent selection of museums etc. nearby. Must count the blessings occasionally.

I’m having deja vu. Laudable aims used to justify spending lots of money on an IT system that probably won’t work and may make things worse, instead of spending less money using trained professionals to do the job better.

As with ID cards, there are thankfully lots of non-government experts - academics, Quango bosses and so on - trying to warn the emperor against changing his clothes.

In the light of recent posts and emails about the DfES consultation on Home Education, it was interesting that last night our local home ed group had arranged a meeting with the top bod in the our Local Authority for home education (he wears an awful lot of LA hats, but one of them is top bod for home education). Hence the provocative title and the apprehension (on both sides, apparently) before the meeting.

He seemed a nice bloke, and respected the right of parents to educate their children at home. He was at the same time an official for the LA, with a set of competing duties and rights to combine somehow. He has to ensure that no children on his radar are at risk of abuse or neglect; that all these children receive an adequate education; and that his staff (e.g. the people who inspect home educating families) aren’t at risk either.

There were families he knew of who used the pretence of home educating to get their son to leave school early, who gambled that the LA wheels would turn too slowly to do anything before he had reached school leaving age anyway (the LA wheels turned more quickly than the family expected and they received a schooling order). There are also home visits where the family have been belligerent bordering on aggressive, and some of his female colleagues might have felt very vulnerable doing that visit on their own. (We asked why an Education Welfare Officer accompanied the inspector on the first visit: his response was that staff safety was a factor, although by no means the whole picture.)

We told him how stressful it can be withdrawing your child from a school, how emotional, irrational and fearful you can be. So, the standard form our LA sends out that asks for Criminal Records Bureau information for all people (other than the parents) who will be involved in the child’s education is far from helpful. As is its suggestion that you need to replicate school at home, with a curriculum etc. We asked him his view of autonomous home education, but I can’t remember the details of his answer. It was rather vague, but was along the lines of “I realise now that my own standard grammar school education was fairly poor, so my attitude to home education as a whole has mellowed over time.” Positive, but not a definite endorsement.

A startling little nugget that he came out with was the matter of funding. Veteran home educators may already know this, but I hadn’t realised that central government pays the LA some money only for children in state schools. They get no money for children in private schools, or for home educated children. Therefore all the LA can afford is a dedicated part-time co-ordinator for home education, but no dedicated inspectors. Instead they carve up the county into areas and an inspector covers all the schools and home educators in that area. As there are many more children in schools than home educated, the inspectors just aren’t as used to home educators and have a strong temptation to fit them into a school-shaped box.

He is keen to bring all the inspectors up to a common high standard, wants us to give him feedback on inspections, and has gone away with a big list of things to think about and possibly do. He’s working on giving us a copy of the inspection reports (he sees no reason why we shouldn’t have them, and is aware that we could get them via a Freedom of Information Act request). He wants us to comment on the official forms and letters, and the LA web site will soon include a link to the local home education group’s web site. There seems to be a lot of un-intentioned cruft on the LA’s part that could be cleared away fairly easily, and that he’s open to fixing.

So, it was an encouraging meeting. He realises that, just as no two schools are the same, no two home educating families are the same. We realise that we represent only a sub-set of all home educating families; we are all nice middle class articulate professionals and not e.g. travellers, and so the LA can’t customise itself to our needs completely. We respect the fact that there are certain things where he just cannot compromise, but we didn’t reach any last night, and he’s keen for us to give him the evidence he needs to help him improve their policy and practice. We’re planning on having a meeting about once per school term, which seems about right and next time he’ll possibly bring along an inspector now that he knows we’re not too scary.

At work we occupy 3 floors of an open office building. Despite our recently launched Project Midas (an odd name for a company-wide cost cutting exercise - some rather ruder and more accurate alternative names have been suggested) the little pieces of paper pinned up on everyone’s little divider walls to show our desk number and our name have been replaced by flashy metal plates. Oh, and the desks have all been renumbered.

So, instead of being at desk 55, I now sit at 00-138. 00 means ground floor, but unfortunately the desk numbers start at 100 so no-one has the number 007 - still the compulsory tight blue swimming trunks probably wouldn’t comply with company dress policy…

Continuing the Bond theme, could the new desk numbers be part of a company-wide desk co-ordinate system that allows our esteemed leader to train his satellite death ray onto under-performers…?