The Weekly Rot

33,000 kids absent from school every day. Clearly this is the fault of schools and teachers. I know this because the government said so. School has to be more engaging for the 33 thousand – they said that too.

The government is spending another 32 million dollars on truancy and I bet my lunch money that 32 million will buy a lot of glossy brochures, one or two snappy phrases like ‘only a fool, skips school’ or ‘Tana said, get out of bed.’

What an idea – no homework. It’s not a new idea of course. Americans have been on about it for ages –which may be the biggest reason to keep homework.

Happy New Year. This year I’ll eat more green vegetables and less red meat and less chocolate, chocolate cake, chocolate pudding, and chocolate cheesecake. I’ll drink less beer and less red wine and more chilled cucumber juice.

I’ll do more vigorous exercise, like walking briskly to work. I’ll take up a sport – golf perhaps, swimming, or maybe surfing. I’ll smile more. I’ll be kind, maybe even sympathetic, to ERO people.

Tilly the Cat’s Christmas Lesson . . .

Tilly was a very bossy cat. She was in charge of the whole house, or so she thought. The people in the house thought they were in charge because they had all the money and they were taller. And there were mice in the house too, running, squeaking, and eating everything they could get their dirty little claws on. They were young and foolish and smelly.

I can smell a holiday coming on. And that’s the first of a long line of good stuff for which I’m grateful. I’m also grateful for having the best, most fun, most interesting, and most rewarding jobs. It’s sure better than unjamming photocopiers or upping networks that are down or asking if they want fries with their ‘meal’.

It’s time I wrote about Wairio School again. It was small so I should be able to squeeze it into this space OK. It was good. We learnt how to do apostrophes and metrics and tennis and tidying the gardens on Friday afternoons.

They should all get down off their high horses, the Hone bashers I mean.

I have a lot of sympathy for the kids who skip school. I missed one or two days myself back in the 70s. It was a boredom thing. No really – how many supply and demand graphs and mitochondria and great expectations should a kid have to take?

In the old days teachers wrote reports that said what pupils could do well, what they couldn’t do well, and what they should do to improve. It was based on the teacher’s professional opinion. Teachers knew their pupils fairly well and knew what they were capable of.

And when primary school pupils became high school students, teachers wrote reports that said what students could do, their expected School Cert and Bursary marks and what students should do to improve.

Year 9 Matthew walked towards me, shirt untucked, mocking the school rules. “Tuck your shirt in,” I said. He did but he surled like a surly teenage boy.

Five minutes later, outside, Year 9 Matthew’s shirt was untucked again. His shirt had got wet, he explained with sincerity, when he went to the bathroom to wash his hands. He’d untucked it to let it dry. “If your shirt was tucked into your trousers, how could it possibly have got wet? Go to the Hall, sit in the sun and let your shirt dry.”

Dear me, Plunket charts for kids at school. Good grief. Don’t they realise that kids are all different?

Children don’t match Plunket’s height and weight and eye-colour charts. Often this is because they have abnormally short or tall or weird-eyed parents and sometimes it’s because some parents feed their kids more or run them around more.

The same applies to reading and mathematics. Some children bring good genes to school and some wear unwashed and torn ones.