Impact of Olympics legacy on music teaching? Options

[Swell Box]

No splog, this is the nanny state of your close colonial relative Australia! Brought up in UK though. Very rare to let any primary aged kid walk to school here. They briefly advocated a virtual bus system where parents led a walking crocodile picking up kids along the way but then that fell away cos of liability issues..... We are very US like in our fear of litigation and our tendency to use it. High school years 8-12 in the cities will take buses or bike but rare before this age. No idea what the UK has to say legally about leaving your kid to walk to school but there was a very famous fairly abduction here of a boy called Daniel Morcombe. He wasnt actually en route to school but to the shops and by a bus stop. I think he was 13 at the time, body has finally been found but many years after the event. It seems to have contributed to the current level of hysteria but the laws have been in place for eons apparently.

Sorry, that was meant to say fairly recent abduction in last post.

How the world has changed. When I was a little 5, 6, 7 year old (early 1960's) I would walk home alone from school, let myself into the house (with the key that was always left under a plant pot in the garden! - we had nothing worth stealing) and set and light a coal fire so that the house would be warm when mum and dad got home from work. By the time I was 11 or 12, not only did I cycle the two miles to school, but also thought nothing of cycling 18 miles or so to the seaside.

Me too until I changed schools. I also remember conducting chemistry experiments in our garden shed which might have been better left to ICI MOND Division! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/blink.gif)

Mind you, some of our [entirely unofficial] distillation experiments at school would probably have raised a few eyebrows at HM Customs & Excise. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

SB

[Aeolienne]

And unless you were a fast runner and very accurate at hitting a small ball with an equally small bit of wood (why anyone thinks that rounders is a good way to learn the hand-eye co-ordination needed to hit a ball, I do not know!), you were not given the chance to try other sports, such as badminton, or discus, or javelin, which are quite different.

You were lucky to have had the small bit of wood - the first time I was made to play rounders (in Yr 3) I had to use my bare hand! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/violin.gif)