Chalk Talk: News and views in education

The junior school at CBC Monkstown Park in Dublin has been pulled back from the brink of closure. A meeting last month announced the small (under 100 children, with annual fees of €4,136) junior boys’ school was closing. A new plan has been formulated to keep the school open and it is currently enrolling, for all classes, for September 2014. It is understood that while the school operates under the control of the Edmund Rice Schools Trust, the scheme to save the school is down to the work of parents and teachers. It apparently involves the provision of a number of “scholarships” to the adjacent, much larger, and recently refurbished senior CBC whereby some parents of boys at the junior school may opt to pay the fees for six years of post-primary school upfront, in effect subsidising the primary school.

The heart sinks. It’s a stressful time of year for those facing the Leaving Cert, and their parents, and you’ve got to wonder what good is achieved by attending one of the one-day crash courses around. A last minute one-to-one grind or consultation with a class teacher about an area of weakness can be helpful at this 11th hour, but the classes, which seem hugely expensive for what is a large group lecture, feeds into desperation.

How money savvy are kids? In a (small) survey of children’s attitude to money, 80 per cent get pocket money, and although most understand it is something to “spend or save”, some think it is “toy money you can use to play games with” . Charmingly, 18 per cent believe earnings are “jewellery for your ears” and 23 per cent think a savings plan might be “a trip somewhere nice that doesn’t cost a lot of money”. Values, Money and Me is a new free online teaching resource to help primary-school pupils explore practical and emotional issues around managing money, and was launched by Experian. Teachers can see it in action, contact Maeve Dunne at 086-7239898.

Two secondary school students, Paul Clarke from St Paul’s College, Raheny, Dublin and Conor Foy from Coláiste Chiaráin, Croom, Limerick, won a total of three awards at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles this month. They won SciFest @SFI Discover last November. Clarke’s project involved the Travelling Salesman Problem, baffling mathematicians since the 1930s, and he received $250 from the American Mathematical Society. Foy won $2,500 from the Society for Experimental Mechanics, plus a category award, for developing a system to measure, display, transmit and record the timing difference between, and the force exerted by a crew of rowers.

And for the second year running, St Conleth’s Community College student Shane Fanning from Newbridge won the ICS Scratch programming competition. Play his ‘Lostlands Part 2’ game at scratch.mit.edu/projects.