TIME is a funny thing. Walked past here on Friday and hardly any of the white flowers had emerged. 72 hours later after a yucky cold, dark and damp weekend – any hey presto it’s a sea of white.

I remember someone very clever saying that TIME operates at different rates for different people. Thinking about it – that clever person might have been Dr Who. When I was a kid I loved Dr Who. I so wanted to be a Timelord. As a prize for winning a football tournament school arranged a trip to the last day of a Dr Who exhibition. I was super excited. On the way our bus broke down. It took them hours to fix it. Finally we arrived at the exhibition only to find it had closed 5 minutes earlier. How on earth can you miss an exhibition about a time traveller – just doesn’t seem right.

TIME definitely operates at different rates for some of our son’s school teachers. Quite a few of the online classes require the student to read an article or a section of a text book. The amount of reading has definitely increased over the last few school days. The number of follow up tasks has also increased. Strangely the TIME allowed has stayed the same. Exactly where does this approach leave the dyslexic student. I know teachers are super busy but maybe one of them might have asked son how he is coping with reading the course material. They seem much quicker to spot his spelling mistakes. Much better use of TIME.

TIME is also hard to define. School have now rolled out a national learning app primarily aimed at those students who struggle with English comprehension and grammar. Interestingly an app with a rating of 1 out 5 from users (lucky to get 1 by all accounts). Son has been set a weekly app study time of 50 minutes. The teacher will be checking that each student has achieved the weekly minimum study time. Punishments for underachieving. What they don’t mention is that the app uses a lot of videos and narratives. Unfortunately these do not count against the learning time but need to be completed before you can get to the student work areas. When it crashes (and it crashes more times than me on a diet) all learning time is lost and you need to start at the beginning of the section again. So far son has been on the app for just under 3 hours. He’s watched endless boring videos and robotic narratives. He’s still to learn anything new. AND he’s only clocked 20 minutes actual study time.

“Dad what is the point of this. I’m bored out of my mind. As you would say, it’s a pile of pants. It’s a complete waste of my time, your time, the teachers time and a waste of bandwidth.”

I fed this back to school with a few of my own rather barbed comments. The school’s response was well we have sent a teacher to be trained in its use, that’s valuable school TIME so we need to keep using it.

Clearly I was wasting my TIME arguing.

73 thoughts on “Time”

      1. Well you know what??? if that is really the case this cannae be that serious can it??? I mean we know it is but come on. We don’t have the ventilators so you might die but just make sure you could pass that test first.. It’s like these fecking pests right now who keep facebook click messaging everyone with some keech about gargling, or what you mean to them when they have no contact with you the rest of the year. And no idea where your life might be right now.

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  8. Time really IS a funny thing. Bloom time has been stumping me lately. Everything in our yard is blooming behind everything in our close neighbors yards. I don’t understand this. Is there an odd weather triangle in our yard? Has time slowed down in our garden, or are the flowers having a bed protest? 😆 Your Son would like that one. Lol. I think my brain is picking up again. I still can’t remember anything about the toy story movies, though.

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      3. There must be a Dr Who exhibition somewhere .. I’m going to keep a look out when things are back on again!!
        It’s nice thinking about moments you’d travel back to. I just have to be careful I don’t stay there in my mind! X

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      9. Let’s do it!!
        It’ll take me a while to do but I’m going to have fun and maybe change a few things on my journey! Like Bill and Ted’s excellent adventure

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      23. I failed … I got distracted with work, then had to get essentials food wise and then I took a walk for fresh air. Now I can’t be bothered to clean or even move. So I’m drinking alcohol free wine and eating peanuts. Living life in the fast lane! X

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  16. Thankfully the schools here have tossed the mandatory testing out the window for the foreseeable future. Just DO something! Sounds like YOUR school is trying to put square pegs in round holes.

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  17. Pingback: Time — A Dad trying to cope with the loss of his Partner and becoming a single parent. | Ups and Downs of Family History V2.0

  18. I have finally heard the educational equivalent of “No, we can’t go back to the old operating system. We know it worked better, but the company spent a lot of money upgrading to this one.” Very depressing

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