Life, we decided around the Soup dinner table tonight, is rather like a marble-run right now.
Any 21st century parent is likely to recognise these contraptions with a shudder. Dozens of plastic tubes and gizmos and a handful of non-standard-sized marbles which will inevitably get lost, only to be tripped over when least expected. It takes an age to assemble a marble-run that connects correctly without too many dead ends, by which time the eager child who first clamoured to play with it has usually lost interest.
But putting the marbles in is rather satisfying. They start slowly but gain speed as they are processed by the wheels and loops, by the end of the run they are scattering in all directions.
And that’s what our lives are like. Dates and deadlines are hurtling towards us at near quantum speed, all from different directions. We compared diaries tonight and realised that double-bookings and indigestible jams of activities abound. Something, we declared, will have to Be Done.
Problem is, how do we take our eyes off the marbles coming out of the bottom for long enough to sort out what is going on at the top of the run?
And downsizing our adult lives is one thing - we both rather hanker for the quiet life and are happy to make excuses sometimes - but turning down social opportunities and enjoyable activities for our children is quite another thing. Much as it makes us feel as mean as Cinderella’s worst relatives, we’re coming to the conclusion that there may have to be a bit more ‘No’.
Please don’t get the impression that my kids are rushed from the school gate to go to a lesson in business Japanese, a bit of bassoon practice and time for a little handgliding tuition before bed. I limit it to a massive *two* extra-curricular regulars per child per week. But combine this with school friends’ birthday parties, play-dates (for want of a better phrase), library, homework, and fit it all around community commitments, household shopping, MOTs, dishwasher repairmen’s visits, oh and - don’t forget - any personal time for us parents - and there are weeks when they barely have time to blow the dust off their own neglected toyboxes.
How are we going to weed our way through this lot to a better work-life-school-home-play balance?
And without tears…
Quick question for you Mrs Soup…as a parent and blogger, what do you reckon to kids school blogs: should the spelling, etc all be corrected by the teacher before publishing or (if the pupils have done their best through self and peer assessment) to make it as good as they can is that okay? (In other words are mistakes alright…?)
Hello Bryan - (yes I am still here and trying to get back to posting!)
A blog is (usually) a genuine record of where a person is at that point - their emotions, their developmental stage and so on. It can be a valid tool in the future for reflective practice and for mesauring progress.
Altering it, either by someone else correcting it, or by coming back and changing it at a later date invalidates much of this. How would you tell, in print, what is the child’s work and what is the teacher’s? Would the child still feel a real sense of ownership?
Situations where it may be acceptable:
- using a blog to publish a piece of work, rather than a posting as such. It may be appropriate to see the work as ‘marked’ or as a ‘fair copy’
- differentiating between typing mistakes and spelling mistakes - this may be valid if the blog is to be a genuine record of a child’s developmental stage
- posting to a class blog rather than a personal blog - the teacher has the right to define the situation, the parameters, the ‘house rules’
- adding, perhaps in square brackets, or following the child’s posting, enough corrections or clarification to make a posting legible.
I cherish my children’s early writings, for all their strange lettering and intuitive spellings. They would lose all that makes them precious if the teacher had simply replaced them with their own neat and correct version.
Not - may I say - that every education professional’s postings are correct in themselves! I’m amused to see that at least one high-profile/status Education Professional Edublogger has a blind spot for a certain punctuation rule…
And many of my own sentence constructions are pretty tortuous…
Personally, I prefer the unedited posts where what the child writes is what is published. What do you correct if you edit it? The spelling? Punctuation? Sentence structure? Eventually it’s not the child’s work. It’s very demoralising to have someone constantly alter your efforts because what you’ve done isn’t good enough. Why not keep that for the esercise books?
And it’s not as though the teachers are getting the spelling/punctuation/grammar right all of the time as a browse around EduBuzz will tellyou!
An afterthought - perhaps where a sanitised version is wanted for some reason, it would be better as reported speech rather than purporting to be the child’s own words. Erin thought that…. Connor said the bit he liked best was….