"Education?"

Today on my bike ride I got thinking about my grandson and what a great summer he seems to be having, and it occured to me that it's unfortunate that he has to go back to school in september. Why? Well because like most every other kid there he's gonna spend about 75% of his time either daydreaming or bored out of his tree! In 12 years of elementary and secondary school I learned to read and write english, learned some basic math and a little bit of french. Everything else I know I learned somewhere else, some other time.

So here's my solution to our almost useless public education system

Step one...retrain half of the teachers to do something else, since only half of them have the aptitude in the first place. Step two...pay the other half twice as much and double the performance standards. Step three...cut the class sizes in four. Step four...have kids spend 2 hours a days in school (all year round) and the rest of the time just messing around with their grampas. I guarantee results!

You know what the problem with my solution is don't you? Us? Society. We need the schools and the teachers to babysit our kids for 7-8 hours a day. As parents we don't really want them hanging around with us all day and there's not enough grampas to go around. But I'm gonna continue to try hard to do my part. Hopefully my little bit of teaching will help offset the pain of their "formal" education.

On the training front it was a pretty quiet day. My legs felt like lead from yesterdays run, but it's the good kind of fatigue that comes from knowing you had a great workout. I did as planned today...40km bike followed by a 4.5 km run. Like I said I was tired but at peace with it.

And I think we're ready for the chickens.

Speaking of education, today I learned a new meaning for the expression, "playing chicken". To Kylie it literally means pretending you're a chicken, sound effects and all. What a joy!

I wish to dedicate day to Mr Ross Kirby, in who's employ I spent my first summer away from home.

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."---Albert Einstein

"Boredom will always remain the greatest enemy of school disciplines. If we remember that children are bored, not only when they don't happen to be interested in the subject or when the teacher doesn't make it interesting, but also when certain working conditions are out of focus with their basic needs, then we can realize what a great contributor to discipline problems boredom really is. Research has shown that boredom is closely related to frustration and that the effect of too much frustration is invariably irritability, withdrawal, rebellious opposition or aggressive rejection of the whole show."---Fritz Redl

love

peter