RFK

Today is the 50th anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's assasination.

I remember it well, because it happened on my 21st birthday. At the time I was in my first year of teaching at Goondiwindi State School, with my year 5 class of 44 students.

My teaching colleagues had taken me to one of the local pubs and shouted me many beers. In those days, drinking in pubs was not allowed until age 21, so these were my first legal drinks.

The news of the assasination came as I was dealing with my first real hangover. It shocked me into alert sobriety immediately, and also into deep sadness.

Bobby Kennedy was for me, a symbol of hope and optimism. I knew enough about US politics at the time, to harbour the hope that if Kennedy got into the White House, maybe my impending national service would not eventuate.

I had already been called up in my second year at Kedron Park Teachers' College. As a teacher in training at the time, I had been deferred to allow the completion of one year of teaching. I had plenty of time to contemplate American politics and how they were likely to effect my future. The letter from the Department of Labour and National Service said I had a "liability to serve", wording that I found completely bizarre. Looking back on it, they were pretty bizarre times.

Kennedy had just won the Californian primary, and was gathering momentum over the establishment Democrat nominee, Hubert Humphrey. Nixon went on the win the election in 1968 after Humphrey became the Democrat nominee when the Chicago convention imploded..

Jack Newfield, writing in Robert Kennedy : A Memoir. (1969) believed RFK had the potential to create a different future -

He was 42 when he was killed. He was just finding his own voice... I think he would have been elected in '68. And I think Robert Kennedy in the White House, instead of Richard Nixon, is day and night. We would not have had years more of death in Southeast Asia. We would not have had  Watergate. We would not have had a crook as vice president, like [Spiro] Agnew. We would not have overthrown the democratically elected government of Chile. The world would have been very different, if not for the veto of a gunman.

And maybe 200 Australian Nashos wouldn't have died in Vietnam.

With Kennedy, died the hope and optimism of a generation of Americans and the future of many young Australians.

Compare the grace, dignity and compassion of  Bobby Kennedy with the behaviour of the current incumbent in the White House. 

We will not see his like again.

The Crushing

The first ten years of my life, gentle reader,  were spent in cane country.

Hearing the Go-Betweens performing Cattle and Cane takes me back. 

On the rare occasions these days when I return north during the crushing, the smell of the cane fires, bagasse and rotting mangoes instantly transports me back to my boyhood.. (It’s well known that the olfactory sense is most closely associated with memory).

Sugar prices are low, so the 2018 Crushing isn’t getting off to a stellar start.

Whatever - growing up west of Mackay* in a sugar town was an amazing experience.

The crushing was the drum-beat of the rhythm of life back then. The mill, with its noise, smoke and steam was at the end of the road that went past our place. Cane grew on two sides of our house, and cane was carted up and down the road daily during the crushing.

We would chase the blackened cinders from the spectacular fires - not always a good idea. I ran backwards into the tankstand doing this once. Only once. By the time the gash in the back of my head healed, I'd understood that my eyes were at the front of my head for a reason.

My best mate came off a very large cane farm, and every now and again I would be allowed to spend a few days with him. We gave the farm machinery a pretty fair workout - but survived.

His dad owned a an Essex Super Six. It wasn't road registered, so we drove it all over the farm. I learned to drive that thing at age 10. My parents had no idea.....

The vivid colours, the energetic growth created by the rainfall and heat, and the Maltese, Italian and Kanaka kids that I went to school with conspired to create an environment unique in this country. 

The lyrics of the song put it better than I can -

I recall a schoolboy coming home

through fields of cane

to a house of tin and timber

and in the sky

a rain of falling cinders

from time to time

the waste memory-wastes

I recall a boy in bigger pants

like everyone

just waiting for a chance

his father's watch

he left it in the showers

from time to time

the waste memory-wastes

I recall a bigger brighter world

a world of books

and silent times in thought

and then the railroad

the railroad takes him home

through fields of cattle

through fields of cane

from time to time

the waste memory-wastes

the waste memory-wastes

further, longer, higher, older

The railroad didn't take me home.

Instead it took me 1000kms south to boarding school in 1961.

My parents moved south, and I never returned to live in cane country.

My heart, gentle reader, is still there......

*The locals use the Scottish pronunciation.

  

Warbirds

RAAF C-29J Spartan

And now for something completely different.

Politics is more boring than usual, the media is full of rubbish reporting about some wedding somewhere, and I've had it up to here with the self contradictory drivel routinely emanating from Washington.

Therefore, gentle reader, I'll post about warbirds.

There is an annual event in God's Waiting Room (Toowoomba) called the David Hack meet. It's supported by local Rotary, the earnings go to a range of charities, and is named in honour of David, whose passions were cars and photography, and whose life was cut short in 1998 by Non Hodgkins Lymphoma (Leukaemia).

I have attended for the last few years, and displayed my MX5, but more about that over at MX5 Mutterings. 

This post features some of the warbirds on display. I'm not as au fait with warbirds as I am with motor cars, so forgive me, gentle reader, if I get some of the identifications wrong.

Better still - comment and set me straight if you see an error.

Whatever you do, don't mention Vietnam.........

North American T-6 Texan

Yak - 11

North American T-28 Trojan

Kiwi Harvard

CAC Winjeel

Wirraway motor. Noisy when it's running.

All the details......

And that is what it looks and sounds like in motion.

Baby and Bathwater

A basic form of cashing-in on NAPLAN. The media are much more sophisticated.

 The National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) has been in the news of late.

The program was introduced in 2008, three years after I had retired as a school principal, so my personal experience relates to encounters with it from the point of view as a consultant - an adviser with no direct responsibilities for student results.

In addition, I was focused on students with disabilities, so my perspective was a mite unconventional.

Whatever, I have certainly developed some opinions based on my experience.

My first encounter influenced by NAPLAN was when I was supporting a student with a physical impairment enrolled in a small (15 student) rural school. The principal asked me how she would go about securing permission for this student to be exempted from the test.

When I enquired as to her reasons for this, it became clear that she was worried that his under-performance on the test would lower the average of her whole school performance. This was a real issue for small school principals. When you have an enrolment of 15, one bad performance makes a great deal of difference to the whole school result.

When your enrolment is say, 500, not so much.

NAPLAN was always an issue for small schools.

 Given my post-2005 experience in the Queensland system, I also noticed other issues associated with the emphasis on literacy and numeracy demanded by NAPLAN. The curriculum is crowded, and teachers generally prioritise areas that are assessed.

So do school administrators. If school staffing resources are prioritised (as they always are) literacy and numeracy take precedence. This is reflected in the way specialist teachers who operate outside the literacy/numeracy area treated. Music and Art teachers find themselves used as relief teachers when push comes to shove as a result of staffing prioritised. Their curriculum areas are inevitably dismissed because they are not part of the program. This is despite the fact that for many students, art and music provide the real colour and movement in the curriculum and the best chance for enduring engagement.

I’m aware of a number of specialist teachers who felt so abused by the practice of disregarding their subject areas that they left the profession in disgust.

Then, of course, there’s the media’s use of the NAPLAN data. They exploit it mercilessly. It is, after all, God’s gift to declining circulations. Everybody wants to read about the relative performances of their child and their school.

There have been calls for the abolition of the scheme. To assess whether this has any merit, it’s important to consider the real reason for its introduction. My belief is that they were political, rather than educational.

The government in power at the time wanted to show that it was DOING SOMETHING ABOUT EDUCATION. When you think about it, NAPLAN was supposed to answer a question that nobody who knew anything about teaching and learning actually asked. Schools and teachers know how they are performing. They are told so every day. Schooling and teaching are the most public and visible of professions.

The league tables that have developed on the back of media coverage of the results have had an enormously destructive influence on schools, teachers and students. It is impossible to identify one positive outcome of these tables except for the above-mentioned boost for the media.

But to terminate the program on the basis of these negatives? I wouldn’t do that. The problem is not the collection of data, but the way in which it has been misused. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The solution is relatively simple – make the data available only to those directly involved – the students and parents – the teachers and the apparatchiks in the state systems.  The media could be kept at bay by press releases that provided system-wide data, but left school data out of it, to prevent school by school comparisons. Real penalties could be applied to any individual or organisation that leaked information.

This should remove the pressure cooker environment that has developed around the program.

There would be wailing and gnashing of teeth from the media of course – I can see the headlines about “denial of accountability” and “cover-up”, but if all sides of politics supported an embargo on league tables, the political sting would be removed.

Let’s have a reassessment of NAPLAN – not in terms of what data is collected, but what is done with it. Leave the data in the hands of those best positioned to use it rather than misuse it. Use it to inform resource allocation, teaching strategies, and staff support, not to score political points and set one system against another.

Let’s make sure NAPLAN doesn’t become Napalm. I saw what that stuff did in Vietnam.