Australian Politics
Tuesday, June 04, 2024
Terrified teachers issued with panic alarms for their homes as youth crime spirals out of control in remote Queensland community
Mornington Island is in the Gulf of Carpentaria, truly remote. Only around 1000 people live there, of whom nearly all are Aboriginal. It is amaizng that such a small community produces so much crime.
Aboriginal communities have long been rather violent but the violence has racked up under current Queensland government policies designed to avoid "criminalizing" blacks The Aboriginal young people have now realized that they can get away with almost any violent deed without police restraint and tend to show no other restraint
Terrified teachers have been given panic alarms for their homes after youth crime spiralled out of control in a remote far north Queensland community.
Twelve teachers at the Mornington Island State School - located 679km north-west of Cairns - have been issued with duress alarms and had heat sensors installed in their homes for their protection.
A teacher was reportedly hit by a student holding a cricket bat, rocks were allegedly thrown at the principal, a student allegedly 'threw a piece of timber like a spear' and homes have allegedly been broken into.
There have been 'unprecedented levels of violence' and teachers have been encouraged to sleep with the panic alarms beside their beds, one teacher told the Cairns Post.
'We have category one fences now around our houses but many of the kids can climb over them,' the teacher said.
There are 12 teachers at the school but the school has 206 students and is supposed to have 20 full-time teachers.
Eight other teaching posts have gone unfilled.
In March, a teacher said a student threatened to 'bash them with two metal poles', while a teacher complained on social media about being hit on the leg with a cricket bat.
Earlier this month, there were incidents of teachers being called 'gay c***' and 'c*** sucker'.
On May 1, Queensland's Education Minister Di Farmer said a program called Flexispaces - designed to help at-risk students - would provide $600,000 in funding to Mornington Island State School.
'FlexiSpaces are such a great tool to help schools respond to students who are experiencing challenges in a mainstream educational environment,' Ms Farmer said when she launched the $45million program, which will be spread across 34 schools.
But there are grave fears it will make no difference in Mornington Island as teachers don't even want to go there, with one new teacher lasting just 10 days at the start of the 2024 school year.
One teacher said the town lived with 'third world conditions' and has not had drinkable water for months.
'Concerns about staff safety or wellbeing at the schools (on the Flexispaces program) have not been raised with the principal this year,' an Education Department spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia.
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This school doubled its NAPLAN high achievers. Now its techniques are spreading
Note "explicit instruction". Old ways work best
Just over a decade ago, Elise Mountford was teaching a routine year 6 maths class when she asked one of her students to solve a simple equation.
“He became so frustrated at not being able to do the task he knocked over a chair and stormed out of the room. That moment really hit home for me. This student had been at our school for years, but he didn’t feel capable and wasn’t engaged in learning,” she recalls.
Mountford was a teacher at Charlestown South Public at the time, a small public primary school in Lake Macquarie, south of Newcastle.
“The teachers knew something wasn’t working. The school was underachieving and was targeted by the department for reading support. We were putting in huge effort, we cared so much, but it wasn’t paying off,” she says. “We also had a school culture problem where students were disengaged.”
The turning point came in 2015 when Charlestown’s staff and then-principal, Colin Johnson, shifted the school to an explicit teaching model based on the instruction method used at south-east Melbourne private school Haileybury College.
Enrolments increased, and the school later became famed for achieving a dramatic turnaround in maths and reading results. In the five years to 2021, the school lifted its proportion of students in the top two NAPLAN bands from 34 to 79 per cent. Several years ago, it outperformed selective private school Sydney Grammar in year 3 writing.
“We brought in ‘warm-up’ sessions at the start of class and reviews at the end [of lessons] that checked students’ knowledge of concepts. Students became so much more engaged,” Mountford says. “We had been trapped in this cycle of needing to reteach all the time. And that disappeared.”
The change in approach was backed by research into cognitive load theory and a 2014 NSW Education Department analysis that showed students who experienced explicit teaching outperformed those who did not.
Mountford says teachers gave students clear instructions and broke down information into bite-sized chunks to avoid children quickly forgetting what they had been taught. Teachers check for understanding constantly to ensure students master a topic before moving to independent or inquiry learning, she says.
While overhauling the teaching approach, the school also surveyed parents about what they wanted in a bid to boost enrolments. “I spent mornings at the front gate, started a school band, and brought in more sport too,” Johnson says. “We changed the expectations of the community.”
Principles of a maths lesson under this teaching model:
Students review previously taught topics at the start of lessons in daily review sessions
New concepts and content are taught explicitly first
Maths topics are ordered so students gradually build understanding
Students work with teachers to master concepts before completing independent work
Lessons change and adapt according to students’ needs
Teachers regularly check for understanding during the class
Charlestown South is now among 30 public primary schools in the Newcastle, Central Coast and Hawksbury regions that have formed a grassroots group known as the Effective and Systematic Teaching Network (EAST) to share lesson plans, resources and hold professional learning sessions for teachers and school leaders.
“It started with Charlestown South, and [Central Coast school] Blue Haven Public, and over a few years we’ve started connecting with other schools that are teaching in a similar way,” Mountford says.
When the new NSW maths syllabus was released in 2022, Mountford and a group of teachers in the EAST network spent six months writing week-by-week lesson plans schools could use alongside the kindergarten to year 6 maths curriculum.
“We wanted to help other schools prepare for the new syllabus. It means teachers don’t need to create lessons from scratch each day, or make up questions the night before,” she says.
The lesson materials form a guide for teachers on each topic – such as division, volume or measurement. “They are fast-paced and interactive, but flexible too. Students are showing the teacher how they are working out problems as they go.”
Ian Short, principal at Vardys Road Public in north-west Sydney, which is part of the network, said the maths program and lesson outlines had helped ease teachers’ workload.
“Studies have been done on how much time can be saved by sharing curriculum resources. When teachers are doing it alone, the workload can be insurmountable,” Short says.
In 2022, the Grattan Institute suggested all Australian schools adopt a whole-school approach to curriculum planning, with a survey showing teachers are often planning on their own and regularly use YouTube and Facebook to source lesson ideas or materials.
Windsor South Public principal Belinda Bristol, whose school is also part of the network, says embedding daily reviews in maths and literacy lessons in all grades was key in stopping students falling behind.
“In the past, children would go away on holiday and forget everything. Now, we are making sure kids aren’t slipping through the cracks,” Bristol says.
Mountford, now deputy principal at Glendore Public in Maryland, said the EAST network’s maths lesson plans allowed teachers to be “highly responsive to students, but it’s still flexible for the teachers and takes the pressure off with preparation”.
“Once students have very deep understanding of the concepts, the teachers can then give them more opportunities for independent learning and problem-solving,” she says.
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Great Barrier Reef Doomsday Claims Should Be Audited: Scientist
Australian geo-physicist Peter Ridd says an additional $5 million (US$3.3 million) allocated to the Great Barrier Reef in this week’s budget would be better spent on “genuine environmental problems.”
The funding was handed down as part of Labor’s 2024 federal budget on May 14.
In a statement released last month, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation said the reef had suffered through the “worst summer” on record, with cyclones, severe flooding, starfish outbreaks and mass bleaching.
The funds will help the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to engage tourism operators undertaking reef monitoring, protection, and stewardship.
The Great Barrier Reef Foundation says the full extent of mass bleaching is not known, but claims aerial surveys over 1,000 reefs showed a rate of 73 percent bleaching within the area, plus another 6 percent in the Torres Strait.
“The Reef Summer Snapshot shows the highest levels of coral bleaching were found across the southern region, where temperatures are typically cooler, and parts of the central and northern regions, where in some areas corals were exposed to record levels of heat stress,” the Foundation said in a report online.
Yet Dr. Ridd, a researcher into the Reef, believes its poor health has been greatly exaggerated.
“It is telling that in the latest doom-news about the Great Barrier Reef bleaching, they failed to mention that the Great Barrier Reef had record amounts of coral in 2022/23 despite having suffered four ‘catastrophic’ bleaching events in 2016, 17, 20, and 22,” he told The Epoch Times in an email.
“We ended up with twice as much coral than in 2012 when a couple of cyclones genuinely destroyed a lot of coral.
“How did we end up with so much coral if those last four bleaching event were so catastrophic—even the fast-growing coral takes five to 10 years to regrow.”
The coral that bounced back, he says, is the type most susceptible to water bleaching.
“That proves the last four bleaching events were exaggerated in terms of the coral death, and there is no reason to expect this latest event to be much different,” he said.
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Proton Mail Says It Will Defy Australia’s Impending ‘Online Safety’ Law
Secure email service provider Proton Mail has added its voice to a growing number of tech companies concerned that Australia’s proposed “online safety” regulation will force firms to break encryption to expose user data to governments and potentially criminal syndicates.
Proton offers end-to-end encrypted email, virtual private network (VPN), and online data and password storage services. Its slogan is “privacy by default.”
The Australian proposal has already been heavily criticised by the Global Encryption Coalition, which comprises the Center for Democracy & Technology, Global Partners Digital, the Internet Freedom Foundation, the Internet Society, Mozilla, Access Now, and Digital Rights Watch.
Andy Yen, founder and CEO of Proton, told The Epoch Times: “With the current eSafety proposals, the Internet as we know it faces a very real threat. The proposed standards would force online services—no matter whether they are end-to-end encrypted or not—to access, collect, and read their users’ private conversations.
“These proposals could not only break encryption, but could put businesses and citizens at risk while doing little to protect people from the online harms they are intended to address.”
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has released the draft standard, which applies to services including “email, instant messaging, short messages services (SMS), multimedia message services (MMS) and chat, as well as services that enable people to play online games with each other and dating services.”
Other “apps and websites ... as well as online file storage services” will also be covered. Everything online, provided it’s accessible to Australians (even if there are no visitors) is captured.
While Ms. Inman Grant insists providers will not need to breach encryption to comply with the standard, the Global Encryption Coalition says it will be impossible to do so otherwise.
Proton is the first provider to openly say it will defy the standard if it’s introduced.
“Under no circumstances would we break end-to-end encryption,” Mr. Yen said. “As other jurisdictions are realising, there is no such thing as technology that can scan everyone’s online activity while also providing privacy and safety.
“There is still time to safeguard end-to-end encryption in the eSafety proposals, and we urge Commissioner Inman Grant to ensure the protection of privacy for Australian citizens. Undermining cybersecurity and encryption in the name of eSafety will only lead to the opposite result, leaving everyone but criminals more at risk.”
Proton AG is based in Switzerland, and says it is therefore subject only to Swiss law.
The legal and technical hurdles to enforcing cross-border regulations on entities that have no presence in the country imposing them have yet to be really tested.
While other tech companies have so far expressed disquiet with the proposals, many are moving to tighten encryption.
Telegram, which claims a user base of 200 million people, grew its market by being the first mass-market messaging service with end-to-end encryption, which is now the basis of its brand.
Meta attempted to win back market share for WhatsApp soon after it purchased it, by adding encryption, and has also pledged to work toward encryption and secure data storage across Facebook.
The company also announced the introduction of end-to-end encryption in Facebook Messenger, which is used by over a billion people. Online storage services such as iCloud and Google Cloud are also offering encrypted storage.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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