TRUENCY

Even though I've retired and given up teaching I still love to watch children's eyes light up when they finally understand a new concept or make a break through in their learning somehow.

This is why I give my services to the local Primary School for free. I absolutely love Science and could easily teach it all day. The extraordinary thing is that the better you are in the classroom, teaching children, the more likely you are to be recognised and therefore promoted, until one day you are promoted out of the classroom completely. So the more successful you are, the further away from children you get. You eventually become chained to a desk ploughing through reports to the Ministry or to the Board etc. What a waste!

However, I digress. I was asked to take a lesson with seven and eight year olds on cogs and gears as part of a cooperatively planned unit on simple machines. The other sub-topics were: levers, inclined planes, screws and finally pulleys. I spent the next two weeks testing and trialling various pieces of apparatus in order to give the children some hands-on experimentation. I finally ended up with used beer bottle tops turned upside down, spiked through the middle on to a 'stick' of MDF board. The stick was approximately 20mm x 2mm by 160mm. I pre-drilled the holes in the centre of the bottle tops with a tiny 1mm drill bit so that the children wouldn't struggle. They secured the bottle top onto the MDF board by spearing it through into end-grained side of the MDF board with a plastic tipped drawing pin.

This allowed the bottle top to spin. By placing another bottle top next to the first with the serrations meshing, a second pin was driven into the MDF board so that the two touching bottles tops interlocked and therefore turned each other around!

The children thought this was great because they had made it themselves and were then further challenged to add a third spinning bottle top to there first two. We had a wonderful time learning about what was needed in order to make the three bottle tops rotate.

After the lesson the children thanked me for all my preparation etc and then I asked the class teacher were there any children away that afternoon. The sad thing was that four students had been away and missed the whole episode about how cogs and gears work. Even though it was at a very basic level their peers would be that much further ahead when they came to studying it later in their education. I cannot help thinking that for every day they spend away from the classroom they are missing some of the basic building blocks of education.

I went to a number of boarding schools from 9 years old. (See "In the Lap of the Gods", Chapters 1- 22) and found it extremely difficult when I learned that some schools had developed their own particular curriculum without consultation with other schools or even the Ministry's prescription. When attending Wanganui Boys College in the Fourth Form I found that they had already covered a whole year of Commercial Practice and Basic Accounting, while I had done two years of extra Science at Wesley College. Wesley College, in their wisdom, decided not to introduce algebra in the Third Form so again, when I left and attended Wanganui Boys College I was a whole year behind in that as well!

 These things were beyond my control but truancy is a choice. And condoned truancy is even worse!

By they way, if you read my article on, "Science is Dead" you'll understand why I'm really angry that the so-called cooperative planning unit on Simple Machines is to be scrapped because the teachers (all five of them are females) decided they would do a "Dance Unit" instead where the children could make their own costumes and make up dances about Spring!!

I have 150 pre-drilled bottle tops and 150 MDF boards if anyone's interested. Minus the ones I used for my wife's class of course!