Today.

And not a moment too soon.

The last month has been fairly taxing for a number of reasons, but this week has just been the limit and so I am looking forward to the weekend even more than usual.

As you many know I hate the lack of light in the winter but the beauty of the sunrise and sunset is some compensation. Sadly sunrise is so late now I can no longer enjoy it over coffee, but witness the splendour from the station platform, next week I will witness it from the train. As I sip my coffee this morning, the sky to the East between the Ashtrees is a brilliant turquoise colour and a tiny sandy coloured patch of light on the horizon heralding dawn, with a large cloud like a purple bruise hovering just above it.

Anyway enough of my waffling.

Hope you are all ok today and that you will all have a good weekend.

I saw this in the news today http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20081204/tod-british-teacher-suspended-over-push-6058bda.html and it made me think once again about discipline in schools and question whether or not this is a step too far. The papers are constantly full of reports of feral children and lack of discipline but then when a teacher takes some action they end up being suspended. Secondly, I am concerned about how many youngsters do not get enough healthy excercise and many of them spend too much time indoors playing computer games and watching TV and eating junk food.

My view is that this particular teacher probably did go a step too far, but the details of the article are scanty. Personally I think physical excercise is a good thing in moderation and providing that people are fit to do it, but it should be made enjoyable so that kids will want to do it and not made into a punishment. Like many others I am concerned about lack of discipline, not just in schools but in society generally, but I am also concerned about lack of common sense and I do not think that it is sensible, responsible or appropriate to set a children a physical punishment like this because of lateness, however I am not certain that the teacher should be suspended for their action. What does bother me slightly is that the teacher is alleging that this suggestion for pushups as a punishment for lateness came from the kids. Interesting that they see this type of phyiscal excercise as a punishment, when I was in my teens we used to routinely do sit ups and push ups as a way of warming up or just keeping fit. I still do sit ups every day, but I have stopped with the pushups after getting tennis elbow. How MANY push ups was he asking them to do I wonder, we used to start off with 10 and build up to about 50 as we got fitter. But they are quite strenuous so asking someone to do 50 if they are unfit could be dangerous I reckon. I wonder why he put the question as to the punishment to the class, I am also wondering whether it was one particular person (or group of people) who was being punished for being late in which case is there an element of victimisation here or was lateness and the punishment for it applied across the board. Shouldn't it be down to the school rather than individual teachers to have appropriate and effective punishments and protocols in place for disciplinary matters?

Soooooooo, what do you guys think? AND how do you think that we should deal with lateness. After all before taking any action we need to establish why the child is late and whether the lateness is habitual or beyond their control, in many cases kids have to take a bus to school or are reliant on their parents driving them there.

See you later.

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