Education

Both my parents were teachers, my bride is a brailler and teacher of the blind, and one of my sisters teaches music.

I have a commitment, therefore, to education, and to its function in society.

Hopefully, I've learnt something about the activity, having been up to my ears in it since 1968. That's 44 years and counting.

As a result, I've developed a set of beliefs about learning and teaching based on what I've seen and done since 1968.

The most fundamental of these understandings is that teaching is about change, initially in individuals, and as a consequence in society. I belong to the group of teachers that believes that beyond passing on society's beliefs and mores, a teacher has a role in making the world a better place by encouraging students to reflect on what they see, and if they believe it can be improved, they should set out to do so.

Good teaching is essentially subversive, something that becomes clearly evident whenever totalitarians seek and gain power. Teachers are usually the first to be controlled or eliminated. 

Obviously, working with disabled kids since 1970, has convinced me that for those disadvantaged through impairment, education is one way of removing barriers to best quality of life.

Hence, I've always worked hard to make kids with disabilities as independent as possible. Ultimately, the amount of real independence they develop is directly proportional to later quality of life, defined as power to make and shape their own lives. The less they have to rely on others, the better their lives.

Which brings me to the image above. The difference with kids with disabilities is that you're teaching basic skills as well as the capacity to be critical. The sequence (skills first) is vital.

Read it carefully.

I reckon Chris Hedges has nailed it.

iLead iTeach iLearn

I’ve just returned from a conference of special educators. Once upon a time, before I “retired” attending conferences was a fairly regular experience.

Not any more.

This is the first professional conference I’ve been to in about five years. I’ve attended training sessions, simply to stay up to date – mostly with technology.

Practically everything once dealt with by the bureaucracy is now “Do it yourself” – using the IT support that underpins most routine processes.

It will be interesting to see how well this proceeds after 30^th June, when the new state government has terminated the contracts of all the IT support staff.

But I digress…

This one was different, and to be honest I shelled out the hefty registration fee because I was glad of the opportunity to meet up with old colleagues, and spend a bit of time with like-minded people. Most of them continue to be passionate about their work, and given the barriers presented by the fading of the social justice agenda (some of it as a result of the political drift to the Right), they need real guts and determination to stay on the job.

This conference was an assembly of leaders (principals and heads of special education services), so for me it was a chance to renew some collegiate associations. It was gratifying to note many teachers that I have mentored down through the years are now principals.

My parents were both teachers, and I ran into one forty plus bloke who remembered being taught (in year 2) by my mum in the early sixties. He remembered her very clearly, described her as the most compassionate person he ever encountered, and told this yarn to illustrate.

Apparently the year 1 and 2 kids in my mum’s class used to have a “sleepy time” for about half an hour at the end of the school day.

This doesn’t happen these days, but looking back on it, it probably wasn’t a bad practice. One afternoon, one of the kids (indigenous, and from a family that was doing it tough) went completely to sleep. At bell time (3pm) mum didn’t wake him, but let all the others out whilst he slept on.

When he did wake up, he was disoriented and upset, so mum took him home with my two younger sisters, ran him a hot bath, gave him a feed, and drove him back to his home with some clean clothes on. This was straightforward, given that the school residence where my family lived was next door to the school.

I was innocent of this, being at boarding school at the time, but when I checked with my sisters, they remembered it.

These days, of course, acting that way out of basic compassion would be unthinkable.

It rings true, because I remember mum doing something similar when I was about six or seven, although on this earlier occasion, she sent one little aboriginal lad home wearing my clothes. I was not impressed.

He was right about my mother. She couldn’t bear not helping if she saw someone in difficulty. Sometimes it got her into trouble.

I must be getting on. I was the oldest person at the conference, and there were only four principals in the room of my generation, who had come through the specialist training that I had.

The scary thing is that no-one is being trained in these specialist areas these days. The organisation is slowly losing its collective memory.

Not a hell of a lot has changed in our system. There are still issues in education involving the on-going clash between politics and pragmatics.

I can attend these things now with a wonderful lightness of being – I’m not a principal anymore, and can be empathetic without having to deal with the day to day challenges of incumbency.

As someone said on the last day – the work these people do with disabled kids is vital. You can't (for example) have an 85% success rate at crossing the road.

I salute them.

Ouch

Not a lot happens at Toowoomba, and when it does, it's rarely caught on video. This is the exception that proves the rule. Only damage done was to the machinery.

L Plates

One furry Queenslander shows his opinion of Cando.  

It didn’t take long for the new Queensland government to get offside with a range of people.

First, of course, there was the issue of the Premier’s Literary Awards. That’s no biggie, I guess, although as a self-published author, I take a dim view of writers being treated as collateral damage in the culture wars. This was very much an ideology driven decision. It makes buggerall difference to the bottom line.

More recently, we’ve seen the Toowoomba Chronicle issue a strongly-worded editorial about the cancellation of improvements to the Warrego highway just to the west of Toowoomba.

As the editorial put it (under the heading “Voters feel betrayed”). “Voters expect to see results in their electorates, not excuses. Forget what Labor did or did not promise in the past, you’re in power now gents, and the pressure is well and truly on”.

That would be OK; the new government has the right to manage their budget. Trouble is, they can’t get their story straight. On the one hand, the Premier talks about “maxing out the credit card” (despite the fact that the work was funded in the forward estimates). 

On the other, the local member (Trevor Watts - Toowoomba North) declared on an interview on WIN the evening of the announcement, that providing four lanes through Charlton would cause bottlenecks on the western approaches to Toowoomba. This sounds strange, given that approaches from the north, south and east are all four lanes. Perhaps the compass orientation has something to do with it? Maybe Trevor, with his valuable experience running pubs and nightclubs has expertise in road building that he’s been hiding under a bushel.

Then of course, there’s the fact that a number of contractors involved in the planning of the project heard about the cancellation first on ABC radio. They’ll be laughing all the way to the bank, of course, as their contracts are already signed, and they’ll be paid handsomely for doing absolutely nothing. Now that's the way to save the taxpayer's money!

Other signs that the new administration is driven by ideological spin, rather than pragmatics include the following –

Disbanding of Greg Wither’s Queensland's Office of Climate Change, an agency that was no longer politically correct in the new dispensation, but with a bit of lateral thinking, could have been renamed and put to work, for example, in assisting the planning for many of the new mining developments on the horizon. Given the imbroglio that has developed around the Galilee basin project, Campbell looks as if he needs all the help he can get on this one.

(In case Rupert’s firewall gets in the way, Google “Burke 'stops clock' on Gina Rinehart's Alpha coal mine in Galilee Basin by: Sarah Elks”)

Michael Caltabiano, the new DG of Queensland Transport and Main Roads (defeated LNP candidate for Chatsworth in 2006) has already got most of his department offside by insisting that all staff call him “Mister” on day one. He’s obviously got a bit to learn about what Queenslanders think about people who have tickets on themselves.

This same DG also insisted that he personally approve all travel requests. That protocol lasted about two days as “Mister” Caltabiano slowly disappeared behind his “in” tray. 

Then, of course, there’s the amazing money-saving initiatives trumpeted on the websites of every state agency. They include printing in black and white only, double-sided printing and photocopying, electronic payslips, plants to be removed, newspaper subscriptions cancelled, and no expenditure on furniture or office equipment.

That will save a motza. Now if Cando is fair dinkum about savings, how about selling the state government jet? I reckon it would take a great deal of double-sided copying and indoor plant hire to add up to the fuel bill and pilot salaries for this piece of indulgence. After all, Cando has railed against its use during the election campaign.

(For the firewall – “Campbell Newman's travel jet jibe against Bligh boomerangs by: Rosanne Barrett”)

They’ve also run into trouble already with a couple of election promises. The standard electricity tariff, which Newman promised would be frozen, will actually rise.

He’s blaming the carbon levy, of course. I wonder how he missed the news that a price was being put on carbon before the election. Perhaps because he was busy telling us that he’d freeze car rego costs.

That hasn’t happened either.

Again, I’ll be charitable. They still have their “L” plates on.

Dog is Love

Bella is my sister's dog. We mind her when they go away. She likes cars.

This piece is from yesterday's Weekend Australian magazine. Author is Phillip Adams.

I'm posting it because it is a delightfully whimsical treatment of the topic canine.

I hope you enjoy it.

The dog in the pic is Bella. She's not my dog. After owning a series of Heelers down through the years our current urban location makes further involvement with Heelers impossible - more's the pity.

They're my favourite breed.

Asked to write an intro to a book on dogs. Got me thinking about them again. Not that they're ever far from my mind.

The first column I remember writing, about 200 years ago, was about a dog who followed me on my bike along the rutted, dusty roads to Eltham High. A beloved bitzer who gave dignity to the unfortunate term mongrel. Mongrel? A derogatory word - yet as fine a breed as the most pure-bred and patrician pooch. Which all too often is a canine fashion statement doomed to be dumped in the death rows of dog pounds once the fashions change.

(To deviate briefly. It is greatly to Australia’s credit that we are a mongrel nation. None of that Aryan or ethnic purity for us. We benefit from hybrid vigour. Every race and religion - as mixed up as the flora in our multi-horticultural society.)

I regard dogs and trees as superior beings to humans. Trees are reliable and beautiful. They give us shade, timber and oxygen - and the paper on which our books and this journal are published. And, unless set ablaze by terrorist arsonists with the WMDs that come in a matchbox, they also store carbon. Give trees citizenship, I say. Give' em the vote. Governments of oaks, elms and eucalypts would be a huge improvement.

Ditto for dogs. Since that first bitzer I’ve had dozens, mostly mongrels, all friends. As reliable as trees, but with a sense of humour. 

Some were gifts, others refugees who just turned up at the farm. A few would die from snakebite, one was killed by a kanga, but mostly they had good lives and died of old age. All intelligent, loyal and sweet of nature. Devoid of vanity. They taught me a lot - particularly how to live in the moment. A few taught me to chase sticks but I'm still trying to learn to wag my tail. It’s not for nothing that dog is god backwards.

Perhaps He put them on Earth to keep an eye on us, to appeal to the better angels of our being. Perhaps they are angels, wingless and furry ones. With fleas. (Well Perhaps dogs are angels, wingless and furry ones. With fleas why not? The standard-issue angel resembles a human chook.)

Certainly the farm's surviving dogs - one-eyed Tommy and his son Squire - retain a degree of spirituality, despite rolling in cow dung and chasing rabbits. Looked into the eyes of an adoring dog lately? God is love? So is dog.

There's no denying that some dogs, judged in human terms at least, seem more demonic than angelic. Ask Lindy Chamberlain - or people in the bush besieged by wild dogs that tear the throats from their lambs. But let us remember that every dog on Earth - and there are hundreds of millions of them - descended from the grey wolf. Every breed is a result of human intervention. We've been designing dogs for specific purposes for 15,000 years - from the poodle to the Pekingese, the Jack Russell to the Alsatians beloved of the Nazis. Many of the wild dogs on our place were bred for pig-hunting - and went AWOL. So canine criminality is as much our fault as those poor, preposterous, powder-puff pooches created for the aristocratic lap.

While I'm writing an intro for a book about dogs, it's also about people who try to free the dogs dumped by humans on death row. Give them hope and a home. Many puppies are mass-produced in appalling puppy farms, pumped out of bitches in circumstances not much different to the factory farming of penned pigs and poultry, producing stressed and neurotic animals.

Meanwhile, ever greater numbers of unwanted dogs are being "put down", to employ the approved euphemism. Australia has one of the world's highest rates of capital punishment for entirely innocent animals.

Hundreds of thousands of dogs are executed per annum. So, think before you buy. Talk to a pet rescue organisation.

Visit a pound. Get a pre-owned dog - and save it from the needle. You will be amply rewarded. Try www.petrescue.com.au

Let’s Buggerup Rupert’s Firewall

Remember Buga-up? This crew used to alter billboards in very constructive ways.

I’m not sure if they’re still in operation – they should be.

I’ve always found subversion of the corporate world appealing, although never have I personally been involved in it.

Given the liberating effect of semi-retirement, and more time available these days, its appeal looms large.

Guerrilla tactics – asymmetric warfare – whatever label you care to apply, is almost always effective when it targets large unwieldy conventionally organised structures. It worked well for the Vietnamese forty years ago.

One structure that is begging to be buggered up is Rupert’s firewall. Given the crap that’s daily posted on the Fart of the Nation, it really deserves its comeuppance.

The irony in this is, of course, that said crap becomes free to browsers. I comfort myself with the thought that much of what is posted is so biased that it deserves to be held up as an example of the depths to which our print media in this country has descended.

The method is simple.

We would need seven bloggers – one for each day of the week. Each would buy a copy of TFOTN* on a different day. Blogger 1 would buy the Weekend edition, blogger 2, Monday’s, blogger 3 Tuesday’s and so on.

Each would post their daily list of stories. To give you an example, the weekend FOTN list would look something like this:

Page 1 – 2^nd June 2012

PM told: migrants or the mine – Dennis Shanahan and Joe Kelly

Secret ‘war’ with China uncovered – Brendan Nicholson

Bonita Mabo’s call to women – Greg Callaghan

Cabinet split as Crean lashes ‘hasty’cattle ban – Hedley Thomas

The list could be posted page by page. You then do a Google search with the whole title including the by-line. Try it with the list above.

The whole article (including pics) is available – no firewall. The firewall does operate if you link from a blog, but the Google search circumvents this.

So who out there wants to volunteer to be responsible for a day? I’ll do the weekend edition – I buy it for Phillip Adam’s article in the magazine anyway. Pick your day and let me know. You can then email the list of titles and by-lines and I'll post daily on this blog, or maybe set up a different website for the purpose.

Today’s front page is true to form, by the way – three out of four stories biased against the government.

It’s about time the monopoly power and bias of News Limited was targeted.

*The Fart of the Nation

Stop Go

In the last couple of days I've driven about 1000km on the Warrego highway.

I've also spent plenty of time parked on that same road behind traffic controllers. Working it out, the time involved was about two hours all up.

In other words, for two hours I was paid good money to sit on my backside. I think that's referred to as a loss of productivity.

The whole highway is under repair, and the damage is a consequence of exploding mine and exploration traffic which has well and truly buggered the road, most of it built across black soil country.

I've followed all manner of trucked machinery along this road, and actually watched the surface move and squirm under the massive tonnage of trucked dongas, drilling rigs, and all manner of gear heading for the Surat basin.

So who's paying for the repairs?

You and me - the Aussie taxpayer.

Our tax dollar is subsidizing the billion dollar earnings of the miners through making good the damage they do to local infrastructure.

It's about time the "user pays" principle was applied to these cowboys.