29 Jan 10 - Sam’s schooling

By Lou: As I understand it, in Queensland there are basically two ways to formally educate the child who doesn’t attend a day school: home schooling or distance education. The former is usually for people who have a philosophical objection to the state curriculum and who are prepared to outline their own curriculum to the satisfaction of the Education Board. Bugger that. We have opted to enrol Sam in a school of distance education which for a fee, provides an enormous amount of assistance and resources (Sam has a big drawer in the car dedicated to school which is relatively speaking a substantial component of our get up).

To get the ball rolling there was a teleconference chaired by the teacher for the tutors to give a run down on the year. While Craig and Sam chased blue tongue lizards I fed my 50c into the public telephone booth at Mungo National Park, dialled an 1800 number, perched on a plastic chair provided for smokers and scribbled down 2 pages of notes. It was a whole new world. It reminded me of my first lecture at Uni.

So how did the first day of school go? Oh My Lordy. I couldn’t get my head around it so Sam got an early cut. Each day he is expected to do 60 minutes of Maths, 90 minutes of English and 60 minutes of CLC (Combined Learning Curriculum which is everything other than Maths and English). I’m told that on average a kid in a regular classroom gets 7 minutes a day of one-on-one time with the teacher. Sam has to cop 210 minutes one-on-one time with his mother. Needless to say it has been very trying for both him and me. I had naively expected to spend about an hour a day, supervising the filling in of a couple of worksheets and listening to him read. But it’s full-on teaching. By the time I factor in breaks (he has the concentration span of a flea) it’s 5 hours a day! This was a rude shock to our sense of holiday. I am trying to skim over things once I know he’s got the concept, but so far he’s needed the time. Also we try to use car travel time to play maths games but he is still expected to produce work for assessment so for now we are putting in the hard yards.

Every day there is a ½ hour audio lesson conducted that we try to tune into when we have internet coverage as we can use Skype to call in for free. The teacher is alone at Charters Towers and then the other 8 or so students are sitting at their individual homes in that district. It’s quite entertaining and has been a good experience for Sam to hear his classmates but not be able to pull faces at them or poke them or make silly noises. Instead the distractions we have to contend with are sun or rain or wind or a passing canoeist or a paddock of cows or seabirds copulating.



By Craig: Well as Principle of the newsomesdash school can I just say, Bloody Hell. A school day starts with an 'Oh my god!' 'Get up Craig we missed the alarm is there any chance we can get up have breakfast and travel 20 minutes up the road to get Bigpond reception and log into today's audio lesson?' Yeh! when is the lesson (yawn) well its in 10 minutes. Ok, so we're back to Bloody Hell!!! bugger breakfast, in the car you lot, up the road and damn we're not going to make it to town so tell me when you have two bars on the phone Louise and we will stop the car and power up the computer. I hear the call 'Two bars'. I stop on some remote corner between say Lake Barrington and Sheffield, high on a hill, OK here's school for the morning. I'll run a few leads from the inverter and save the computer battery. A little walk up the road and I find a couple of photo opportunities, Mt Roland looks magnificent in the morning light.