It has been a week since the DANA disaster and although the most basic emergency continues, it is time to think about the children, who, as so many times before, are the weakest link in this crisis. Maybe it is a secondary problem, maybe not, but the fact is that seven days after the floods, the Generalitat Valenciana does not have an educational plan for the students who have seen their schools become a mass of objects and mud.
The Department of Education has reported that there are 22 municipalities without service (apart from three other districts of Valencia), but it limits itself to explaining that there will be no class this week. Directors and teachers who have seen some of these schools say that it is very optimistic to limit it to this week because there are some centers absolutely destroyed and that a plan is needed now. The only thing that Education offers at the moment is that anyone who wants can go to another center, but the families have to manage it on their own. The Government does not provide transportation or means, everyone there.
And, of course, it hasn’t gone down very well. “Understanding the difficulty of organizing something, it cannot be that there is no plan for the children,” laments Rubén Pacheco, president of the AMPAS Confederation Gonzalo Anaya. It is urgent, this representative tells us, to implement some alternative to get the little ones out of the quagmire. They have spent a week in which they have only seen mud, death and destruction, and that, experts warn, can cause trauma over time.
There are all kinds of reasons to resume school activity, and the least of them all is educational. But children need to socialize, play, have at least a semblance of normality. “The most important thing of all at this moment is to give them a feeling of security,” summarizes child psychologist María Bilbao. That and listening to them, which in their language can mean putting a sheet of paper in front of them so they can draw or recreate situations that help them understand what is happening. Above all, much love and understanding. A group of psychologists from Valencia has prepared a guide to help students, in case you find it useful.
The unions are also upset with Education. They have not been informed of anything and there are teachers who do not know how to act. Just yesterday afternoon, he finally called the entire educational community to a meeting, which will be on Wednesday. Eight days later. As one director summarized, “the educational community has been launched before the Ministry.”
We will see what comes out of that meeting, because the work ahead is enormous and moving a few thousand students from the center is going to be complicated. Spaces, transportation, teachers, cafeterias and even school insurance must be organized. We will tell you in due course. Meanwhile, here I leave you the article in which we tell you how the situation is (always educational in this bulletin) in the Valencian Community and I will go on to tell you other things, which, although they are even smaller, are also happening.
This week we talked about…
- Father and son, against young people’s ignorance of Francoism. José A. Martínez Soler and Erik Martínez Westley, father and son, have published in four hands Franco for young peoplea book with which they aim to remedy an endemic evil of the system, which we have already told you about here before: strange as it may seem, Francoism is hardly studied in schools and institutes. The causes are various and do not fit in this space, but it is a notable lack. Good luck to them with this initiative, it is needed.
- Goodbye to AI doing your homework? Bad news for students: a team of workers from Google’s DeepMind laboratory has generated a sampling algorithm capable of applying watermarks to the text generated by its AI tool, to make them recognizable. It is enough to have the associated software and it will recognize the origin of the text.
- Neither single nor competitive selectivity. Months of delay, protests and noise, a lot of noise later, the autonomous communities have moved on from the Government and its proposal (Royal Decree!) of Ebau to end up proposing, in most cases, a test very similar to those of previous years . In most regions there is no hint of competency questions, and in those of the PP they have not even kept their own word of putting a “common” test in all of them. And meanwhile, the Ministry makes a point of ensuring that no one complies with its rules. Here I leave you a more detailed analysis of what is happening with the Selectivity.
To upload grade
- A teacher in Euskadi charges up to 620 euros more than one in Catalonia or Asturias. That is what UGT concludes in a study on salary differences between teachers by autonomous community. The distance, and depending on the case it is not small, as seen in the example in the title of this brief, is normally due to the supplements paid by each regional government, so if you are aggrieved you already know. Here is an article on the subject, and here is the link to the UGT website, where you can consult the entire report.
- At what age should you have your first mobile phone? A recurring doubt among families and which, furthermore, cannot always be handled at will. Peer pressure causes children to want to have a cell phone as soon as a friend has it, and there is always a father or mother who is advance and sparks the great discussion. Here you have data to make an informed decision based on what science says.
- Galician families, against the digitalization that the Xunta intends. 70% of parents have a negative opinion about the Galician Government’s digitalization program, E-dixgal. I leave you the details about the study, carried out by the Confederation of AMPAs, but the news leads me to think about what is happening in the classrooms with technology. Mobile phones, which have been banned, are rejected, but digitization programs are implemented that often consist of going from paper books to digital ones, without greater added value. And, of course, families reject this, seeing that it contributes nothing. We need to turn this around, sooner rather than later.
Thank you very much for coming this far, especially these days when we seem to talk about seemingly minor things in relation to everything that is happening.
Much encouragement to all.
See you next week!
#time #children
