The West is the Best! Adventures in Berlin

I am currently on holiday in Europe. The first leg of my journey is in Berlin.

My wanderings through the city have taken me into East and West Berlin (or the areas formerly known as East and West Berlin). I have come to the conclusion thus far that East Berlin is a place of grey sadness, and West Berlin retains its historical buildings, which makes it much prettier.

As we all hopefully know, Berlin as the capital of Germany was the headquarters for the NAZI regime, and then the site of what was arguably the greatest zone of confrontation between capitalism and communism during its occupation subsequent to the end of World War II. The reason (or one of the reasons) for this division was because the Allies and the Russians advanced upon the city in the final days of the war from different sides. The direction from which they came was not the only difference between the Allies and the Russians. The method used capture the city was very different. My trusty source of all military information (also my boyfriend) informs me that Soviets very methodically would take a city block by effectively razing it, and the moving on to repeat the process on the next block. Effective? Maybe. Destructive? Unquestionably. What this has meant was that the buildings that dominate the East Berlin landscape are typical of the communist era. The phrase that springs to mind to describe them is “the embodiment of an Orwellian Dystopia”. 

 The only tree in all of East Berlin. 

I actually turned off the black and white setting for this picture. That building in the background is the finance ministry (we hypothesised it may be a prison, initially). It has a mural of all the workers working together on its entrance.  

West Berlin has many trees

West Berlin is also just generally pretty

By no means do I wish to suggest that East Berlin has less value than West Berlin. However, I think that it is a great shame that the Soviets had control of that area of the city.

My advice for any travellers to Berlin: Stay in the Western part – there is great value in travelling during the days to the Eastern areas to see museums, monuments, and everything in between, but it’s much nicer to come home to a pretty neighbourhood when you’re away.

It's not how much you have, it's how you use it

Recently, there has been a spate of standardised testing conducted both locally and internationally. These tests reveal Australian students to be at a disappointingly low rank in the international community, particularly when it comes to literacy. It has been suggested that this is partly because many Australian students simply do not read enough. (This and this article explain the reports quite well).

Peter Garrett, the Schools Minister (whatever that title means), has pointed the finger of blame at a few factors, but one of them is inadequate funding. 

In life it is rarely how much you have but rather, how you use it. Undeniably, funds can mean that schools can acquire better facilities or learning tools, but having a library full of shiny new books is useless if nobody reads them.

There is an increasing trend in Australia society away from reading books to playing on ipads or computers. More and more, you can see mothers giving their children ipads or iphones to occupy them rather than a book or toy. This year, I tutored twin nine year old girls who each had an ipad, loaded with games. Unsurprisingly, they both did not read enough, or read books which were not beneficial to their literacy. 

When I ask my English students whether or not they read, I inevitably know the answer is going to be “not really”.

Increasing funding to schools isn’t going to help if the underlying culture and attitude toward reading remains unchanged. I know I certainly read less than I used to, and that’s partly because electronic distractions are so easily accessible.

When you set the pattern of reaching for an ipad rather than a book, that is a habit that will be set for life. No wonder the literacy of Australian students compares poorly to other societies.

It’s great that this is an issue which has been brought to our attention, but the answer from the Federal government should not be to throw money at it. That is a quick-fix solution that doesn’t do anything to change the culture that means that students don’t read enough.

Two Sides to Every Story - Mark Strizic

The older I become, the more I realise that there are two sides to every story.

Be it the divorce of my parents, the squabble within a family, or even the Labor Liberal divide – everybody has their own opinion, and their unique perspective. After all, would you hold your ground stubbornly unless you believed utterly that you were correct?

In events such as we have recently witnessed in the US, with that awful massacre, I always wonder what compelled the gunman to such a terrible act, for whatever it was, it must have been terrible.

But what is mostly preying on my mind when it comes to both sides to the story, is my great-uncle, Mark. Last week, he died. Nobody is perfect. He was certainly not. But I always knew him as someone who was kind to me. When I was a child, he would never speak down to me, but always as though I were his equal. When I would bring him the drawings I had enthusiastically made, he would treat them seriously, telling me to “sign and date them”, or offer an aesthetic tip. Little did I realise until my wanderings through his room and studio during the past few months, that he had kept most of my drawings, and even the photograph I gave him for Christmas or a birthday two years ago.

Outwardly, Mark could be at times, difficult. But I never doubt that he cared for me, or my mother. The last time I saw him in hospital, his wife, my great-aunt, Sue, pointed to me, and said “this is Alice”. His response was a definite, “no”, because to him, I was a young child. This is something which brought a smile to my face then, and now. I regret not having adequately gotten the chance to know him in my adulthood, because I hope that I may have gotten to know him a bit better. Have understood him, and in turn, his perspective.

As an artist, Mark influenced me, probably more than I know. In the link below, he explains photography as capturing a moment in time that will never again be seen. Seeing this, my reaction was “but I think this”, and I truly realised the extent to which he lives on in my own photography and artistic endeavours, such as they are.

The point I am making in a roundabout fashion, is that Mark was a multifaceted individual, whose outward manifestation did not reveal all there was to him. I am the first to admit that I am too quick to judge, but it is always well worth keeping in mind that there are two sides to every story, and Mark certainly had a story to tell.

I strongly recommend you watch the following video, as it tells not only his story, but ours as a country. I will miss him, and I will miss not having known him to the extent that I could have.

http://www.abc.net.au/arts/stories/s3324845.htm

If you are even more inclined (which I do hope you are), Zetta Florence has a line of stationary featuring some of his photographs. I think them truly beautiful.

The problem of the undisciplined child

A conversation yesterday with one of the lovely girls I coach for debating got me thinking. She was telling me how she flatly refused to follow a teacher’s instructions, and in return received a ‘behavioural strike’. What even is that? I wish I could say that in my day, had I done something like that I would have received a detention, but the truth is, in my day (bearing in mind it is only a few years since I graduated), the most I probably would have gotten was a talk from my year level coordinator – maybe the head of senior years, with very little punitive consequence other than my own conditioned self-guilt.

The alarming trend toward children is that they are allowed to run free without teaching them any serious understanding of consequence or discipline. As a result of my work, I see this in classrooms and one-on-one behaviour.

In a classroom, there are often only one or two students who act up, but I have very little authority to discipline students. However even the hands of regular teachers are frequently tied. A stern talking-to will only ever be so much of a deterrent, and the behaviour will inevitably start up again. The problem is that if a teacher comes down to hard on a student, there is a risk that the parents of that student will come back to the school, in defense of their child, which then lands the teacher in trouble for being "too mean" to a student who was misbehaving in the first place.

In one-on-one tutoring situations, I have had to teach seven year olds who I am unable to discipline because the parent is in the adjacent room and will reprimand me for attempting to rein in their unruly child. There are of course, techniques that can be used to make the child sit still, but it is difficult to reason with a small child.

The issue then becomes that because the child is not concentrating, or finds the work required in order to improve boring, no progress is made, and one must then justify this to the parent.

In both of those instances – both classroom and individual, I point the finger at political correctness and a indignation on the part of parents that stems from the message that nobody should tell you how to raise your child. It is impossible to tell a parent the truth about their child, because they don’t want to hear it. When you want to say “Your child is an undisciplined little brat who is at times, quite rude”, you have to instead say “Your child could learn motivational skills, and it would be beneficial if they would develop a more positive attitude towards learning, and the learning environment”. It doesn’t really pack quite the same punch, and moreover, it leaves room for interpretation as to the meaning. 

The unwillingness of parents to hear anything negative about their children means that their children aren’t instilled with the self-discipline to be dedicated students, or often, even particularly polite.

Maybe I’m just a crotchety old woman before my time, I have witnessed parents threatening their young children with punishments if they don’t start behaving immediately, and then when the behaviour continues look at me apologetically and shrug, suggesting we end our lesson short.The only thing this tells the child is that they can get away with this sort of behaviour.

I think that in some ways this has led employers saying that they are least willing to hire generation Y workers, because they are the least disciplined or fastidious when it comes to their work. Gen Y (my generation) is the generation that grew up with the beginnings of this behaviour. I dread to imagine what this will be like for the students in school now. So I would just like to say a big thank you to my mother for smacking me when I was being unruly or rude (in honesty, she sometimes still does). Mother, I understand why you did it, and I think it’s the best thing you could have possibly done for me.