Random Mum

Today I have been at Perth Concert Hall to hear my teenage daughter playing in “Perform in Perth”, the annual Music Festival.  I may be biased – OK, I am biased – but Perth Academy String Orchestra played brilliantly, and in the evening, I thoroughly enjoyed the performance by Perth Academy Orchestra.  The full orchestra played the March from Carmen (Bizet) then a Beach Boys medley. During the latter, their conductor was so obviously enjoying himself that he was dancing!  Both performances were a result of lots of hard work and dedication from the players, teachers and conductors. 

The adjudicator won himself a round of applause with his comments on the String Orchestra: “The people of Perth need to know how talented our young people are.  We only ever hear about young people when they are beating up grannies and throwing bricks at buses.  These young people here should be headline news.”  

He is so right!  It’s often true that we only hear about the bad things that teenagers are up to.  So as parents, let’s speak up and praise our children and teenagers.   

I love in-service days, and in particular, the November days that Perth & Kinross Council so kindly provide.  This year, we used these days to go on a short trip to London, primarily to see the Tutankhamun exhibition at the O2 arena.

The exhibition was excellent.  It is laid out in such a way that you can walk round the exhibits easily and each exhibit is labelled with just the right amount of information.  It wasn’t too crowded when we were there (only the second day of the exhibition) and we really enjoyed ourselves.

The rest of our time in London was spent travelling by tube, walking, soaking up the atmosphere, admiring the Christmas lights and shopping.  I’m sure the novelty would wear off quickly if I lived in London, but I love travelling by tube.  There’s something logical about it that appeals to me – maybe it’s just that I love the maps! 

Earlier this week, my teenage daughter came home from school and announced that parents’ night would be next Thursday.    My thoughts, in the exact order that they occurred: 

Oh, no, not Thursday.
Surely she has got the wrong date?
That’s next week.
Have I missed a newsletter?
When did the school decide this?
Maybe I should phone the office and check the date.
I’ll check the details on the school website. 

So off I went to the school website and guess what?  There was nothing at all about parents’ night.   

The next day, teenage daughter had managed to book two appointments, so obviously parents’ night was going to happen.

The letter from the school came home on Friday and sure enough, it says that this is an important time, a few months into Standard Grade courses: I couldn’t agree more and I’m really keen to discuss progress.  But we need more than a week’s notice about these important meetings!  I think that between my husband and I, we can cover the appointments that have been made so far, by doing some re-organisation of our diaries.  I await these appointments with interest…

At school, I learned to touch-type, which is a skill I use daily.  Here’s how that came about: in 1980, when I was in my sixth year at school, St Andrews University lent the school a midi-computer which we used for our Sixth Year Studies Maths paper, Computing and Numerical Analysis.  After using this machine once or twice, I was frustrated because I didn’t knowing where to find the letters on the keyboard.  So I went to the Secretarial Studies department and asked the teacher if I could learn to type.  He said they could teach me but I would have to do a Standard Grade in Secretarial Studies.  So I did!  Unfortunately I didn’t pass the Sixth Year Studies Maths paper, but that’s a story for another day.

But I do wonder why we don’t teach our children to type properly, given that computers are used so widely.  I know that they will say they type as fast using a few fingers as someone who uses all eight fingers and two thumbs.  But are the results as accurate? 

Of course, there may be some folk out there who have learned to type: how did you learn and has it been worthwhile?

When asked about the school day, my teenager often talks about a particular lesson then comments, “the banter was great”.  So what exactly is banter?  It seems to me that it’s a conversation involving at least two people that can be about any topic you care to imagine, so long as the resulting conversation is amusing and entertaining. 

I’ve been listening to a fair few podcasts recently and I wonder if “banter” could  be put on to a podcast, and if it would sound as funny as it had in real life. 

Today I’ve been wondering how I can help my teenager to be a bit more organised.   Picture the scene: it was a beautiful Saturday afternoon and the two of us were indoors struggling with a particularly difficult piece of music.  Neither of us had chosen to be there but we hadn’t managed to fit in enough music practice this week so it simply had to be done today.

On reflection, we both agreed that Science homework had taken up a large part of week, partly because there was some catching up to do after absence and partly because there had been a test to prepare for.   I was left wondering how this could be managed a bit better.  How does a busy teenager fit in after-school activities, evening activities, socialising with friends (physically or virtually) and still keep up with homework?

Last year, we tried “homework hour”: an hour of each evening had to be spend doing homework and if there was no homework given, the hour would be spent reading.  This was met with enormous resistance and pretty soon this plan fell by the wayside.  At the moment, I am encouraging my teenager to do homework on the night that it’s given out.  This doesn’t always work,  probably because it’s easier to put things off than do them straight away.  Then, of course, several bits of homework all have to be done for the same day, I get annoyed and start nagging and my teenager gives me that look that says, “Here we go again, she’s always nagging me.”  

Does anyone have suggestions for how to improve this situation? I’d love to hear what other people do!

Since my last post, entitled “Distractions”, I have realised that I’m very easily distracted: not just by ipods and phones but by blogging, television and newspapers.  So I decided to try out my own experiment and quantify how much time was being wasted by distractions.

I took three similar sized piles of ironing.  While ironing the first pile, I listened to music.  I ironed the second pile in silence and watched TV while ironing the third pile.  The results are fascinating!

Ironing to music : 10 minutes
Ironing in silence 9.5 minutes
Ironing while watching TV : 12.5 minutes

Let’s do the maths - it took 5% less time to iron in silence than it did to iron while listening to music.  BUT it took a huge 25% more time to iron while watching TV.

What I’ve learned:

1. It’s better to keep distractions to a minimum, otherwise simple tasks such as housework and homework can take much longer than they should. 
2. Listening to music can stop you from getting bored by the task in hand 
3. I have lots of ironing!

How can you possibly do homework while there’s music playing, you’re looking at photos and chatting to your friends on MSN?  My take on this is that it takes less time to do homework if there are fewer distractions. 

I know that teenagers will argue that listening to music helps them to concentrate on homework: fair enough.  But chatting on MSN is so distracting and time-consuming (I know, I’ve tried it) that you can’t possibly be giving your full attention to the homework.  Every time someone sends a comment on MSN you have to stop what you are doing, read the comment, compose a reply then pick up where you left off.  As a result, homework takes longer, you run out of time for doing fun things and parents start to get really irate and go off into a long rant!

I think that all teenagers should try this experiment:

1. Take two similar pieces of work that you think will take a similar amount of time to complete. 

2. Note the time you started the first piece of work and make sure you have background music playing, possibly be logged on to MSN or Bebo, keep your mobile switched on.

3. Note the time when you finish the first piece of work.

4. Note the time you start the second piece of work, but work in silence, switching off all music, PCs, and anything else that might distract you. 

5. Note the time when you finish the second piece of work.

6. Compare the amount of time it took to complete each piece of work.

Be honest and let me know the results of the experiment!