Education - where are we going and why?

 Over the last few weeks there have been a number of articles and books that have come my way about education in general and where we are heading. It's something I have been in the midst of for a long time, looking at change and how the system is working, or not. I feel very strongly about this and every time a new article comes my way I read it and am sitting here going yes, yes, but how can we get others to do the same thing?

I think we would all agree that the current system of education does not fit everyone, there will never be a one size fits all, but the question is, when are we going to change what we are doing so we cater for more of our young people. I wrote a blog about this in 2018 - nothing seems to have changed in that time and I wonder when, or if, anything will. There seem to be a bunch of people keen to move forward, but then a group definitely keen to stay put, or even go backwards! One of the podcasts I listened to this week even comments on the way the NCEA changes that are currently in progress are actually taking us back a step. This podcast is a conversation with Bevan Holloway, the founder of SMATA, ex HOD of English at Wellington Girls College. This podcast talks about the concept of 'play' in a secondary school and the experiences that schools can offer that challenge what many would consider traditional secondary school. Well worth a listen. It reminded me of my blog around the Lifelong Kindergarten - play being an important part of learning at any age.

I think that the education system that has been around in the same format for a very long time has not kept up with what students or the current employment system needs. There is a great blog by Robin Sutton published this week about this very thing - I love the title:

Our educational purpose: compliant economic units, or creative human beings?

He says "There was a general view that education didn’t meet the needs of the group of young people who are most at risk." I believe we have known this for a while but not all schools are trying to do anything radical about it and when they do, they are often slammed for being too radical, or not focusing on the qualifications at the end.

Derek Wenmoth's Futuremakers blog Pedagogy of Compliance talks about our actual system of schooling and Frederick Taylor's pedagogy vs John Dewey. It gives a good background of how we got to where we are but also challenges us to move forward and make change, to take risks and to move forward. Derek is always writing about the future and what we could be doing and his Futuremakers site has more to read on this very topic. I look forward to his blogs -  I read them and say yes, yes, yes....

As the world is slowly moving on from Covid19 there have been many articles around changing the education system to better cater for needs of students. Many young people excelled by working from home - others wanted to be in a school environment. It brings up many questions about what we are wanting to achieve and how students learn. Time to revolutionize our education system is an article around schooling in Massachusetts but is relevant to us in New Zealand as well. It challenges educators to:

 "create the conditions necessary to meet students where they are, and move toward student-centered, whole-learner approaches that are trauma-informed and more responsive to individual students’ needs."

So, where to from here?

The system needs to change. This will not happen overnight, but we can make it happen, one small step at a time. Keep pushing those boundaries, keep challenging each other, keep sharing information and ideas so we can move forward.

Genealogy

 

I love the school holidays. Apart from having a break from a busy time at work, it gives me the opportunity to get stuck into some genealogy - I mean hours and hours of it! I can quite easily spend 8-10 hours a day just researching and sorting and puzzling through things. My poor garden does get a bit neglected and I find myself hoping for rain so I don't feel too guilty!

These holidays gave me the chance to tidy up some lines with the main purpose being able to try and track some DNA matches. You get matches with all sorts of people and often I find that we can't work out who that common ancestor is. So my goal was to set up something that meant that others could see where they might fit on my tree and hopefully be able to connect a few dots.

This fan chart started last year when I decided to do something for my children for Christmas. I did both my tree and the McLachlan tree, giving them a fairly full idea of their ancestry on both sides of the family. Both had gaps with dates not complete, or names missing, so I decided to work on filling in some of these on my line. Although there are still a few gaps and a couple of "I'm fairly sure" guesses, it is looking a lot more complete than the one I did last year. 

This is a printout from MyHeritage. I don't put my tree online generally, but found this was a really good way to present this information so I've put the basics up there, enough just to print this out. The limitations are that you can only have 250 people in your tree for free, I'm sitting on 241 with the Eason and McLachlan trees, so I won't be putting much more up there - maybe a few gap fillers if I find them. I do like the way it looks - it's very clean.

After doing the fan chart, I thought I'd see what the next generation looks like. As I couldn't do this in MyHeritage due to numbers, I used Charting Companion. I've used this a lot in the past for full circles of lines and did a number of descendant circles for the McLachlan Reunion in 2013.

I did a circle for each of the lines that came out to New Zealand and did them in different colours, but hadn't done an ancestor one until today.

The difficulty is that I have my Sagar and Eason lines in different files. I decided not to join them together early on in my research and they have stayed apart. It's something I'll have a think about - it would be useful when putting pretty things together but when I'm researching, the files get very large. The Eason one in particular, because I'm doing a One Name Study, it has Eason's from all over the world. Having my Sagar line in there could get a little confusing I think.

Anyway, I did the Eason and Sagar lines to see what they looked like - taking them out the 8 generations back. They are not pretty yet, but I just wanted to see what was missing and this certainly gives me a really good view.

I'm missing a fair bit, not the Eason name itself, as I know I have more even further back, but many of the others need filling in.

The question is always - how far do you go? These are my great great great (x lots) grandparents, but often in lines that we don't always think of. Most of us research our name (generally paternal line) or our maternal line, but then once again following the paternal grandfather. It's interesting to follow different lines back and often see where some of those obscure middle names have come from!

So, both the Sagar and Eason lines have now spread into Metcalfe, Gildon, Holmes, Anderson, Hill and Phillipson lines and it only gets bigger from there!

In working my way back I am finding all sorts of interesting things, some unusual middle names (I finally found where the Avern came from in my GG Grandmother's name) and some interesting forenames - Mr Brown White is definitely one for the books!

So, next step is to fill in the next generation all round I think. It would be good to get a few more filled out - I won't be going back down every line, but it would be nice to have as many of my 5 x great grandparents names.

Part of me hopes it will rain all next week.....