Monday, August 26, 2013

School at Down Under...

How is the school in Australia? I have no clue because I went to school in Hungary, therefore I have no idea whether it is better or worse than in Hungary. It is always a good topic to start a fist fight about the low or high level of education in Australia among my Hungarian friends. We always have a debate about  how much more we learnt in Hungary. When this comes up as a conversation we always say that "Google is my friend, and I always hated to learn how much was the annual yield of bauxite in Poland in 1980.

But this is not what I want to tell you. My son who is 5 and half year old, and goes to pre-school, saw a dino at the front of his books and said: "Daddy, that is a Brachiosaurus". "Great" I said, I've never heard about it in my past 38 years. So I told him that he has to teach me the names of the dinos they learn about at school this term.


After school, just like a good puppy, he came to me and said, that it is dino time. So I took my computer and said "Google is my friend, then I showed him this image.

He named all of them, except the Ichtyosaurus and Saber-toothed Tiger with perfect pronunciation. Even though I've never told them or never showed them any dinos before. He couldn't read their names because he hardly can read and the fonts are quite small as you can see. They started this topic in school only 6-8 weeks ago. I have no idea how the teachers teach them, whether they queue them up in front of their whiteboard and make them tell the name of the dinos until they collapse and beg for mercy or just simply tell them once. Either way, it is a big achievement. I know kids are into dinos at this age, but I would rather name them all T-rex or Bruno or Alex if I were 6.

I don't think my kids are exceptionally smart but I can see they've learnt something. If the only thing they can name in year five is some old dusty bones, I'll come back and write an other post about the education system. Until then, thanks for reading.


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