[BITList] Fwd: [qsitecommunity] www.australiancurriculum.edu.au

[HUGH]

John,

The heart stops when one starts to read about the latest educational ploy, 
especially when I see it contains the word "tranche", but "curriculum" is 
correctly spelled, and I see the word "rigour" in it, so it can't be bad.  I 
wish them well in their enterprise.

When I started school in 1938, an elderly lady (she had grey hair and was 
called Miss Chalmers) said to us, "This is how to read," and we listened and 
learned very quickly how to read.  We'd read sentences from the blackboard 
in unison or be picked at random to read them from the book. Lesson 1 : "A 
cat sat on the mat.  It is a cat, not a rat.  It is a fat cat."  I wouldn't 
say "fat", but she didn't hold it against me.  The average classroom 
nowadays is a blaze of colour - posters everywhere.  And they sit at little 
tables, half of them with their backs to the front of the room, so teacher 
has to walk round the place all the time in case the wee ones get cricks in 
their necks.  We all faced the front, and the only distractions on the walls 
were the 1-12 times tables (in my dad's day it was 1-15), the alphabet in 
big letters, and the number diagrams - one dot for 1, two dots for 2, etc. 
I got G+ for reading and spelling (spelling in the first class, for God's 
sake), and G for writing, arithmetic and General Proficiency.  None of us 
ever knew what General Proficiency was, but I seem to have been good at it - 
by the time I left primary school I was VG at it.  My education wasn't 
fashionable by modern standards but, along with my classmates, I was 
literate and numerate by the age of  6 and a half, hence with a foot on the 
road towards educating myself.  All Oz needs is a batch of grey-haired 
spinster ladies.

Hugh.