Posts by Isabel Hitchings
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Plus, having a uniform is possibly the only reason many teenagers learn how to handwash and iron.
Really? Cause I didn't care about the neatness of my uniform so I figured someone who did care about ironed bouses (ie my Mum) could do that bit. I figured out the laundry thing when I had clothes that I actually liked.
I also discovered that the secret to keeping warm in uniform was to own two (thin acrylic) regulation jerseys and wear them simultaneously. Socks the same colour as the tights (worn underneath if necessary) saved my toes in winter.
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I made my uniform skirt significantly shorter and tighter with my mother's approval it almost looked like something a real person would wear when I had done with it.
The year after I left they introduced these honking great kilts. I had to wear one a couple of times for meet-the-prospective-third-formers purposes and discovered that it was completely impossible to ride a bicycle without getting it stuck round the wheel about every four turns of the pedal.
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Wikipedia lists my high school's most famous alumni as Courtney Love and Sharon O'Neil.
Being a fairly genteel girls shool I was rarely beaten up but the cliquishness and low-level but ever present psychological warfare that went on were pretty damaging.
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I'd say the Hobbit too
He's definitely not ready for the Hobbit yet and when he is that will be a read-aloud family event.
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Jo (I think) in Whitcoulls Southcity a couple of Sundays ago. I was looking for a book for my six year old who reads at about twice his chronological age but won't touch anything he even suspects of being scary*. Jo seemed to know every book on the shelf and in moments had pulled out a pile of things she thought he might enjoy. He selected Because of Winn-Dixie from the stack and absolutely adored it. I was really impressed with Jo's knowledge and enthusiasm.
*Book suggestions from PA readers gratefully accepted too
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My son has good male role models and likes quiet nerdy activities. My brothers think he's a jessie and have tried several times to give him socket sets and stuff in the hope that this will tough him up a bit.
My older boy is quite similar and seems to gravitate towards gentle, smart men. I have a step-brother-in-almost-law who is much more of an unreconstructed blokey bloke (though still reasonable middle classish) and I notice he'll take a "harden up" attitude with his three-year-old over things we'll still gentle the six-year-old through
My theory about parenting (which has yet to be tested on a teenager) is that if you treat them gently with lots of love and support in the early years they will have a good, secure base to explore the world from as they get older.
My mother's approach to having a teenager was to more-or-less expect a certain amount of experimental behaviour therefore the best way for me to rebel was to confound her expectations and very rarely put a foot out of line. I did do some dumb stuff but it was very small beans compared to many of the tales here.
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Like an awful lot of people my first experience of voting was as a leftie student in Gerry Brownlee's very safe electorate. It felt rather futile and I only just resisted the temptation to spoil my ballot with smart-arse comments and a vote for the university cat. I became a very big fan of proportional representation. I never really understood proponents of FPP - it always seemed to be a very unfair system to me and just because an unfair system favours your interests at present it doesn't mean it always will.
I'd still vote for MMP today. I don't think any system could produce perfect fairness as well as have a ballot paper you don't need a pHD to fill out and not have too much magic-happens-here in the counting. I like the dual vote too. Sometimes the person who is going to represent local interests well isn't in the party I want to vote for. Sometimes I want to support more than one party.
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My kid has an email account through his school (they are doing email as part of literacy at the moment) which seems to be blessedly spam free. Must find out if he can access it from outside school.
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My kids (aged 3 and 6) have relatively free access to the internet. We keep the computer in the family room and make sure an adult wanders by with some regularity. They know (well at least the six year old does) not to click a link unless they are very sure that it's likely to take them where they think it will go and to tell an adult immediately if they run across anything they find confusing or upsetting.
At the moment they mostly want games associated with their favourite cartoon characters so while it's possible they'll accidentally run into something a bit dodgey (Crispin knows for example that a youtube clip marked "dubbed" or "funny" won't be what he's looking for) I don't have enormous concerns. I may worry more and have to put more rules into place when they reach the stage of looking up gross stuff just to see how much they can squick themselves out.
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However, if your objective is to get people to 'voluntarily' do something they don't want to do, opt-out is perfect
Especially if what they see is a generic error message rather than a specific "this page is blocked by cleannet here's how to opt-out" message.