Reading: Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris (a little bit of tacky vampire-ness which is the inspiration new Alan Ball series True Blood); Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (but, the more I read it, the more I’m sure I’ve read it before).

Watching: True Blood (Alan Ball created my favourite TV series of all time, Six Feet Under, and this is his newey – it’s a more grown up version of Buffy or Twilight, but still quite silly; it stars Anna Paquin, of Piano and X-Men fame. If you’re not expecting much, it’s quite good.); Heroes, of course; and Mad Men, a big hitter in this year’s Emmys, is brilliant – it’s a drama set in the high-strung world of Manhattan advertising in the late 50’s to early 60’s).

Doing: Knitting a scarf and a pair of socks; drinking Beaujolais Nouveau, a fruity, watery red wine that causes excitement every November amongst the French, but I just drink it because it tastes nice – and isn’t as nasty as some of the ‘award winning’ French wines (which could fill a goon bag no problem); overcoming a serious addiction to TV series – I don’t think I could survive without my Hiro or Dexter.

Back in Adelaide, while I hide out overseas, my uni-mates are protesting, striking and marching all in hope of fair pay as teachers. I come from a family which doesn’t respect teachers (which makes it even more hilarious that I became one), so I do hear a bit of ‘they’re lazy, they have more holidays than everyone, get over it, they’re paid more than the average person, what are they complaining about’. The attitude at home has changed a bit, however, with the latest round of strike action – the government ruled the education union’s last strike illegal at 9pm the night before, causing chaos the following day as all teachers arrived at school with nothing to teach, and only a third of the students turning up. People are starting to become aware that a) teachers in SA are the lowest paid in the country and b) the government (including the increasingly unpopular Premier, Mike Rann) are doing some nasty shit to get out of paying them a fair wage. Or at least, that is how it’s seeming.

Education’s been deplorable in Australia since the Howard government took office and decided that the lower classes didn’t deserve the same oppourtunities as the middle and upper classes (because, hey, who’s going to work our factories, orchards, and shops if everyone becomes educated?), and I admit, there are a good array of teachers who, after years of overwork and low salaries, have simply given up and are hanging in until retirement. But there are plenty who, inspired by a need to make a change where it matters most, still do give it their all, and they’re in the majority. Does 60 hour weeks, with additional hours spent at home, with constant verbal and physical abuse from students and parents, after a minimum of four years (but more likely 5 or 6 years) of university study for about the same salary as an unskilled factory worker sound like an attractive job/career for anyone?

So anyway, I think a lot about the reputation that teachers have, and how they are not taken seriously – by the working or middle classes – mostly because I am one, and I’m very tired of being told it’s a secure, well paid glorified babysitting job with lots of holidays.

Part of this is because I sense many people think of teaching as it was presented in The Simpsons - take away the ‘Teachers Guide’ and we’d be lost – that teaching can be done straight out of a book. Admittedly, this was the case in Japan where thousands of human-harddrives are trained every year – god knows what those teachers thought they were doing, but it wasn’t teaching and those kids certainly weren’t learning.

Back on Facebook, some of my uni-mates have complained about how the teacher’s union isn’t doing a good enough job in terms of PR – I agree with them, in that if the public had any idea how difficult the job is, perhaps they’d be more sympathetic towards our strike actions.

So I was glad to see the following article. Teachers haven’t been ‘fact-transmitters’ for several years now; well, at least in South Australia. It’s definitely more important to teach students to evaluate for themselves the implications and issues of Nazism and fascism than a list of useless dates of battles and events. Yet, there’s still so much push for a return to history and English teaching methods of the 1950’s in the public – and the government – because they themselves simply haven’t figured out that kids today don’t need these ridiculous lists of dates, figures, facts that was taught when they themseves were students. Hell, it can even be argued that kids in the fifties didn’t need to learn poems by heart, grammar and figures then.

Here’s the article – and here’s for making people realise that teaching methodology has changed; now kids are actually learning instead of just memorising. The next step is for people to realise that teaching learning is complex, requires high levels of skills, and far more difficult than teaching facts. And that the job of teachers is a lot more difficult than many give credit for.

Google generation doesn’t need rote learning

NEWS.com.au

December 02, 2008 02:38pm

Morgan Pozgar, 13, of Pennsylvania, competes in the National Texting Championship in New York last year / AFP

SCHOOL children no longer need to memorise facts and figures because everything they need is just a mouse click away, an internet educator says.

It would be better to teach children to think creatively so they could interpret and apply knowledge they gained online, said Don Tapscott, author of the bestselling book Wikinomics and a champion of the “net generation”.

“Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is,” Mr Tapscott told Times Online.

“Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don’t need to know all the dates. It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorise that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google,” he said.

But Mr Tapscott said he was not rejecting education.

The ability to learn new things was more important than ever “in a world where you have to process new information at lightning speed,” he said.

“Children are going to have to reinvent their knowledge base multiple times. So for them memorising facts and figures is a waste of time.”

Mr Tapscott, who coined the term “the net generation”, based his observations in his latest book, Grown Up Digital, on a study of nearly 8000 people in 12 countries born between 1978 and 1994.

He said the prevailing education model was designed for the industrial age.

“This might have been good for the mass production economy, but it doesn’t deliver for the challenges of the digital economy, or for the ‘net gen’ mind,” he said.

He suggested the brains of young people worked differently from those of their parents and said “digital immersion”, in which children may be texting while surfing the internet and listening to their MP3 player, could help them to develop critical thinking skills.

Brighton College headmaster Richard Cairns told Times Online that a core level of knowledge was essential:

“It’s important that children learn facts. If you have no store of knowledge in your head to draw from, you cannot easily engage in discussions or make informed decisions.”