John Craven's Newsround

Sitting in the Doctor's surgery this morning, reading an extraordinarily badly written article in one of those magazines that are produced purely for the doc's, (not really but it seems that way) I thought of 'John Craven's Newsround'. I don't know why. The article was about homework and it was just wrong. The writer claimed that the reason for giving homework was 'to make kids smarter' which it didn't. He also claimed that parents didn't particularly want kids' time to be taken up this way. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong on both counts.
The reason for giving homework is to reinforce the work done in class and to prepare for the next lesson.
The one biggest and most enduring complaint that comes from parents is that teachers don't set enough homework. Furthermore, the writer offended by referring to the generic child as 'he' continually, and his writing style was that of a 13-year old, so it really wasn't working for me on any level.

So why did John Craven pop into my head? Well, I don't know really, but back in the 17th Century when I was a teenager, or do I mean the 70's...yeah, maybe the 70's....John Craven educated the Nation's youth in ten minutes an evening twice a week on current events. It was a programme your parents wanted you to watch, especially since every child and every teenager's TV viewing had to stop for either the nine o'clock or the ten o'clock news.
But in spite of the annoyance of this, we pretty much couldn't avoid knowing what was going on in the world.

I have no idea whether Newsround still exists, I wouldn't be surprised. I like that the BBC doesn't go with the recent trend of getting children to present programmes like that, the BBC is much more teacheracious, and so it should be.

Leaving the 70's behind me .... or am I ? ....a piece on the F-Word website yesterday almost made me choke on my brekkie. The Vatican in its infallible wisdom is ex-communicating a team of doctors in Columbia for performing an abortion on an 11-year old girl who had been raped by her stepfather.
I need to keep reminding myself that in Iran she would have been hanged for seducing her stepfather into having adulterous sex with her. The doctors were evil-doers apparently, I wonder if the stepfather will also be excommunicated, or will he be forgiven by a forgiving God?
And then I wonder whether God acknowledges ex-communication. Does s/he sit up there and think,
'Hmmm...can't listen to those prayers, a human, another person has sat judgement on them and decided they can't take communion with me. Hang on! Didn't I tell them 'judge not, lest ye yourselves be judged,' I'm pretty sure I did, I'll just google it...'
I think that God would look into the hearts of those doctors and see that they were doing what they felt would be for the good of the child who was raped. But then I'm just a human too, what do I know?

A lot of new TV series are starting up for the Autumn, this week we saw a welcome return of the excellent series 'Bones'. In the next couple of weeks we are promised all kinds of goodies. Seems like Christmas ? Don't get excited, it's all stop/start. We'll have a couple of weeks of the new series then a repeat, then a gap, then a couple of episodes more and so it goes on.

The last thing on my own Newsround that I wanted to mention was the film 'Date Movie'. We rented this on Ben's birthday and watched it. It falls into my own category of 'aircraft movie', ie nowhere near 'watch at the cinema', not really up to 'rent on DVD' but well above 'sooner boil your head than watch'. It was certainly funny, and I always enjoy the referential, but nonetheless more cheesy than Wisconsin.
However, anyone who knows me well enough to have ever been to the cinema with me knows that I always watch the credits. And I was dead impressed with the way stunt doubles were credited at the end of this movie. Each name came up individually underneath the name of the character they doubled for. Classy.