Category: General Education

There is a recent article about schools are banning wearable devices in one particular inner west school in Sydney. This is something bothering all parents and schools for the last decade or so. The situation got a lot tougher with all the new wearable devices in the last few years.

The primary school my children are attending ban the use of phones and also any wearable devices with an internet connection. On school trips, students can bring phones without sim card as a camera.

In the early days, smartphones are expensive and took a while before the hand me downs propagated from parents to the children. Girls seem to love social media and boys with games, availability of internet and devices means children are exposed to them at a very early age. I manage to talk the daughter into not sign up for any social media account until she turns 13, how I dread that day.

Most of the parents I know had struggles dealing with this issue. Particular as you cannot use a blanket bane on use of the device, as they need them to actually do their school works as well. With my daughter, I settled on the limit of half-hour a day and additional times as needed. Once they are in high school, they actually need a laptop for day to day work at school as well. I will just have adjust the policy as required.

I also had to set up sleep time on her tablet after I caught her using the tablet 2 am on the morning once. I highly recommend spend some time and set up proper parental supervision on your children’s device, saved me a whole bunch of headaches.

Thirty schools were evacuated on Tuesday and Wednesday, including students that were doing their HSC at the time. For people that are not familiar with the term, HSC is basically the university entrance exam in NSW, so it is a big deal.

Currently, it is confirmed that the emails came from Eastern Europe, so like many things internet, it will most likely be a black hole and we never found out who did it.

Now some personal experience, this happens frequently on both secondary school and university level. Most of the time around the end of the term examination period. I think this alone gives some hint on who benefits most from these type of incidents and the likely culprits.

I have never heard any of these turned into serious incidents. However, in the post 911 era, these tend to be taken very seriously all around the world.

A break from the usual depressing Covid-19 related news, we will look at the recent barrage of bad news that the now infamous Shore Grammar got.

It first started with the muck up day list which the detail I do not see the needs of repeating here, one can easily Google it if you want to. Muck up day in my high school days were pretty tame in comparison on what is on that particular list. Eggs fight and graffiti are the most common choice, however, my school crackdown pretty hard on it. So on my year 12, they basically threaten anyone caught doing the nasty on the muck up day will be banned from doing HSC. As a result of this, nothing much happened in my year.

The second article is someone chatted with a couple of kids from Shore and as a result, some suburbs are disparaged on. One thing people not from Sydney have to understand is that Sydney-siders can be very snobby. North shore is family tree-huggers, inner west is where the hippies live, Eastern suburbs are where all the ultra-rich, Western suburbs are all the bogans are, well you get what I mean. While there are some elements of truth to this, but the actual situation on the ground is a lot more nuanced. People love to stereotype and Sydney-siders are no exception to this.

There are also videos on the internet showing the immaculate facilities and the view of Shore Grammar. This is not really a secret, these are all public information. I was in Shore Grammer years ago on events for my kids, the site is truly spectacular, it is what you call million dollar view. Naturally, with the recent happening, many had brought up the question why a school charging more than 30k per students still receives significant public funding when it already has far superior facilities than any public school in Australia.

Taking the rich and powerful down a peg or two is one of the favourite exercises for most Australian and I suppose for many in other parts of the world as well. I would not be surprised to see more similar articles to pop up while this currently occupies the centre of the public’s attention.

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Things definitely is a lot better in the last week or so. We went from 10 schools closed down in one week to only three in last 10 days. The three school that were closed within last time I updated are as following.

Lidcombe Public School
Kincoppal-Rose Bay School
Blue Mountains Grammar School

This trend is very encouraging and hopefully, we can keep reducing the infection rate.

Australia wide there are a total of 26738 confirmed infections today and an increase of 50 which is equivalent to 0.19% from yesterday. Victoria counted 84% of the new Covid-19 infection for today in Australia.

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Relative good week as far as Covid-19 induced school closure goes. Only three school closure for this week due to Covid-19, they are as follows.

St Paul’s Catholic College
Girraween Public School
Regents Park Christian School

Australia wide there are a total of 26137 confirmed infections today and an increase of 89 which is equivalent to 0.34% from yesterday. Victoria counted 91.01% of the new Covid-19 infection for today in Australia.

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After the brief calm the week before last, we had seven school closure in the NSW within the last three days. This is a very sharp escalation and roughly kept the trend of last six weeks. We have already easily exceed the total number of school closure in the first four month of the current Covid-19 outbreak. This demonstrate that in there NSW there are very significant and more serious community infection in the current second wave compare to February to June period.

Schools closed this week in NSW

Riverstone High School
Wyndham College
Schofields Public School
Ryde Secondary College
St Gertrude’s Catholic primary school
Double Bay Public School
Homebush Public School

Australia wide there are a total of 25448 confirmed infections today and an increase of 131 which is equivalent to 0.52% from yesterday. Victoria counted 86.26% of the new Covid-19 infection for today in Australia.

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In light of recent development a bunch of restrictions are placed back onto NSW schools.

* Students must remain within their relevant class or year group to limit mixing.
* Schools must not travel outside their local community or zone, including between rural and regional areas.
* Interschool sport and zone carnivals are restricted to 100 people per venue and must be held in the local area.
* Spectators, including parents and carers, are not permitted within school grounds or at sporting events held during school hours.
* All group singing and or other chanting activities, as well as the use of wind instruments in group settings are not permitted.
* Dance activities and drama group work can continue under a COVID-19 Safety Plan.
* School formals, dances, graduation or other social events are not permitted. Schools may hold a Year 12 assembly at school without parents to recognise the completion of school or consider delaying events until later in the year.

NSW Department of Education

Some personal experience for my own kids, school band practices are back to on Zoom again and school assemblies are still not on as well. Sports are more or less back to normal, the netball is back on full swing, but parents are not allowed on the courtside.

Australia wide there are a total of 24812 confirmed infections today and an increase of 216 which is equivalent to 0.88% from yesterday. Victoria counted 96.30% of the new Covid-19 infection for today in Australia.

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The news just came over the weekend that Sydney Girls High School will close on Monday due to positive Covid-19 test. I thought it is a good time to do a summary of school closure due to the Covid-19 infections this year so far.

Following are the public schools closure due to Covid-19

Sydney Girls High School – 17 August 2020
Parramatta Public School – 12 August 2020
Bonnyrigg Heights Public School – 10 August 2020
Bonnyrigg High School – 4 August 2020
Greenway Park Public School – 4 August 2020
Fort Street High School – 30 July 2020
Bayanami Public School – 29 July 2020
Tomaree Public School – 23 July 2020
Tomaree HS – 23 July 2020
Camden High School – 26 June 2020
Lane Cove West Public School – 25 June 2020
Laguna Street Public School – 13 to 24 June 2020
Rose Bay PS – 12 to 15 June 2020
Werrington Public School – 14 May 2020
Warragamba Public School – 4 May 2020
Bankstown Senior College – 6 April 2020
St Marys Senior High School – 2-3 April 2020
Kincumber High School – 1 April 2020
Wiley Park Girls High School – 2 April 2020
Riverside Girls High School – 30 March 2020
Normanhurst West Public School – 23-26 March 2020
Katoomba High School – 13 March 2020
Willoughby Girls High School – 9-10 March 2020
Epping Boys High School – 6 March 2020

NSW private school closure due to Covid-19

Tangara School – 10-21 August 2020
Our Lady of Mercy College – 10 August 2020
St Pius X High School – 5-7 August 2020
EverLearn Preschool – 30 July 2020
St Margaret Mary’s Primary School – 30 July 2020
Cerdon College – 24 July 2020
Mary Immaculate Catholic Primary School – 24 July 2020
Freeman Catholic College – 24 July 2020
Green Point Christian College – 3 July 2020
Waverley College – 26 May 2020
Moriah College – 26 May 2020
St Ignatius College – 20 May 2020
St Patrick’s Marist College – 8 March 2020

I probably missed some schools, but this should be pretty close to a full list. As we can all see in the first four-month after first incidence there were in total 20 school closure, but in the last month we had seen 18 school closure.

Australia wide there are a total of 23288 confirmed infections today and an increase of 285 which is equivalent to 1.24% from yesterday. Victoria counted 97.89% of the new Covid-19 infection for today in Australia.

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There had been a number of temporary school closure over last week. In particular the Tangara School For Girls in north west of Sydney, up to today there are already 11 cases in this cluster.

Contact tracers are still trying to determine how the Covid-19 spread between the students and staff, plus the source of the original infection. The school will close until 24th of August.

Batemans Bay High School and Bonnyrigg Heights Public School are also closed due students at both school tested positive for Covid-19.

With continuing community transmission, we can have easily have an explosion of infection in NSW and cause Victoria like situation. I feel it is just sustainable to keep shutting down schools left and right.

Australia wide there are a total of 21734 confirmed infections today and an increase of 337 which is equivalent to 1.57% from yesterday. Victoria counted 95.55% of the new Covid-19 infection for today in Australia.

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