by
faffajane
@ 04/04/07 - 12:52:03
http://bringontherevolution.blog.co.uk/
The above link, courtesy of Paddy, has had me thinking over a few things in the last 24 hours.
Now I am not normally a political person. I have my views, I rarely share as they might offend. Like religion I tend to steer away from discussing politics. We all have views, we all have opinions and sometimes trying to have a discussion about them tends to cause upset or makes someone angry along the way.
Today I am going to express some of my thoughts and feelings. You may not agree, that is fine, it is only my point of view.
1) Carers - As some of you know my mother gave up work to look after her mother. She took early retirement. Her house is small and Nan lives/sleeps/eat/drinks in mum's living room. There is a small kitchen where mum spends most of her day washing the clothes and bedsheets that nan has messed or wet. A careworker comes in 3 times a day to help change nan. Nan gets attendance allowance (which by the way is under threat of being taken away)but not the full whack because of a pension she gets from my grandfathers firm as well as the state pension. Mum gets her own pension and that is all. Out of that she has to pay for the careworker, pay her mortgage and insurances, council tax, shopping, bills. There is never enough money.
Mum is a proud person, so is nan. Mum reluctantly applied for benefits that carers should be able to get and got turned down. She hasn't reapplied, she is too proud to do so, her theory being if she was entitled then she would get. We have since found out that if she did reapply she probably would get because almost 90% of people that apply the first time are turned down and have to appeal.
Why?
If they are entitled to it in the first place why not give it to them, why make people jump through hoops for it?
why make the forms so difficult to fill out?
We are talking about two people here who have paid NI contributions and taxes all their working lives. Two people who never, ever have claimed from society. Like thousands of other people out there, good honest working citizens, they have never ever asked for help from anyone yet when they need it the most, they have to fill out forms which are difficult to understand and if not filled out correctly could be classed as a given misleading information - basically they are shafted. Yet if mum had put Nan in a home it would have cost the state thousands of pounds to look after her (Nan has no assets), a cost which mum is saving them by looking after her herself.
And don't get me started on people who have to sell their homes to pay for their care or the fact that people who have been happily married for years are separated because there is only room for one loved one not both!
2) Education Over the years successive Governments have made changes to the national curriculum that just defies belief. I am all for children getting a variable education so they don't get bored but there are better ways of doing it. Children are taught several ways of adding up, subtracting, multiplying, dividing (though to do long division nowadsys you need to do all of the others to get the answer trust me). Not enough time in primary school is spent on learning times tables. Some schools I admit still try and do it parrot fashion, but others find there isjust not enough time to go over it. Lots of methods of doing basic sums, but not enough time is given to allowing children to learn one method till they can do it automatically before moving onto another method. Confusion often reigns in maths classes in primary school. We have a lot of Polish children arriving in our school. Most of them start school in their own country at the age of 7. Remember in some parts of our country children can start full time education at the age of three. Some of the Polish children that come to us may have only been in school for a year yet their mental maths ability is far superior to the ability of our children. A maths test I did with the class a few days ago, 40 multiplication sums to be completed in two minutes. 3 members of the class managed to do 20 in them 2 mins, majority only did 15, a few only 10. The polish children though did all 40 and got them all correct in that 2 minutes!
English - again they don't get to spend enough time on the basics before they move on to more complex work. You teach a child to read using one method when the Education department comes along and says it isn't working now teach this method. A lot of children leave school, not being able to understand what they read, that is if they can read at all. How to construct a sentence, the amount of children that cannot do something as simple as put a capital letter and punctuation in the correct place yet we expect them to know how to right a jounalistic report, a myth, a legend, a non fiction report by the time they leave primary school. The confusion between the words are and our - this is are house instead of this is our house. Confusion between the spellings stationery and stationary. Basic things like this are rarely taught and if they are, then they are not reinforced.
Children do not have fun at schools nowadays, they are not allowed to be children. They cannot play. Running around in some school playgrounds is banned because someone might get hurt and we might be sued as a result. Children are always having to meet targets. As teachers we are always target setting children and filling out paperwork or crying into our teas because only half the class managed to meet their target this year!
It has got worse, it will get worse. If you managed to read this far then thank you for taking the time to do so. I could go on about other things that really irritate but for now this will do.
