Saturday, December 8, 2012

big mistake




Professor Penington, who led Australia's successful response to the AIDS epidemic, told an obesity summit in Canberra this week that the inclusion of weight in primary school reports could spark discussion between teachers and parents about diet and levels of physical activity.

Not once, the whole time I was at school, did anyone turn up on a parent/teacher day to discuss my academic progress. Well, perhaps it would have been a lack of academic progress. In either case, a day’s pay was too much to lose.

One of my school chums was in strife one day. I can’t remember why, but I do remember Sister Tortia saying to her “tell your mother I want to see her”. I went home with her that afternoon and was there when she walked into the kitchen and told her mum, “Sister Tortia said she wants to see you.” Quick as a flash her mother replied “you can tell her I don’t want to see her.”
This did not surprise me, as my chum’s mum had not passed through the front door of her home in over five years.

The nuns had other creative solutions to compensate for a lack of personal discussion between teachers and parents: the letter. Every time there was an election, we were given letters to take home informing our parents they must vote DLP. My mother used to snort and put them in the bin.



If this plan was implemented, wouldn’t it be a little like giving a child a letter to take home, addressed to the parents and telling them they were inadequate, or somehow defective? Or not, depending on the level of insight or the resources of the parents.

Toast and dripping was one of the four main food groups in our home. If there was little money or food left at the end of the week we ate pancakes. Or toast and dripping. Or fried bread. I know times have changed, but maybe it's only the type of junk that has changed, really. 

As for activity levels, we went to Royal Park on Fridays for an hour to play stuff like softball, or basketball. The equipment the school had was minimal, but I always took a book to read. There were a few kids left over after two teams were full, and no one ever picked me anyway, praise be.


On the other hand, why shouldn’t teachers solve the problem of childhood obesity? Many people assume they can solve all the world's other problems.

10 comments:

  1. This is a tough one, isn't it? Your final two sentences sum it up perfectly.

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    1. It is definitely a tough one, and there is no question that obesity is a growing problem. Now that we've started to outweigh USians we must, at the very least, become a little more choosy about which competitions we want to enter.

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  2. As one parent replied when asked his opinion he more or less said, well, it is pretty self evident if they are fat. We had neighbours who ate bread and dripping. I tried it once and hated it.

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    1. Excellent reply, Andrew.

      I loved toast and dripping. It had to include the gravy, and be a passel of dripping that had been used over and over to have any real flavour. It also needed lots of salt, and white pepper. A few years after leaving home I tried it and nearly gagged.

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  3. Too many parents these days rely on junk food to feed their children which is high in saturated fats, salt, sugar and voodoo chemicals which will cause other heath problems further down the track and the lack of exercise doesn't help the situation either.

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    1. This is true, Windsmoke. And to be honest, a lot of homecooked food is pretty much the same.

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  4. ...because "many other people" don't want to take responsibility for their own children. You can very much tell in the children the ones that have parents that pay attention and care. I so feel for teachers these days...they have so many other "things" dumped on them that they don't even get to TEACH!

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    1. The expectations the "public" have of teachers are a tad over the top - teaching kids not to bully, and acting as baby-sitters amongst them.

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  5. No, leave it all to the teachers. But then we'd need to hire a bunch of 'teachers assistants' to actually implement the curriculum because this'd be the last straw in the teacher's already overloaded pantheon of responsibilities. If the 'obesity summit' (give me strength ...) was REALLY serious, they'd slap a FAT & Sugar tax onto unhealthy food AND its sellers (ie fast food joints) to put it forever out of reach. Pushing the problem down a few levels doesn't actually mean something's been done!

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    1. Ah, Hot Potato 101 - isn't that what politics is all about?

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