Route 39 Academy - Why?

Hey guys,

This is kind of a niche post I guess being it is about a new "academy" near Bideford where I went to school.

This is the new Bideford College. The building part opened in September 2010 to students. At a cost that can be rounded to £50 million the school was built to be able to hold a capacity of around 2,000, more than the actual amount of people who went to the school by a couple of hundred people. The school was built to be state of the art with great resources including lecture theaters that would put some universities to shame, a sports hall and a gym of great size, fit for sports including basketball, netball, indoor football, tennis and more to take place. Of course with a new school came up to date computers that worked efficiently, everything had just become better. A school that once had little hope, a school that at one point wasn't allowed to exclude pupils had just got the chance of a lifetime with the new school. Despite the name having a bad reputation from those darker days, the school could now potentially achieve huge success given the right elements of support for staff and pupils.

This was a building to be proud of for the people of Bideford and the surrounding areas for people to be able to say their children went there proudly to the parents of those who may have went to private school or further afield from Bideford. There wasn't a reason to stop your child going to this school now. Obviously though, the money had come just before the financial crunch we have found ourselves in and money has been cut from a lot of things. Although I am adamant that we should not cut education but spend as much as a nation as we need to to provide everybody a top quality education (not just your average Eton snobs like David Cameron and George Osbourne - one of whom doesn't know what "lol" means - which mean you have to come from ridiculously wealthy, sometimes partially dodgy families). This gives the poorer children a chance to achieve their dreams, possibly become an MP one day...make a change from what we have now yeah? But it seems when the economy collapses, the rich decide on state schools not doing great to face cuts. These are the places where increases in expenditure is needed most!

That said...when you've spent £50million on a new school, why support the idea for an "academy". Now from what I understand (I come from the stone age of schools...often called colleges) an academy is what is a school or college, just under a name you would more associate to a football club and it's young players. I don't understand why we had to move from school or college to academy. It's a pathetic name change to be honest. They don't teach to the same regulations sometimes, which is very strange if you ask me and needs looking into. Then there is the fact local/national government paid a lot into this unnecessary "academy". The fact of the matter is, if this is so much more "state of the art" than Bideford College, why the hell did the Governments locally and nationally not think of including them into the normal state school trying hard to succeed but include them on the "academy" that they will try to plug over the College only a few years later. It isn't on. 

Plus schools funding often comes from the school having high achieving children, what's the betting we go back to the dark days where the more intelligent, higher achieving children go off to this "academy" and Bideford College see's its reputation fall as the students that would have been there achieving pretty much the same as they achieve in this "academy" and therefore a possible funding cut. The better teachers could go too if there is a better wage. This "academy" should not be there. It is only going to negatively effect the College that was there at the start. There shouldn't even be academies. It isn't good for anyone in the long run and is almost a privatisation of schools that will see another gap like the one between Etonians and the human race.

I would send this to the MP for the area, Geoffrey Cox QC, but as he presumably doesn't have the time to reply to all my issues with him and his parties politics, he has blocked me on Twitter. Maybe he's to busy being a QC rather than an MP? if someone would send this to him via that it would be cool, I doubt he'd bother to read it though. 

If I could be somebody.

Hey there,

So I was talking the other day about who I would be if I had the ultimate choice. And I thought wouldn't it be cool to share some of these ideas to this blog so everybody could read them. I had come up with a few ideas so I thought I would share my top few. The realms of possibilities are endless, with me also choosing fictional characters into my selection.

5. A Wizard (from Harry Potter)

Who wouldn't want to be a wizard? Like I mean being able to fix things with a couple of words, have moving newspapers and the answers to many different things, including to an extent death with the philosophers stone. Wizard sports also look like they'd be pretty amazing, I mean look at Quidditch. How awesome would it be to play that!? Or to be able to summon things to you. Invisibility cloaks also look cool too. Although one thing I could do without is Lord Voldemort trying to kill me all the time. I'd rather just be a wizard without the responsibility Mr Potter seems to have.

4. Stand Up Comedian.

Because who wouldn't want be able to enter a room of thousands of people and have them all laugh at their jokes? It must be fairly amazing. Being able to just have the wit to regularly come up with some of these peoples stuff on panel shows for instance must also be pretty cool.

2=. Lead Singer Of A Rock Band.

So second and third have to be equals. The feeling of writing a song, having it released, having people buy it and then buy tickets to see YOU live must be amazing. But really, it's that feeling of having thousands of people sing the song you wrote with you in a stadium or major festival. That must be the best feeling ever. Why not just a pop band then? Because those at rock concerts are most commonly a far more up and at it crowd, a louder crowd and usually a longer lasting crowd. And how many pop bands have you seen last from the early 90's until today without splitting up at some point?

2=. A star footballer...for Liverpool.

Clearly this was going to come up. I'd just love to get my name in Liverpool's history books. I mean to be mentioned as one of the best players for Liverpool ever is like being compared to one of the best ever players in the world. Kenny Dalglish and Steven Gerrard have walked onto that hallowed turf and really that says it all. World class. And the fans, they're some of the best in England. The only club with a comparable atmosphere in this country is Newcastle with teams like Celtic, Rangers and Dortmund being comparable in Europe. All you'd need to do is get the club back into Europe and win a major trophy to go down in history. There would be no humanly better honour than to put on the Liverpool jersey and represent them on the turf of Anfield where once the King Kenny played. No better honour.

1. I'd like to be....doctor who....

There is one thing that beats Liverpool or having thousands sing songs you have wrote. It just isn't a human thing. And that is being able to travel throughout space and time, to see things that in reality are not humanly possible. To visit other planets. To have a TARDIS. It would be insane. But I guess I'm gonna have to settle by watching the 50th anniversary show...which proves to be pretty awesome.

Got anything you wanna be? Just leave a comment below or tweet me @jamesmartinlfc

"I Give Up" - A blog on bullying.

Hey guys, thought I'd blog after a fairly long hiatus about bullying. This post was inspired by a poem by a girl named Izzie Dix who killed herself after writing it. From what I understand Izzie Dix was a 14 year old girl who had the hope of one day going to Oxford University. A girl who was bullied day by day at school to the brink. A girl who had people sending Facebook invites to her funeral. And another girl who had a membership on the website Ask.fm, a website mentioned on my friend +Danièlle Owen's blog. She however left the world with an emotional poem I have left below.

So generally this has led to me deciding I shall tackle the issue of bullying on my blog. Especially when it comes to bullying in schools. 

Generally when you go to school, or at least if you had went to my school you could see bullying happening every day and anybody could be bullied if the right people turned against you. The right people weren't even those with hope after school in most cases, but they were those who had little hope. In year 8, I remember being one of those people that the "right" people turned against. This seemingly happened after I had reported one of these people had assaulted one of my good friends after a PE lesson. To be honest what he did looking again at the injuries would have seen him possibly behind bars (it's not like he eventually ended up there...) for at least a Section 47 offence, the school should have excluded him, but for some strange reason they gave him another chance, before giving him what must have been another 25 last chances at least (but then what do you expect when they were more bothered about a nice new building than the wellbeing of their students half of the time?). With the months that followed I can understand what lows bullying can give you, your friends can easily be turned against you and different people will always snap in different ways. However all of this was before really before the rise of technology. Okay Bebo was there and I remember some girls being told off for having a nice little bitch-fest on Bebo at some point around this time by the school as well as an attempt to stop students using the website, however I didn't really use these websites back then myself. 

Technology, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or especially this Ask.fm means that bullying from school can basically go inside your home. Your home is where you are meant to feel safe and away from the rubbish in the outside world. It may sound sad but when I was bullied, I'd go home, I may seem low I remember my parents saying but I could get home for a weekend, watch Liverpool in that seasons FA Cup (which they won!) or Doctor Who and just forget the world. I could play my own taste of music, if I talked to anybody I could be selective regarding who I decided to talk to from home. It was a safe haven. Albeit getting up for school with all of it going on was hell. And I'd count the hours till I could get home and the days till the holiday. So imagining if I couldn't get away from it, if I went home turned on my PC and found more abuse, it must have been horrible. I did have MSN, but there was a block button, there is no block button on Ask.fm. People can also ask anomalously on it too. I can only guess the questions people who were bullied by the same thugs as me would get if they were 7 or 8 years younger and where it would push them too. It often was people with prospects they'd bully, them or the people that may seem a bit "strange", maybe geeky people, people with a low temper. I remember one person walking through the school site to get to a lesson after lunch and three of these low life's walking up to him with crisps in their mouths and spitting it at him. Honestly, this person was a person who it was "unpopular" to like and I was just fed up of trouble with them, as much as I hated them (and still blamed the school for not excluding at least one of these people when he clearly should have been, but I'm not writing a post to discuss what my head teacher did wrong in my opinion, I'd be here all day!) I just walked past and ignored it. To this day when I think back to this I feel like I was in a way one of the bullies. It immediately made me feel sick, it was one of the lowest forms of humiliation I had ever watched and I had walked past and what had I done? Fuck all. And those people that ignored and went on with it, well we were all the bullies. At the time when somebody needed a friend, or needed to be stood up for, but had already lost the confidence from years of torment from these people, many of us walked past and not one stood up for him. Not one would be seen asking if he was okay. Nobody even reported it. We just all watched it happen. Maybe it's an unpopular opinion, but if you watch somebody get humiliated like that and you do nothing, you're just helping the person get bullied. If you help them, whether it be like nowadays when they're bullied online (I kind of have a perception that a lot of this is girls, and then the physical actually physical bullying, whether it be a punch, threats or spitting crisps at a person is most commonly guys, if you disagree with this perception, please comment) or bullied in a face to face physical concept then you are essentially offering the person some hope. Believing there is no hope at all, to the extent where you decide to attempt to end your own life must be a horrible thing, yet if we didn't stand there and let it happen then maybe it wouldn't. If we didn't give a damn about our friends popularity and actually stood by them rather than disown them at least publicly as a friend then we'd be giving people at pretty low moments some hope. 

It's horrible to see in the news that somebody has taken their own life due to bullies and we always say "we need to do something" to the extent that we don't. And it has to change. We need a zero tolerance policy when it comes to bullies. My school gave these people chance after chance. They can't have this. The people they bullied don't suddenly get left alone if the bully returns the next day because somebody has had a chat with the them. And offering to put a bully on some register isn't a way to stop bullying, there needs to be a substantial punishment. Besides when it came to that, they didn't offer me the chance to put the main bully on the register, just my friend who at that time had just conformed to the main bully. I wouldn't put him on, but the other, should have been, mind you, he should still be in her majesties pleasure for something completely unrelated. Maybe that's another failure. 

On the whole, don't let somebody suffer from bullying, don't let them hit the low where they consider their own life. But help them, stand up for them and give them hope. Does it really matter if they're fat, if they're a stick, if they have a different taste or merely that they have the guts to stand up to the group of people where the bully(s) come from. Don't let another person like Izzie finish their own lives because of some idiots. 

RIP Izzie Dix & Hannah Smith.