It has been a week since the DANA disaster and although the most basic emergency persists, it is time to think about the children who, like so many times before, are the weakest link in this crisis. Maybe this is a secondary problem, maybe not, but the fact is that seven days after the floods, the Generalitat Valenciana does not have an educational plan for the students who have seen their schools become a pile objects and mud.
The Ministry of Education has reported that there are 22 municipalities without service (apart from three other districts of Valencia), but it limits itself to explaining that there will be no classes this week. Principals and teachers who have visited some of these schools say it is very optimistic to limit this to this week, because some centers are completely destroyed and now a plan is needed. The only thing Education offers at the moment is that anyone who wants can go to another center, but families have to manage it themselves. The government does not provide transportation or facilities, everyone is there.
And of course, it didn’t go very well. “Understanding the difficulty of organizing something, there cannot be a plan for the children,” laments Rubén Pacheco, president of the AMPAS Confederation Gonzalo Anaya. It is urgent, this representative tells us, to put in place an alternative to get the little ones out of the quagmire. They spent a week seeing nothing but mud, death and destruction, which experts warn can cause trauma over time.
There are all sorts of reasons to return to school, and not the least of them is educational. But children need to socialize, to play, to have at least some semblance of normalcy. “The most important thing at the moment is to give them a feeling of security,” summarizes child psychologist María Bilbao. That and listening to them, which in their language might mean putting a piece of paper in front of them so they can draw or recreate situations that help them understand what’s going on. Above all, lots of love and understanding. A group of psychologists from Valencia has prepared a guide to help students, in case it may be useful to you.
The unions are also unhappy with Education. They are not informed of anything and there are teachers who do not know how to act. Just yesterday afternoon, he finally summoned the entire educational community to a meeting which will take place on Wednesday. Eight days later. As one director sums it up, “the educational community was launched before the ministry”.
We will see what comes out of this meeting, because the work ahead of us is enormous and moving a few thousand students from the center is going to be complicated. Spaces, transportation, teachers, cafeterias and even school insurance must be organized. We will tell you in due time. In the meantime, I leave you here the article in which we explain to you how the situation is (always educational in this bulletin) in the Valencian Community and I will continue telling you other things which, although even smaller, are also produce.
This week we talked about…
- Father and son, against the ignorance of Francoism by young people. José A. Martínez Soler and Erik Martínez Westley, father and son, published together Franco for young peoplea book with which they aim to remedy an endemic evil of the system, of which we have already spoken to you here before: as strange as it may seem, Francoism is little studied in schools and institutes. The causes are varied and do not fit in this space, but it is a notable lack. Good luck to them for this initiative, it is essential.
- Farewell to AI that does its homework? Bad news for students: a team of workers from Google’s DeepMind laboratory has generated a sampling algorithm capable of applying watermarks to texts generated by its AI tool, to make them recognizable. All you need is the associated software and it will recognize the origin of the text.
- Neither unique nor competitive selectivity. Months of delay, protests and noise, a lot of noise later, the autonomous communities went from the government and its proposal (royal decree!) of Ebau to end up proposing, in most cases, a very similar to those of the previous ones. years . In most regions there is no trace of proficiency questions, and in those of the PP they have not even kept their word to impose a “common” test for all. And all the while, the ministry makes a point of ensuring that no one follows its rules. Here I leave you a more detailed analysis of what is happening with selectivity.
To download a note
- A teacher in Euskadi charges up to 620 euros more than a teacher in Catalonia or Asturias. This is what the UGT concludes in a study on salary differences between teachers by autonomous community. The distance, and depending on the case it is not small, as the example in the title of this dissertation shows, is normally due to the supplements paid by each regional government, so if you are wronged, you already know it. Here is an article on the subject, and here is the link to the UGT website, where you can consult the entire report.
- At what age should you get your first cell phone? A recurring doubt within families which, moreover, cannot always be managed at will. Peer pressure leads children to want a cell phone whenever a friend has one, and there is always a parent who has one. advance and sparks great discussion. Here you have data to make an informed decision based on what the science says.
- Galician families, against the digitalization envisaged by the Xunta. 70% of parents have a negative opinion about the Galician government’s digitalization program, E-dixgal. I will leave you with the details of the study carried out by the Confederation of AMPA, but current events lead me to think about what is happening in classrooms with technology. Cell phones, banned, are rejected, but digitization programs are implemented, which often consist of moving from paper books to digital books, without greater added value. And of course, families reject this, believing that it adds nothing. We must reverse the trend as soon as possible.
Thank you so much for coming this far, especially these days when we seem to be talking about seemingly minor things compared to everything else that’s going on.
Lots of encouragement to everyone.
See you next week!
