Ruth's Diary

6/9/2007

On the morning of Saturday 1st September I disembarked at Heathrow Airport. I had told Dad that I wanted to go home by bus and to pick me up at the nearest bus stop-which is not that near my house, but I was trying to prevent another car on the motorway. However, when I walked through the exit and saw the crowds of people waiting to welcome people home, I suddenly got the idea that Dad might be there. And there he was. I was even more surprised to find Nathan there, since he never greets people at airports/bus stops/train stations 'cos he doesn't like to leave the house and believes it to be a waste of time. Dad was there 'cos he returned from Switzerland a day before so his body clock woke him up at 7:30 when it was actually an hour earlier. Nathan couldn't sleep and had nothing to do that morning.

What's funnier is coming home, checking my emails and finding that Dad had sent me an email earlier on Friday telling me that he would pick me up at Heathrow. I could tell he wasn't sure if I'd read it or not by the fact that he said "hope you have internet access at JFK". (Yes I was at JFK-it was HUGE) Well I could have internet access at JFK but first I'd have to pay and I'd already done my important stuff so I saw no reason to pay for an hour of internet access.

After Nathan got so surprised by Sajida's poor AS results (as a result she's grounded for the entire year) we ended up talking about schools today. (Wow-that sure was bad grammar.) The funny trend is that the GCSEs are made to be easier to pass (not Maths) as well as more interesting while A Levels are becoming more challenging and fact-based. This just creates a larger gap for students to jump when getting used to the new styles of courses and teaching, which doesn't help confidence or increase learning. In fact, Nathan even pointed out that in some cases, a subject in A Level has completely different content to the same subject at GCSE. This is honestly rather daft. Surely the advanced course should be a further step after GCSE? Or-even better-transfer some of the GCSE content to the curriculum of the younger years so that people don't enter High School bored and constantly procrastinating. I seriously regarded little of the work we did as real until Year 9. Surely we want our young pre-teens to feel challenged and more grown up? Our society is already rather challenging, so why dumb down the lessons in school? It helps build a more prepared adult after all.

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