Bill English striking a blow against children in New Zealand.

As it stands now Centres get different amounts funding from the government depending on the percentage of (ratio-ed) staff they have that are qualified and registered Early Childhood Education teachers. So if you have 80% qualified teachers you get so much funding, if you have 100% then you get more. That extra money goes to classroom materials and staff wages, as you can imagine a qualified teacher gets paid more than an unqualified one.

Now the new 2010 budget changes this by removing the 100% incentive. Therefore to get the new maximum funding (equivalent to the old 80% incentive) a centre is only required to have 80% qualified teachers. Now, just think about this for a minute. This is some scary shit. Let me break it down for you.

Early Childhood Centres are businesses just like any other. They need to watch their bottom line. They need to make a profit, some are under more pressure than others (you know the ones… the big name ones on every corner who have stockholders). In order for a centre that currently employs 100% qualified teachers to stay at the same level of profit they do now under the new budget they have two options.

One, fire 20% of their qualified staff and hire people with no experience who will work for minimum wage. This of course results in a weaker education system for your young children. With no incentive for uneducated staff to study. In fact incentive for them not to study as it might just lead to their unemployment.

Two, increase the cost of sending a child to their centre. Labour’s education spokesman, Trevor Mallard, said the $100 million shortfall in ECE funding amounted to about $25 a week per parent. That’s a lot, more than your probably going to be getting in tax cuts!

This is where it starts to get really scary. Once all the Centres go down one of these two paths that leaves parents with a choice, a choice many of them have no real say in. Send your child to an expensive Centre where the teachers are all qualified and know how to professionally deal with your child’s needs during their most important and influential learning period, 0 to 5 years old. Or send them to a cheaper Centre where 80% qualified teachers is enough and hope your kid doesn’t fall through the cracks somewhere along the line.

Of course parents and whānau that live in lower socio-economic areas aren’t really going to have a choice are they? Which leads to yet another way to increase the gap between the haves and the have-nots. That’s right National, make sure that even if your under 5 years old, if you don’t have the money you don’t deserve the same level of education as people who do.

Scared yet? I am.

Guns in Early Childhood Education

This in my mind is stupid.

First of all, trust me when I say that I’m no gun activist. In fact, I’m completely against guns being used against human beings. But that being said I sure as hell played with water pistols when I was a child and I even had a BB Gun when I was in high school. I have fond memories of my friends all going down to the local primary school with our BB Guns and glasses and having wars late into the night. I still enjoy the odd paintball game now a days. This didn’t make me into a crazed killer. This was just a part of my boyhood.

Second, aren’t we meant to be working with the children’s interests? The kids at my centre are very interested in guns. Wouldn’t it be awesome to do a project on guns. Learn about the different types of guns. Learn what guns are used for? Learn about how to safely use guns. Learn about gun licenses? Make some gun licenses? Teach them what to do if they ever find a real gun? To me this sounds like a great idea, but I’ve had some pretty horrible “great” ideas in my life time. But then again what’s the alternative? Make guns, which are seen by kids everyday in their cartoons and stories, a taboo subject. Just pretend they don’t exist?

What’s your thoughts on toy guns at centres? Would you allow them at your child’s centre? If so, why and what rules would you expect to come with them? Would you forbid them? If so, why and how would you stop a child from pretending a stick is a gun?

Pick me! Pick me!

If you only praise students that answer correctly then no one learns anything. Why? Simple the students that can answer already know the answer, and the kids that can’t don’t want to answer because there is no motivation for them to. If they aren’t answering then you can bet your ass that they probably aren’t listening either. On the other hand, if someone answers and gets it wrong, then they naturally want to know what the right answer is, and so will others. You learn more from a wrong answer than you do from a right one. So instead, encourage participation over knowledge. Praise everyone that raises their hand or even shouts out! Count yourself lucky, if you have a classroom full of students so eager to participate that they can’t even wait to put up their hands.

So, how do you get them participating? I like to play games and award points for answering whether right or wrong. Make sure to make teams and have a rule that states each member must answer before another team mate can answer again. This will cause students to encourage each other to participate. Remember give verbal praise and points for all answers, if it happens to be wrong encourage other students to help come up with the answer and explain it. Once you’ve played a couple of times, students will just get use to participating, trying to answering questions and helping others who answer incorrectly. Your classroom will transform from a teacher lead Q&A session with only a few students joining in to a classroom full of students participating and discussing ideas and reasoning behind those ideas with each other.

If your students feel comfortable and safe enough to answer a question even if they are most likely going to get the answer wrong, then you my friend are in the top 10% of teachers. Once you have them participating, you’ve got them listening and thinking. With participation knowledge will follow, it’s inevitable! It really is that simple.

Propaganda Machine

He did a great job of entertaining the kids and even talked to them about what they liked to eat. He said he liked apples? Make no mistakes, all these kids knew that this was the clown from McDonalds. While it sounds like he is promoting healthy eating by saying he likes apples, all he really doing is pumping the kids and parents full of propaganda that McDiddy’s is a healthy fun and family oriented restaurant. In reality no one should be eating at McD’s let alone any child! Do yourself and your children a favour and stay away from the golden arches and all their fast food friends.

Rush Hour 3

Now bear in mind that “We’re gonna need…” is what they are saying in English. What they are saying in French is translated to “(Speaking in French)”! How useless is that!

Nothing but Garbage on TV

If there are any good books you can recommend to me leave them in the comments. If they aren’t available in ebook format that’s even better!

Bloody Cell Phone Companies

In New Zealand there are two major cell phone companies; Telecom and Vodafone. I personally use Vodafone because they have cell phones that use sim cards unlike Telecom which allows me to use the same phone I use in Taiwan, Canada etc.

Both companies offer similar plans and charges for their users, for instance they both have a best mate number which you can choose which allows you to call one number as much as you want for a month for $6, and 2000 text plan where you can send up to 2000 text messages for $10 a month. The difference is that both companies only allow you to call and text other phones on their network for the special plan, otherwise you have to pay normal charges.

As you can imagine this means that you usually choose a company based on what all your family and friends use. For instance most of my friends are on Vodafone, so I text them whenever I want, but the few friends that I do have that are on Telecom I don’t usually text because it costs me $0.20 per text on top of my $10 2000 text plan.

Up until recently it was pretty easy to tell who was on which network because all Vodafone numbers began with 021 and all Telecom numbers began with 027. I say up until recently because they have started to allow users to keep their numbers while switching networks now.

This resulted in me wasting a bunch of money, as one of my friends changed to Telecom without telling me. I continued to text them thinking it wasn’t costing me anything all the while I was slowly but surely spending a lot of extra money. Of course I didn’t find out until weeks later when I ran out of money on my phone, much to my surprise.

That is just another reason why I hate cell phone companies. Bastards.

Surveillance Cameras

The 25 cameras, almost triple the coverage of the 13 existing cameras which were already on Christchurch streets.

Last year the cameras helped with almost 80 arrests, located 27 missing people, seven witnesses to a homicide and helped identify and locate the suspect in a stabbing. Although those stats sound good, I still feel like we are giving up a little too much of our privacy to see these results.

I have been thinking about it for a while and the more I think about it the more it freaks me out that I am constantly being recorded during my day to day life. The key word in that sentence was “recorded”, I realise that these camera’s are in public places and that we are seen by random people all the time when walking around town and I’m fine with that. It’s the recording that unnerves me. I would be a lot happier if the camera’s watching me were doing just that, watching not recording me. It would be the same as any other random person on the street being able to see what I was doing.

This would still be advantageous to police, as they could have one officer watching multiple cameras, thus giving the police a greater presence in the community. The police officer viewing the camera feeds could keep mobile officers up to date to help stop crime on the streets.

One argument against this would be that evidence of crimes being committed would be lost. To this I suggest that the officer viewing live feeds should also be able to be used as eye witnesses for crimes in court, the same way any other officer would be able to if they were standing where the camera was when the crime was committed.

I would really like to hear your thoughts on this subject of Big Brother encroaching into our privacy. Do you mind being recorded? Do you think my idea of only allowing live feeds from the surveillance cameras is stupid? Have you got any other ideas? Hit those comment boxes people.

Who is the big spoon?

Most of you will automatically say the guy (or girl) snuggling at the back is the big spoon, because they are usually the bigger person in real life. I on the other hand, believe that the one in the front is the big spoon. Just hear me out on this, if you look at the picture it seems pretty clear to me that the legs of the people represent the scoop of the spoons and their bodies the handles. If this is the case then the bigger scoop therefore the bigger spoon would be on the bottom of the pile which would be the person getting cuddled.

Let me know who you think is the big spoon in the comments!