Ashburton’s new walkway delights
17th October 2009
I have been unkind to the Ashburton River in the past. I have dismissed it. “Scungy” I believe was my favoured expression.
Imagine, then, my delight last Sunday when I discovered the District Council’s new walking/cycling trail that connects Ashburton to Lake Hood, winding along the south bank of the river. Sylvia and I had heard the rumour of this new jewel in Ashburton’s crown so we set out to find it.
The track begins a very short walk from our home on Carters Terrace, at the southern end of the bridge, but finding it is unnerving. Dropping down off the road we followed the cycleway past picnic tables alongside the railway embankment, skirted a large, evil-smelling puddle and negotiated the underbelly of the bridge, where the entrails of the town are strung across steel girders and all hope is lost. The concrete abutments of the bridge scream with graffiti, most of it eye-wateringly desperate. Our spirits rose immeasurably at the most prominent slogan, “**** you bicth.” Bicth? Where was the putative graffiti artist when ‘tch’ was the sound of the week? Perhaps he was asleep in the Wendy house, or kicking a can down Chalmers Ave.
Emerging from Dante’s Purgatorio and dodging a dad and daughter mountain-bike tag team we clambered onto the embankment and there, unassumingly, was the beginning of the new trail, marked with a large white-washed boulder.
The track plunged immediately into the tall grove of trees that spreads out from the eastern edge of the main road. I’ve often admired this stand of trees. I’ve no idea what kind of tree they are: neither willow nor poplar, but something akin to both and at this time of year glorious in the first blush of spring. Their trunks reared up around us and gathered, cathedral-like, far above our heads.
The track, a fine river silt with patches of gravel, meandered among the trees, marked by more white painted boulders scattered heedlessly like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs.
Emerging from the grove we drew near the riverbank where the newly bulldozed track carved an alley through scrub and willows. In the hot afternoon sun the air was rich with the jasmine smell of willows and wildflowers.
From here the walk quickly established itself as a Cook’s tour of New Zealand noxious weeds. I don’t mean just a few tendrils of hieracium or the occasional ragwort. Here were all the big guns: blackberry, broom and gorse. Here were draperies of old man’s beard scrambling 10 or 20 metres up the trees. In some places the bush was so entangled with creepers it became the adventure land of every small boy’s imagination: a place of writhing anacondas and lost tribes, of sunken temples and scowling statuary.
My ridicule of the Ashburton River tends from the irony of finding myself living beside the least attractive strip of nature in this stunningly beautiful country. What possible pleasure can be found in walking on a bulldozer track through thickets of gorse and blackberry? And yet, on a bright spring day, with the warm sun on my shoulders, surrounded by a carnival of yellow broom flowers, this track was pleasurable: and all the more at those places where it closed to the riverbank and we could admire the sunlight on bright water and the long reaches of shingle.
There are a few disappointments. We encountered too many heaps of broken glass and rusting whiteware, reminding us how often the riverbank is a convenient rubbish dump, and a couple of places where the concrete-block barriers designed to restrict the track to walkers and cyclists had already been breached by joy-riders.
Hidden deep in the undergrowth, lost to all landmarks, we had no idea how far we had walked until, unexpectedly, we found ourselves at the intake to Lake Hood. We strolled down the water race and picnicked with the boats and biscuits at the lake’s edge before retracing our steps to Tinwald.
I take a lesson from this. I am guilty of overlooking my place, of equating pleasure with ‘away.’ I forget that a landscape can still satisfy even if it is less picturesque, and that the familiar can still surprise. If I cannot find virtue in my own backyard I am a poor customer indeed. I cramp my spirit and risk my life becoming, like the man said, a bicth.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Motor mower sparks moral crisis
3rd October 2009
One of the final things my neighbour Leanne Argyle did before she joined the tide of kiwis flowing to the Gold Coast was to give me her late father’s motor mower. It is the first motor mower I have owned. Pause a moment, dear reader, and reflect upon the enormity of that statement. For a New Zealand male of 51 to admit he has never owned a motor mower is like Michael Laws claiming modesty.
It’s not that I have never owned a lawn: I have possessed lawns all my life, usually large ones. Since I was a child I have been an enthusiastic participant in that greatest of kiwi weekend rituals – taming, trimming and tidying a suburban lawn. The difference is that, until now, I have always used a hand mower - a ‘push’ mower as we called it.
Thirty or forty years ago a push mower was commonplace but I can think of nobody who uses one today. Why did I persist for so long? To answer that question is to invite a philosophical discussion, a dialectic of home gardening that would fill several large volumes.
Let me just say that my attachment to the push mower was partly about style (I liked the effect it had on a lawn) and partly about personal fitness (it’s cheaper than joining a gym). I’ll confess that as the years went by it also became a matter of pride, particularly after we moved to Carters Terrace and took up a half acre garden, much of it grass.
So to be confronted with Leanne’s late father’s motor mower was no small matter. Here was a gift with hooks. It sat in my driveway like a great red beetle, exhaling smells of petrol and silage. I circled it suspiciously, my soul in turmoil. What was I to do?
My instinctive reaction was to give it back, but by the time I discovered the gift it was too late, the Argyles had departed. There was nobody to give it back to. Clearly they had observed me pushing my hand mower across the vast acreage of my lawn and had left me this machine out of sympathy, or perhaps to provoke the moral dilemma I now confronted.
My second thought was simply to park the machine in the corner of the garage and continue using my push mower. And that is exactly what I did until the motor mower’s silent mockery became too much for me.
My reluctance to take up the motor mower sprang from more than a desire to cling to old habits. It went all the way back to Mrs McClymont.
As a child I flexed my entrepreneurial spirit by developing a small lawn-mowing business. On most days after school I cut lawns for the many elderly women of our neighbourhood. All my clients had push mowers except for Mrs McClymont, who insisted I used her motor mower. This was a leviathan, an untamable beast of the high veldt, an ancient reel mower with ape-hanger handle bars. It was a brute to start and, being self-propelled, when finally coaxed to life was almost impossible for a young boy to control. It dragged me around Mrs McClymont’s lawns in a cloud of blue smoke, occasionally rampaging through flowerbeds and rose bushes. My only effective way of bringing it to a halt was to aim for a tree or fence post.
This early experience with motor mowers was on my mind when I eventually decided to try out my new machine. True to expectation, Leanne’s late father’s mower proved to be as temperamental as Mrs McClymont’s. It was slow to start and quick to cut out. I tinkered and fiddled, cursed and complained and eventually carted the machine off to Skinner’s in Netherby.
Now, in the full flush of spring growth, I am slowly becoming accustomed to the motor mower. It is fast, effortless and convenient.
Do I feel happier, fulfilled, or at least more in tune with my fellow suburbanites? Perhaps, but I miss the satisfaction of working up a good sweat and I try to ignore the reproaches of my old push mower cast, after all these years, to the back of the shed.
3rd October 2009
One of the final things my neighbour Leanne Argyle did before she joined the tide of kiwis flowing to the Gold Coast was to give me her late father’s motor mower. It is the first motor mower I have owned. Pause a moment, dear reader, and reflect upon the enormity of that statement. For a New Zealand male of 51 to admit he has never owned a motor mower is like Michael Laws claiming modesty.
It’s not that I have never owned a lawn: I have possessed lawns all my life, usually large ones. Since I was a child I have been an enthusiastic participant in that greatest of kiwi weekend rituals – taming, trimming and tidying a suburban lawn. The difference is that, until now, I have always used a hand mower - a ‘push’ mower as we called it.
Thirty or forty years ago a push mower was commonplace but I can think of nobody who uses one today. Why did I persist for so long? To answer that question is to invite a philosophical discussion, a dialectic of home gardening that would fill several large volumes.
Let me just say that my attachment to the push mower was partly about style (I liked the effect it had on a lawn) and partly about personal fitness (it’s cheaper than joining a gym). I’ll confess that as the years went by it also became a matter of pride, particularly after we moved to Carters Terrace and took up a half acre garden, much of it grass.
So to be confronted with Leanne’s late father’s motor mower was no small matter. Here was a gift with hooks. It sat in my driveway like a great red beetle, exhaling smells of petrol and silage. I circled it suspiciously, my soul in turmoil. What was I to do?
My instinctive reaction was to give it back, but by the time I discovered the gift it was too late, the Argyles had departed. There was nobody to give it back to. Clearly they had observed me pushing my hand mower across the vast acreage of my lawn and had left me this machine out of sympathy, or perhaps to provoke the moral dilemma I now confronted.
My second thought was simply to park the machine in the corner of the garage and continue using my push mower. And that is exactly what I did until the motor mower’s silent mockery became too much for me.
My reluctance to take up the motor mower sprang from more than a desire to cling to old habits. It went all the way back to Mrs McClymont.
As a child I flexed my entrepreneurial spirit by developing a small lawn-mowing business. On most days after school I cut lawns for the many elderly women of our neighbourhood. All my clients had push mowers except for Mrs McClymont, who insisted I used her motor mower. This was a leviathan, an untamable beast of the high veldt, an ancient reel mower with ape-hanger handle bars. It was a brute to start and, being self-propelled, when finally coaxed to life was almost impossible for a young boy to control. It dragged me around Mrs McClymont’s lawns in a cloud of blue smoke, occasionally rampaging through flowerbeds and rose bushes. My only effective way of bringing it to a halt was to aim for a tree or fence post.
This early experience with motor mowers was on my mind when I eventually decided to try out my new machine. True to expectation, Leanne’s late father’s mower proved to be as temperamental as Mrs McClymont’s. It was slow to start and quick to cut out. I tinkered and fiddled, cursed and complained and eventually carted the machine off to Skinner’s in Netherby.
Now, in the full flush of spring growth, I am slowly becoming accustomed to the motor mower. It is fast, effortless and convenient.
Do I feel happier, fulfilled, or at least more in tune with my fellow suburbanites? Perhaps, but I miss the satisfaction of working up a good sweat and I try to ignore the reproaches of my old push mower cast, after all these years, to the back of the shed.
National Standards undermine real change
12th September 2009
Mel is indignant. She sits in the corner of the staffroom and puffs herself up. “Well, I don’t know what all the fuss is about National Standards. When I was teaching in London I taught right through their national testing and I can tell you it’s brilliant.”
Heads turn - this is a view of the world we haven’t heard before.
Mel continues. “National testing is so satisfying for the teacher. You know exactly what you have to do and you can work really hard to get the children through the test. I was starting at 7.30 in the morning with extra classes for kids at risk, with other classes on Saturdays and all sorts.”
“What did the kids think of it?” Julie voices our common thought.
“The kids were actually learning real stuff for a change: facts, figures, information.”
“And were you teaching to the test?”
“Of course. The idea is to get your results looking as good as you can. And it works, my class got really good results. I mean, you cram it into them and they won’t remember much of it six weeks later but it’s very satisfying teaching.”
Mel is satisfied - she sips her tea with satisfaction. The rest of us sit uncomfortably.
I generally avoid writing about my day job in this column but there are some things afoot in education that need to be aired outside staffrooms and the offices of policymakers.
Anne Tolley, the education minister, has set as her priority the introduction of national standards in literacy (English to our generation) and numeracy (Mathematics). She maintains that parents throughout the country are crying out for clear standards. I talk to parents and I haven’t heard these cries but I must believe Mrs Tolley because she is the government.
To be clear, the minister says she is not planning to introduce a national testing regime like Mel enjoyed in England. National Standards in New Zealand will be a set of benchmarks against which children’s progress is measured using a range of assessment methods (including tests).
Generally the profession feels comfortable with the concept of standards but their introduction at this time is overshadowing the implementation of a new national curriculum. The New Zealand Curriculum is a blueprint to transform schooling from the factory model we’ve worked with for a century. It addresses areas of low performance like the relatively poor achievement levels of Maori and Pasific Islanders by enabling teachers to develop educational programmes that are meaningful and engaging for these students.
Schools have been working for years on the New Zealand Curriculum, which comes into effect in 2010. It is the most significant reform of education in 20 years, drawing together the best of curriculum content and teaching skills.
National Standards on the other hand are about assessing and reporting student achievement – a necessary part of the process but not one that should drive the education system. Assessment belongs in the back of the bus. The front seats should be occupied by strong curriculum and excellent teaching. Prioritising assessment is like driving the bus in reverse, and a bus driven in reverse will never perform at its best.
This is the lesson of Mel’s experience in England. Teaching to the test improves student achievement in only the most facile sense. It does nothing to inspire thirst for knowledge or prepare a child to become an independent life-long learner.
I cannot say whether the introduction of National Standards is a deliberate attempt to undermine the New Zealand Curriculum but that threatens to be the outcome. Support services to schools are being axed or diverted to the National Standards. In 2010 schools can expect no professional advisory support in science, physical education, the arts, social studies and a raft of other curriculum and skills areas. Programmes like the Literacy Professional Development Project that are proven to lift student achievement are being curtailed or cut.
These changes are happening within a wider climate of austerity. In 2010 the government plans to pull $45,000,000 out of the education payroll, with a further $50,000,000 to go in 2011. This is at a time of growing school rolls.
Another change will see Canterbury lose $860,000 of funding for specialist education services over the next three years, leaving schools and teachers grappling with rising problems of learning and behaviour and denying service to children with specialised needs.
The government may believe that National Standards will enable it to improve our education system even as it cuts resources. Time will show that simply weighing the pig more often does not make it fatter.
12th September 2009
Mel is indignant. She sits in the corner of the staffroom and puffs herself up. “Well, I don’t know what all the fuss is about National Standards. When I was teaching in London I taught right through their national testing and I can tell you it’s brilliant.”
Heads turn - this is a view of the world we haven’t heard before.
Mel continues. “National testing is so satisfying for the teacher. You know exactly what you have to do and you can work really hard to get the children through the test. I was starting at 7.30 in the morning with extra classes for kids at risk, with other classes on Saturdays and all sorts.”
“What did the kids think of it?” Julie voices our common thought.
“The kids were actually learning real stuff for a change: facts, figures, information.”
“And were you teaching to the test?”
“Of course. The idea is to get your results looking as good as you can. And it works, my class got really good results. I mean, you cram it into them and they won’t remember much of it six weeks later but it’s very satisfying teaching.”
Mel is satisfied - she sips her tea with satisfaction. The rest of us sit uncomfortably.
I generally avoid writing about my day job in this column but there are some things afoot in education that need to be aired outside staffrooms and the offices of policymakers.
Anne Tolley, the education minister, has set as her priority the introduction of national standards in literacy (English to our generation) and numeracy (Mathematics). She maintains that parents throughout the country are crying out for clear standards. I talk to parents and I haven’t heard these cries but I must believe Mrs Tolley because she is the government.
To be clear, the minister says she is not planning to introduce a national testing regime like Mel enjoyed in England. National Standards in New Zealand will be a set of benchmarks against which children’s progress is measured using a range of assessment methods (including tests).
Generally the profession feels comfortable with the concept of standards but their introduction at this time is overshadowing the implementation of a new national curriculum. The New Zealand Curriculum is a blueprint to transform schooling from the factory model we’ve worked with for a century. It addresses areas of low performance like the relatively poor achievement levels of Maori and Pasific Islanders by enabling teachers to develop educational programmes that are meaningful and engaging for these students.
Schools have been working for years on the New Zealand Curriculum, which comes into effect in 2010. It is the most significant reform of education in 20 years, drawing together the best of curriculum content and teaching skills.
National Standards on the other hand are about assessing and reporting student achievement – a necessary part of the process but not one that should drive the education system. Assessment belongs in the back of the bus. The front seats should be occupied by strong curriculum and excellent teaching. Prioritising assessment is like driving the bus in reverse, and a bus driven in reverse will never perform at its best.
This is the lesson of Mel’s experience in England. Teaching to the test improves student achievement in only the most facile sense. It does nothing to inspire thirst for knowledge or prepare a child to become an independent life-long learner.
I cannot say whether the introduction of National Standards is a deliberate attempt to undermine the New Zealand Curriculum but that threatens to be the outcome. Support services to schools are being axed or diverted to the National Standards. In 2010 schools can expect no professional advisory support in science, physical education, the arts, social studies and a raft of other curriculum and skills areas. Programmes like the Literacy Professional Development Project that are proven to lift student achievement are being curtailed or cut.
These changes are happening within a wider climate of austerity. In 2010 the government plans to pull $45,000,000 out of the education payroll, with a further $50,000,000 to go in 2011. This is at a time of growing school rolls.
Another change will see Canterbury lose $860,000 of funding for specialist education services over the next three years, leaving schools and teachers grappling with rising problems of learning and behaviour and denying service to children with specialised needs.
The government may believe that National Standards will enable it to improve our education system even as it cuts resources. Time will show that simply weighing the pig more often does not make it fatter.
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