It can make or break their happiness. It may hinder or accelerate their journey to future success. It may determine the quality of opportunity and options open to them when they take leave for the big wide world. Today, as a parent to a 10-year-old boy, I reflect on how these formative years have not actually transformed me into an overbearing Tiger Mother?—?you know, the type who has been driven to near lunacy by the 11 plus system, obsessed with nothing more than getting her child into one of Buckinghamshire’s few over-subscribed grammar schools.
Put into the context of my own experiences with education,http://forum.tagks.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=4372864cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg,cheap wholesale jordans, it would be far too easy to do this. After all,cheap jordan shoes,http://www.wiski.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=3814746cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg, why would I want my child to endure what I myself had been through at school? Yet the 11 plus ‘rite of passage’ has tested my parenting skills in more ways than I care to imagine. ?On one side,http://siemprelucenacf.es/index.php/component/user/?option=com_content&view=article&id=115cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg, forcing my child through tears and tantrums to engage with reams of pointless non-verbal reasoning puzzles?, and, on the other, the temptation to rail against ?a grossly flawed grammar school system.
How do you communicate the importance of getting into the ‘right school’ to a 10-year-old child? To communicate the values of a good education and the implications it will have for their future in ways that both motivates and inspires them to do well? I’ve still yet to figure this out.
For the time being, my child has neither the interest nor the inclination to listen to my own school-centred horror story. Telling him how lucky he is only tires him. Last year, as he became more anxious, sullen and withdrawn, we abandoned 11 plus study almost completely. We resolved to let our child just be exactly that?—?a child. Encouraged, supported, but able to develop at a pace that was comfortable and right for him. Sometimes though it takes all my effort to conceal my frustration and disappointment at his apparent nonchalance.
Don’t you know how lucky you are,jordan shoes, boy? Don’t you know what passing this blasted exam could mean for your future? Your life? Had I been presented with the same opportunity of being in the running for a grammar school, I would’ve ripped anyone’s arm off to sit that 11 plus exam. Hell, I would’ve demanded of my parents private tuition. I would’ve worked so goddamned hard to ensure that I got in,cheap jordans, it would be like nothing else mattered. My 10-year-old self represents the very child the grammar school system was originally intended to help.

That the 2023 Rugby World Cup has been awarded to France is a humiliation for World Rugby,cheap retro jordans. The ‘clear leader’ and recommendation of the Rugby World Cup board had been South Africa. There had been a huge amount of money and time invested in producing a 139-page evaluation report that,cheap air jordans?considered all aspects of the three countries bidding to host the event,cheap jordans free shipping. South Africa came top of that process by some distance.

This was no token technical assessment. This was a process that had been set up by World Rugby and agreed at various discussion stages by its various members with the explicit intention of making the whole bidding process ‘clear and transparent,’ and bringing to an end or, at least,cheap real jordans, diminishing the horse-trading that usually attended these sort of events. Football has been mired in scandal over the staging of its World Cup. The Olympics, too.

The credibility of this process for World...