Category Archives: School

Whither GP1?

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It seems a long time ago since I started this blog. My concerns at that stage seem so distant. Life has indeed moved on. It is over a year now since Tim (aka GP2) left school and Standard Grades, Highers, SQA, Curriculum for Excellence, Leaps, are now of no more than passing academic interest. Time for a round up.

So, Chris/GP1/Ginger left that fine academic institution that is Ross High School three years ago with a respectable assortment of Highers, Advanced Highers and various other SQA offerings. I can’t really say, hand on heart, that he ever quite got studying but hey, he did what he needed. We suggested he took a year out to figure out what he really wanted to do before moving on to more studying but he didn’t want to, so onwards it was. I think perhaps he couldn’t visualise the alternatives to the school-college route – it was a sort of comfort blanket that didn’t require too much thinking. LEAPS summer school (he didn’t really get that, either) was followed by Sport Science at Heriot Watt University.

Oh dear. Oh Heriot Watt – do you have no student support system that flags up when things are not going as they should? It was obvious to us by Christmas Continue reading →

Yesterday’s conversations No. 1

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“I’m in Aberdeen tomorrow” he said casually, as we drove home from the station. Nothing unusual about that – sometimes he’s working in Aberdeen several days a week.

“Oh,” I said, “what time will you be back?”

“Usual time. Maybe a bit later. I’m on the 4pm train.”

“What! We’re booked for 7pm. Don’t say you’ve forgotten.”

“Oh… Perhaps Continue reading →

T is for Trees

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Tara’s prompt this week is T. Just that, T. So I thought I’d show you some trees.

The twisted pines are behind the dunes at Yellowcraig in East Lothian. All these years that I’ve lived here and I’d never seen them before – we always go straight down to the beach at Yellowcraig and never wander around the back of the dunes. But last week I was helping GP2 with his project on sanddunes for Advanced Higher Geography. Not only did we measure across the dunes from the sea to the trees, we did zillions of quadrats so I had to learn to identify some plants that weren’t seaweeds. GP2 had to learn to identify some plants. We sat in the sunshine and counted and named plants together and afterwards we both agreed we’d enjoyed ourselves. This is not an activity I would ever have believed that I’d be doing with one of my offspring, let alone a willing, happy offspring.

We saw some spectacular strangler figs on our Big Holiday. We have dozens of photos of trees – that’s what you get when you go on holiday to the Australian rain forest – but I thought I should show you these. It’s difficult to get the scale – suffice to say Enormous! We also saw lots of palm trees but this one from Fiji was my favourite.

The day after chemo

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Chemo days are long. They start in the middle of the night, 6 hours before the appointment, when I have a lonely midnight feast with a handful of steroids. Middle of the night feast, of course, not midnight. Do you remember those midnight feasts when you were little when you and your friends would hide away a bundle of sugar-hit goodies, and of course it was a secret and your mum didn’t know, but then you couldn’t last until midnight? Either you tucked in to the goodies at 10 o’clock, torch under the blankets, or you woke up in the morning and it was all still sitting there.

Anyhow, back to the chemo. My appointments at the moment are Mondays, and have moved from 9am to 11am. The 11am bit means I can get up at 6 to take my tablets, rather more civilised than midnight. Why not 5? Unfortunately the Monday bit means I have to get my pre-chemo bloods done on Friday, three days ahead, rather than the preferred 24 hours before. The way this drip-drip poison works is to kill off every fast growing cell it can find. Subtle, eh? Fast growing cells include Continue reading →

SOAP

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Legend has it that teenagers have no affinity with soap. This is of course a complete fantasy, as any parent knows that modern teenagers must have at least one shower a day, preferably more, each involving a clean towel from the airing cupboard.  So I wonder is the acronym SOAP an ironic nod by the East Lothian Outdoor Education team to this proclivity for cleanliness? Or does it have more to do with that early morning whiff that must have hit all of them at some time when they’ve unzipped a tent stuffed with teenagers on a Duke of Edinburgh trip, to try and goad them into action?

Anyhow the Secondary Outdoor Adventure Programme run by the Outdoor Ed team is taking a group of ten Sixth Years from the county High Schools into the Scottish Highlands for a series of weekends over the course of this year. Maybe it was the attraction of building snowholes Continue reading →

Vintage – or maybe retro

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I keep having failed attempts to reboot my blog.  Unfortunately, it may have found new impetus from an entirely unwanted direction.  So just to cheer myself up, I thought I’d dig out something for this week’s Gallery – Vintage.

My father took this photograph of me (I’m the little one at the front) and my older sister and brother, just about to set off for school. It must have been roundabout 1960, when we lived in Kuala Lumpur.  Don’t you just love those school baskets?   We had cute little straw hats for going to church on Sundays.  And the sandals! I think the shoe shop was Batu Shoes.The car – a Zephyr, I think but I might well be wrong – is classic rather than vintage but let’s not quibble.

I’m not sure why I’m looking so cheerful in this picture. My earliest memories of school Continue reading →

University musings

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Is University education all set to become highly parochial?

  1. Fees of £9000 a year in England.  Currently free in Scotland.   Will any Scottish students ever go to university in England again?
  2. Something in the paper the other day about the low numbers of ethnic minority (or maybe it was AfroCaribbean) students at Oxbridge.  I bet there aren’t going to be many Scottish students applying for Oxford or Cambridge in the future.
  3. Are Scottish students the next ethnic minority?
  4. Why is funding being cut for Arts and Humanities courses?  Continue reading →

Let there be snow

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“Can I take the car tomorrow?”

Where?

“I need to get back to Uni.”

Just 18, he passed his test in July and already, of course, he’s a far better driver than his mum.  Never mind that the car is buried under a 3 ft blanket of snow and hasn’t moved since the weekend.  Don’t worry that all the roads are single track and covered in slush, with cars abandonned all over the place, and as soon as the plough goes through and clears the path new snow fills it in again.  So what if the AA has had 18,000 breakdown call outs and that the temperature is predicted to drop to record lows tonight?   Even the buses are struggling to reach the village.

The Forth Road Bridge was closed by snow for the first time in its life. The schools have been off all week and Continue reading →

Digging around

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I was recently pointed in the direction of this series of  videos by a friend.  There’s an archaeological dig going on in Orkney and the team are posting a daily update on YouTube.  Just the thing for the  EduBuzz community, if you haven’t spotted it already.  I’ve found it fascinating.

Orkney Island tomb dig

As an aside, Number 2 son did his work experience last year with a local archaeological consultancy.  He’s got no plans to be an archaeologist, as far as I know (and after all what does a mother know about these things?), but he is interested in things environmental and did have a great time with them. They looked after him really well.  He spent time in each of their departments, cleaning tiles, doing drawings, washing tiles, database searches, washing more tiles, and spent a day out on a job with one of the team. Before washing yet more tiles.  He loved it and came back buzzing each day. Just what work experience should be about!

Onwards and upwards

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Life has moved on in the Guineapig  Household this summer.  In fact, I was wondering if it was time for a name change but I’m really quite attached to Guineapigmum so I think I’ll stick with it for the time being.  The biggest change is that Number 1 son, GP1, is now in residence at one of those institutions where teenagers practice sleeping, drinking and spending their parents’ money.  Yes he’s now at university. It’s not quite as far afield as originally planned. He got cold feet at some point during the summer (it may well have been the point at which he hitched up with a new young lady) and changed his UCAS options. He’s now in halls somewhere on the outskirts of Edinburgh and learning to cook, drink (did I mention that?), run up phone bills and play. And he’s home almost every weekend.  Well, you get fed at home, don’t you?

He didn’t work quite hard enough during 5th year Continue reading →

Drifting thoughts

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I know that, as a responsible citizen with a fully paid up TV licence, I should have been watching the Prime Ministerial debates during the election campaign. And I did, I really did, listen to part of each of them on the kitchen radio  following the Guineapig family’s various Thursday evening jumping around activities in disparate parts of East Lothian.  But I only listened to part of them because on Thursday evening at 9.30pm Outnumbered came on the box.  The series is now finished, sadly.  Political debate v Outnumbered?  Scripts v improvisation? Adults arguing like children or children arguing like adults? No competition.

Anyhow, one of the best episodes of the election campaign was the one where the family discovers that Ben’s a whizz at chess.  It suits him because spear wielding knights can charge through the opposing army and lay waste in all directions while alien pawns come hurtling in from outer space.  As part of the discovery process there were dicussions about the relative merits of letting your child win as opposed to playing to win yourself.  Of course, when Ben trounced them all they all protested that they’d just let him win.  No, they didn’t fool the viewers.   It set me wondering, though, at what point I stopped playing GP2’s Scrabble hand as well as my own and started playing for my own survival.  I’m just about hanging on to my winning record, but only just.  And when did I start finding the crossword has been done by one of the children before I get there?

There are so many other events that slipped past me unobserved.  Continue reading →

Speaking up for education

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education-changeI was struck, at the school bus meeting, not by an angry parent but by the general negativity in the room. Scattered amongst the “what about your expenses” and “you’re not listening to us” comments were mutterings about the Curriculum for Excellence. Why, people were asking, was money being wasted on this scheme that people clearly didn’t want? Now, I can’t profess to knowing a huge amount about the CfE  but from what I do know, I wish it had been introduced early enough to benefit my two guineapigs, now in the closing stages of their school careers.  I think there’s a huge selling job still to be done.

I’ve always thought that it must be extremely difficult to introduce real change in education, change beyond tinkering around the edges.  The problem is that everyone thinks that their experiences were the best.  They want the system they know for their children.  The popular pundits tend to bolster this view. And children are in education for such a short space of time.  Yes, I know it seems forever on that first day when they walk up the road in their smart new uniform, clutching their superman lunchbox and you’re choking back the tears, but believe me, it zips by.  Continue reading →

On the buses

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schoolbus

Long, long ago, in my student days, I went to a talk by David Owen at Strathclyde University.  It was around the time that the Gang of Four were breaking away from the Labour Party to form the Social Democratic Party.  It was the first time I’d been to a public lecture by someone of his stature and I remember I was quite blown away by it.  He may not have been the orator of Michael Foot’s standing, but it was still very powerful stuff.  At around that time I also went to a rally where Shirley Williams, always one of my favourite politicians, was speaking.  I had friends who were doing Politics, you see, and they made sure I went to all the right events.  Anyhow, Shirley Williams was preceded by a local Councillor who introduced her with a rambling speech.  When her turn came, it was immediately clear that Williams was in another league. She may not have been glamorous but she oozed charisma. I’ve no idea now what she said, but I do remember the enormous gulf between the presentation skills of this leading politician and the local councillor.  There was no mistaking which of the two had made it to the top.

This memory returns to me every time one of our local councillors makes another gaffe and I try to remind myself that they’re surely doing their best and that it must be a truly thankless job being a local politician.  For instance, there was the issue over the swimming pools when my two were small.  Continue reading →

East Coast FM 87.7

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Tuesday evening found us all glued to the radio listening to Sam, one of GP2’s classmates, in his new guise as DJ.  East Lothian’s new community radio, East Coast FM 87.7 was launched on Monday, run entirely by volunteers and with a four week licence.  Monday might have had Fish and the Red Hot Chilli Pipers to launch proceedings but Tuesday evening had Sam presenting a 2 hour slot for Ross High School and then his mum, Sally, with two hours of folk music.  Of course we asked for autographs the following night at the brass Christmas concert.

Sam, I have to say, has been excited about this for weeks. There has been quite a long preparatory lead in that he and Sally have been involved in during what spare time they have Continue reading →

Neglect, n.

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Neglect.  As in My blog has fallen into a state of neglect.  I haven’t written anything. It has accumulated spam comments (now deleted, I hope).  There are real comments, including some from Reluctant Memsahib, one of my favourite reads, and I haven’t responded.   I’ve been busy. I’ve been away. I have lots of excuses.  I don’t really like excuses, though.   My sister has taken me to task. “Why doesn’t your blog work? It won’t load” she asked.   I think it’s sulking.

It’s not that there’s a shortage of material.  The holiday, for instance, is begging to be told.  Stories about the fading American lady in Fiji Continue reading →

I’m not nervous!

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So, 10am I dropped off a jittery, jumpy, couldn’t-sit-still GP2 for his first exam.  “I’m not nervous” he said.  Hmm.  By the time we got to the school he had my stomach turning somersaults.  Maths.

It started yesterday, 3pm.  “Mum! My calculator’s broken”.  “It’ll be the battery” she said sagely and spent the next 20 minutes extricating one of those tiny silver buttons, the sort you never have spares of in the house, from an impossibly tight casing.  Dashed up to town for spares.  Dashed home to insert.  It still didn’t work.  Emergency phone call to GPD to purchase new calculator on his way home.

“I can’t do this question! How do I work this out? We’ve not done this.”

GPM thinks: Continue reading →

In denial

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Three weeks and counting…

Nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag

GPM:  “That’s 3 weeks. THREE weeks. Well OK 23 days and a few hours until Higher English.  You won’t be able to put it off any longer then.”

GP1:  “I kno-o-ow.”

Nag. Nag, nag, nag, nag.

“So have you learned that poem? Read that book? Written out those quotes?”

“I’ll do it tomorrow.  Sigh.”

Nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag.

Bup-a-lup goes MSN.

Nag, nag, nag, nag.

I think I’m turning into a moany old nag.

And I wish someone would move that wall that’s making lumps on my head.

Nag, nag, nag. Nag, nag.

It must be summer – exams are upon us.  It’ll all be over soon. Thank goodness. Until next year, that is.

And until then…

…nag, nag, nag, nag…

Bup-a-lup

Geo what?

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Subject choice time looms for GP2, my 14 year old son.  He has to pick three subjects plus Maths and English to study for Higher.  “What do you want to do when you leave school?” everyone asks.  “I don’t know!”  he wails.  “Earn lots of money.”   Don’t we all.  Did you know what you wanted to do at 14? 

Anyhow, Chemistry and Physics are firmly at the top of the list with Geography and Graph Comm (Technical Drawing to you, I think) tying in third place.   “What can you do with Geography?” he asked.  Geochemist, geophysicist, geologist, oceanographer, meteorologist, cartographer, accountant (OK, I didn’t tell him that one), teacher, search for oil…  lots of interesting things.   

What about Graph Comm?  We came up with engineers of various sorts, architect, accountant (no, not this time either)….  lots of interesting things. 

“Go and speak to your teachers” I said.  “Ask them.  Speak to that nice careers man.  The one who plays the clarinet.”

So he burrowed about on the internet and found various things.  I was burrowing about today for some work I’m doing (honest!) and came across this, which I thought you might like:-

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/jxbIJH4fTYo" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

And even though he's a teenager, I like to think I still have some idea of the things that interest him most ;-) , so I'll give a gentle prod in the Geography direction.  His choice, though.  Ooops - the font's gone funny. :oops:
 
 

 

😀

 

Teacher speke

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Parents’ Evening could have been worse, I suppose, but you do have to read between the lines.  A little conversation ensued on my Facebook page, to help me in the interpretation.  I though you might all like to join in.

Facebook quotes:-

“I used to get comments like, easily distracted, can do it if he makes the effort. Not to mention the poor splelling 😉 “
“My best was for p.e. – J.  would benefit from a more active approach to this subject”
“Teachers’ code. Lazy ass who needs a kick up the backside. But we are not allowed to say stuff like that.”
“Teachers’ code: I know a teacher who refers to the pupils as E.L.F.s (evil little f…ers) Made us laugh lots.”
So was the “There’s been some improvement” code for Continue reading →