8 - 12 Age Range

This was going to be another angry week. But then I had ice cream and I started hallucinating about unicorns or something so I'm going to talk about my History GCSE.

Well, not specifically my History GCSE, but that topic shall come up. Right now, in fact. In the GCSE course my school runs (and so, I take) a topic about Medicine through Time. For the past year, I have had to suffer my mixed-ability class ("Miss, I know you've been teaching us this for the past six weeks, but can you repeat everything because I have the memory of a goldfish?" ¬_¬), as we learnt about Galen etc.

I have also started watching Horrible Histories, because at heart I am five years old. Recently, I've discovered as I plough through the series, it is pretty much teaching me my course. Yes, I am only scraping by in History because I watch a show for eight to twelve-year olds.

It's shown on the CBBC channel, which was roughly my life until I was about... eleven. I would spend hours watching The Story of Tracy Beaker, Young Dracula and Blue Peter, to the point where I was banned from watching TSoTB because "my attitude was suffering". Now, they show CBBC on BBC One until 5;15, but back when I was younger and had only four channels on my telly it wasn't, and I watched The Weakest Link instead.

What brought on my little trip into my past? Recently, in the paper, they announced the removal of various programmes from CBBC while it aired on the BBC One channel. This includes Blue Peter.

Not Blue Peter! The glorious show that most people under the age of fifty have spent a childhood watching Blue Peter. And I'm fairly sure that because it's on BBC One many adults still watch it too. By moving it solely to CBBC, the chance is it'll lose many of it's viewers. Why? I'm going to answer this in the form of something I once yelled at one of their continuity presenters.

"Why are you here, and not on the CBBC channel?!"
"BECAUSE I AM NOT BETWEEN THE RECOMMENDED EIGHT TO TWELVE AGE RANGE!"

Community

I was going to talk about something or other that came under the title "Advertising". However something happened recently that made me so bloody angry that I'm going to leave that for another time, and talk of this instead.

There are many things that annoy me about my town, the lack of rail links, lack of decent shops, lack of any form of life. I can't change these, and don't particularly care enough about my town to try. Despite this, I am on my school's council, so we can raise important issues for them to politely ignore.

Now, in one part of the school there is a gate and a path, next to a couple-of-tennis-courts size space of grass, which was next to two tennis courts. The majority of students who attend my school go through this side path (there are only three other ways into the school). This gate looks onto a main road, ten minutes one way and you're through the town centre, half an hour the other and you're at the train station. So you can imagine at school run time, with kids for my school and two close by, the road gets pretty busy. Past the area my school grounds cover and past the adjoining school, is a set of traffic lights. I use these traffic lights every day to get home.

In the morning, the road is blocked up with cars dropping children off to school. Yet this does not mean that the cars go slowly. Kids being kids, they'll happily run straight across the road without looking. I can't move for times I've seen near-misses and skids of cars as they struggle to brake. This happens to the ones who are too lazy to walk to the traffic lights and cross there. It's worse after school, when parents have queued up outside for half an hour or so (my step dad once needed to pick me up, he got there half an hour early and it was already full with waiting parents). The same children who go to run across the road in the morning do the same in the afternoon, only this time from behind parked cars. The braking and such gets much, much worse.

Bear with me, I'm getting to the point. So I went to a school council meeting yesterday, where we began discussing a new hydrotherapy pool that's been built on the grounds (my school grounds are actually two schools, one is for special needs children. As a result, we have strange doors in walls that lead to the second school. Think Coraline). This pool sits on this couple-of-tennis-courts size space of grass. In this conversation, the leader of this meeting admitted that this space was actually going to become a roundabout, so we didn't get the backlog of cars in the afternoon. What happened? The local residents, the people who live across the road, refused to allow it.

And now I'm at the point. Surely it would not be better to allow the roundabout and stop the traffic? Stop the children running out from between parked cars? Quite a few of the local residents would have bought their house knowing there was three school in a very close-knit block. They would have known things like this would prop up. Why would they be so selfish as to prevent the building of something that would help hundreds of people, every day, to the possible minor inconvenience of themselves? The same argument goes to the proposed creation of a zebra crossing just outside this gate.

I may not be an active member of community, but if I needed, I would take a small amount of time from my day to help the greater good. These people would only have to bear with -shock horror- a slightly different method of traffic for about an hour five days a week. They need to stop being so bloody selfish, grow up and help many schoolchildren get home slightly safer every day.