Kate Ellis on body image
I reckon when we’re at a point where young Australians are listing body image and self esteem as their number one concern in Mission Australia surveys, when we see dwindling confidence and self assurance from those who cannot possibly live up to the entirely unrealistic images that they are being bombarded with and aspire to replicate- then the time is probably long overdue for us to actually see some action.
via Moving past the blame game on body image | Article | The Punch.
Federal Minister for Youth, Kate Ellis, has written an interesting article about body image, as part of the publicity tour for the recent proposed national strategy on body image. There’s some good recommendations in the report – though you can’t help feeling that the whole thing is a little bit wishy-washy. However, politics aside I was struck the with magnitude of the quote above: that the number one concern for young people would be body image and self-esteem. If that sort of research doesn’t have an impact on how you teach: I don’t know what would.
(More information about the proposed strategy on body image can be found at youth.gov.au)
But now I know
I’m off to the Northern Metropolitan Region!
A very abstract, very unknown future suddenly has form. Wow.
The Trouble With Not Knowing
As much as I’m really excited about the prospect of the Teach for Australia program next year, and more specifically just getting into a classroom and teaching; there’s something really frustrating about this extended period of not knowing where that’s going to be. That’s no criticism of the program, but it’s just a strange position to be in. The planner in me wants to be able to start working out what it all looks like: sort out housing, work out which church community we might join, decide whether or not we can continue to be a one-car couple. Things like that. But instead, I’m left just wondering.
The Son of a Teacher Man
“The only one who could ever reach me
Was the son of a preacher man”- Dusty Springfield, “Son of a Preacher Man”
Well, not quite. I am the son of two teachers, though my father has given up teaching to work for a church (so, preacher man?!). My younger sister is in her second year of primary teaching, and at the age of 25, it feels like I have spent half my life finding reasons why I wouldn’t become a teacher. But after 3 years of study and close on 5 years of working in Information Technology, it seems that teaching has been calling me after all.
I’ve signed up as an associate of “Teach for Australia“, a program designed to recruit high-achieving graduates into a 2 year program: teaching in disadvantaged schools. 2010 will be the first year that the program is running, and will only run in Victoria for the initial launch. At this stage I don’t know which school I’ll be teaching in, though we now have a better indication of which regions of the state the schools are situated.
The plan at this embryonic point will be to blog my experiences, as well as content around educational theory and specifically (given that I’ve got an IT background) the use of computers and technology in the secondary classroom. I’m a passionate person, and I get excited about improving the educational experience of students: so hopefully we can carry that through once I get to the classroom.
Welcome to the beginning.