"It must be right; I got it off the internet..."

Remember the Canvey Island nativity play?

The “Christmas Tale” stars a pair of robbers, named Bob and Bill, who raid a jewellery store in broad daylight to steal a manger full of rubies and emeralds.

There's a similar theme at work in a grammar exercise recently given to primary school children across the Estuary in Sheerness. We know this because one parent was so 'shocked' that she was apparently obliged to go to the local press and have it reported, complete with carefully posed photographs.

In an exercise designed to test the appropriate use of the pronouns 'I' and 'me', children had to complete the following sentence:

Hand ..... the money before ..... put a bullet through your head.

Could it, perhaps, be part of the continued attempt to reflect modern urban society in the school curriculum? And, if so, can we look forward to the same thing emerging in, say, Maths,

If Liam and Kane steal £140 and divide it in the ratio 3:4...

Physics,

Sayeed takes a BMW without the owner's consent and drives it into a wall at 70km/h....

or Biology?

How can Shanice and Amii use this graph to record the growth of their cannabis plants...?

Educational orthodoxy demands that work set should be as relevant as possible to the lives and interests of pupils - though it's not clear whether that would extend to a crime-themed nativity play in an area which had recently seen several armed robberies  - which raises some interesting questions about the test paper's provenance.

We do know it was downloaded from the generally respected Times Educational Supplement resource-sharing site. It's an excellent example of the spurious authority lent by the imprimatur of the internet; an unquestioning teacher seems to have handed it out without the proof reading which would have detected the rank illiteracy (or devious trap) of asking pupils to use 'I' or 'me' to complete:

When I asked the Scotsman if he enjoyed haggis, he looked at me and said ‘Och .....’ 

I doubt the 'bullet' sentence caused any lasting damage, though it does seem unnecessarily crass to include it in a grammar exercise for primary-age children. What concerns me more is the idea of teachers indiscriminately trawling the internet for off-the-peg lessons and homework with no guarantee of quality.

Over the past 50 years, the nature of education has shifted from imparting knowledge and skills to teachers being expected to keep pupils - or 'learners' - entertained. The result has been a desperate scramble for novelty while trying to satisfy the demand for constant exhaustive record-keeping - senior management and inspectors do love a brightly-coloured progress chart or graph! - and a corresponding lack of consistency in what some of us would call the basics.

Borrowing back a comment I left at Julia's place recently, on a post highlighting the effects of this degeneration,

Truly we have an education system at which the rest of the world can only wonder!

Toast of the week - a Herculean task

In the previous post, I mentioned a man dressed as Santa Claus on behalf of a Canvey Island charity, whose sleigh was undeservedly run out of town at the behest of some over-zealous citizens (JuliaM has the story too).

He is, in fact, the chairman and founder of the charity 'The Friends of Concord Beach', an organisation formed with the laudable aims of maintaining the salt-water pool there and promoting 'good citizenship, civic responsibility and good habits' in those visiting the area and using the facilities.

The group are also busy arranging for sponsored benches along the front and a pool-side shower, together with murals to cover unsightly graffiti and some very polite notices:

But it doesn't stop there; these valiant souls have a far more challenging objective in their sights:

To promote the education of those who visit the beach in sea water and beach safety as it applies to the tidal estuary of the River Thames.

One has to admire their ambition; as a trawl through the Tavern archives makes abundantly clear, Britain's coastline is the destination of choice for an alarming number of Darwin Award hopefuls every year. In fact, an appropriately seasonal example was reported this week:

Two men who were in a toy inflatable boat and wearing penguin and Santa costumes have been taken to a Cornish harbour by the RNLI after they were seen drifting out to sea.

These intrepid mariners set out to paddle across Mount's Bay from Marazion to Penzance, a distance of about 4km, in voluminous fancy dress and without the benefit of life-jackets or a seaworthy craft; what a good thing we've been having such calm weather recently!

If the Friends of Concord Beach seriously intend to tackle the Augean stables of public ignorance of even the basics of beach safety, they certainly have their work cut out, which is why we are raising a glass to them and their endeavours.

Friends of Concord Beach, your very good health!

A Festive Selection Box

Well, it looks like normal service may soon be restored at the Tavern at last, following absence, midwinter festivities and downed telephone lines.

The seclusion enforced by the latter has meant that several news stories have passed by without comment here. The treat-sized asteroid 2013 YB, for example, flew by just a whisker under 15,000 km away on the 23rd, though at somewhere between 1.5 and 3 metres in diameter, the most it could have done would probably have been an impromptu firework display in the upper atmosphere.

Meanwhile, a tale of not-so-goodwill from Canvey Island gave us a quote positively dripping with Zeitgeist:

"All we know is somebody in a yellow tabard went and asked them to stop because it was apparently traumatising children."

What dreadful deed could possibly have justified such a dramatic intervention? The culprit was a volunteer dressed as Santa Claus on behalf of a local charity; he turned up at the town's Christmas Event and fell foul of some hi-vis jobsworths, who told him to sling his festive hook because the officially approved version was on his way.

"A town council officer told us we had to take our Santa away as the Rotary Club Santa had arrived at the other end of the Christmas market round the corner."

Apparently, the prospect of seeing two Santas in the same place was considered too much for Canvey Island's impressionable youngsters, though, oddly enough, the spectacle of an 'aggressive' man in a fluorescent jacket shouting at a beloved childhood icon appears to have been deemed quite acceptable.

Personally, I'd have thought that today's children are familiar enough with celebrity lookalikes and fictional distortions of the space-time continuum to take it in their stride and, in any case, the local infants do seem to be made of sterner stuff than most.

Finally, since we are in Canvey Island, it seems fitting that another recent news story has awakened the long-silent muse and provided a merry tune to whistle while next out shopping in a popular high street store.

This is not just a song parody...

Saturday, in town,
Food shop, look around:
Basket, I put in
Pork pie, bottle of gin.
The headscarfed woman in the cashier's seat
Takes one look and gets to her feet;
"I can't handle pork and alcohol."

Says that she's gotta go;
Why work where you know
There’ll be liquor and pork?
You knew it right from the start.
How bad can scanning the barcodes be?
I ain’t asking you to taste it for me;
I just want some pork and alcohol.

Extracurricular activities, Essex style

Oh dear; looks like the silly season for Christmas stories has begun.

A primary school has outraged parents by doing “away with the manger” in its annual nativity play and making children act out a "politically correct" jewellery heist.

This, you may not be surprised to learn, is from Canvey Island, where staff have apparently decided that grand larceny is more relevant to their local community than the traditional shepherds and stable.

The “Christmas Tale” stars a pair of robbers, named Bob and Bill, who raid a jewellery store in broad daylight to steal a manger full of rubies and emeralds.

You've got to admit they may be right; according to the Telegraph, there have been seven violent armed raids in the area in the past six weeks, making it - probably - a more common occurrence than a teenage mother giving birth in a garage to a baby of dubious parentage.

And, since many of the 'traditions' of primary school nativity plays owe more to sentimental embellishment and renaissance iconography than to biblical sources, one might argue that the story is fair game for a substantial rewrite - if, indeed, it is performed at all.

But isn't it just a little odd, in a community that has seen so many armed robberies recently, to appoint two children to act out the part of modern-day criminals while the rest of them sing a distinctly unorthodox version of 'Away in a a Manger' (with some very dodgy scansion) about their raid on a high street shop?

“They knocked off the jewellers,
Though it was broad daylight,
They stole loads of diamonds,
To their utter delight.”

I fervently hope that the director of this theatrical masterpiece is not a devotee of the Stanislavski Method of acting, where actors seek out real-life experiences in preparation for their roles; in view of the recent spate of armed robberies nearby, perhaps it would be worth taking a closer look at the CCTV footage to look see if the perpetrators were less than four feet tall.