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Author Topic: 2019 AA Club - Week 7  (Read 2979 times)

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MissSmiley

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2019 AA Club - Week 7
« on: February 18, 2019, 11:37:17 am »
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Opinion piece title - The chore that most parents start too early
By Caitlin Fitzsimmons
Website - https://www.smh.com.au/sport/swimming/the-chore-that-most-parents-start-too-early-20190214-p50xx7.html

Note: The original piece has been shortened here
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Swimming is our birthright as Australians. We swim in the ocean, in rivers, lakes and dams, in council pools and our own backyards.
This summer has been all about swimming in nature for my family: bushwalking to billabongs in national parks and enjoying the ocean pools around Sydney.
My husband and I spent our honeymoon a decade ago snorkelling on a coral reef, and I can hardly wait to share a similar holiday with our children.
Before then, I have to endure more swimming lessons. Not mine, the kids’.
There are few things more important than teaching your child the skills to survive in water, apart from maybe learning them yourself.
There have been 97 drowning deaths this summer – 31 in NSW alone – according to Royal Life Saving Australia.
For that reason alone, swimming lessons are a non-negotiable in my household.

Swimming is also one of the things I love best in the world and I want to pass on the joy to my kids.
But I confess, I do not love children’s swimming lessons.

I'm not alone. I actually heard a story about a friend of a friend who said she would have considered having a third child were it not for swimming lessons. I’m not sure she was joking.

We’ve tried a few different swim schools in our time.
We moved on from our local pool where the lessons were taught by indifferent uni students nursing noticeable hangovers.
We left the pool in a nearby suburb where they wouldn’t offer refunds or make up lessons if the pool was closed because someone else’s child had a toileting accident.
We stopped going to another nearby public pool where the council also owned the carpark underneath the complex but operated it separately to maximise profits. Parking costs ran between $7 and $12 each visit.

Fortunately, I’m very happy with both the quality of lessons and the convenience at our current swim school.

But even in the best-case scenario, children’s swimming lessons are rarely enjoyable for parents. They involve rushing to and from the pool on a tight timeframe, sitting on the bleachers in a humid room, feeling frustrated about the wasted effort and money when you see your children are mucking about rather than listening to the teachers, and dealing with getting children showered and changed without dropping their clothes in a puddle.

When children are tiny, parents have to get in the water. As a mother of twins, this was too hard. Every lesson required two adults in the water – one for each twin - and we soon gave up.

For children between about age three until five or six, parents have to stay poolside. Parents will also need to supervise older children if they wind up in different classes at different times.

Once you’re past this phase, you might be able to dash off a few laps yourself, as long as you’re at the public pool rather than a specialist swimming lesson centre. Like Cinderella you’ll need to rush back to the pool deck before the clock strikes 30 minutes.

Then you’ll negotiate whether to go back in the water for a play session, head to the cafe for an over-priced snack, or try to drag everyone to the changing room and home.

Lessons are also expensive – the NSW ActiveKids voucher of $100 is welcome but doesn’t go far when lessons are about $17 each – and many centres have waiting lists, especially for weekend classes. The cost and restricted availability means many children miss out, and the two-week intensive class offered by primary schools is not enough to compensate.
One mistake a lot of families make is they start too young. Then, fed up with the grind, they pull the children out before they really have the skills.

We’ve been doing swimming lessons on and off since the twins were three. I'm grateful we can afford them but in hindsight that was too young. We wasted many hours and thousands of dollars and it didn’t really click until the children reached primary school age.

The Royal Life Saving Australia study found children were starting lessons earlier than in the 1980s and 1990s but most stopped before their eighth birthday and before they learnt vital skills that could save their lives.

Because children were being pulled out of lessons too soon, more than four out of five 12-year-old children couldn’t tread water for two minutes, two out of five couldn't swim 50 metres of freestyle or backstroke, and one in three couldn’t swim 25 metres of survival strokes.

Lessons for babies and toddlers are about water familiarisation, but you can get that for free by playing with your children in water. It doesn't need to be through the structure of formal lessons with a high cost and inflexible schedule.

Most families will need professional swimming lessons eventually but it shouldn’t stop when children are eight – that’s only the end of the beginning. To mix it up, try squads, or water polo, or Nippers.

A friend told me parenthood is one long exercise in delayed gratification. Swimming lessons are the perfect example. It’s a chore, but I know it will be worth it in the end.
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ngu0038

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Re: 2019 AA Club - Week 7
« Reply #1 on: February 22, 2019, 05:36:02 pm »
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Caitlin Fitzsimmons creates an opinion piece titled “The chore that most parents start too early” from the Sydney Morning Herald, February 17th 2019, to insinuate the fault that parents have with granting swimming lessons to their children. In an authoritative tone, Fitzsimmons directs her piece to the Australian society, predominantly parents, to encourage the readership to the feel that children should not be attending swim schools at their early stages of life.

Fitzsimmons states early in her piece that swimming is “our birthright as Australians,” suggesting that it is something that she considers the “best in the world.” However, Fitzsimmons instigates that families cause children to start too young when it comes to swimming lessons, and that corrective action must be taken. To highlight her discontented view, she emphasises the childish behaviour of children “mucking about rather than listening to the teachers.” As a result, the readership, particularly Australian parents, are inspired to understand the nature of young children within pools and their lack of coordination between their mentors, which thus reiterates Fitzsimmons’s claim of that children are beginning earlier than they should be. Moreover, Fitsimmons employs her insight, regarding her being a mother, to reason that the swimming lessons on early phases of children is something which brings many efforts and “many hours” wasted. By claiming that parental care in pools “was too hard” accentuates the stress that parents suffer due to the lack of competence of children in waters, allowing readers to relate to Fitzsimmons and thus are encouraged to feel that swim schools are purposed for older children. Additionally, Fitzsimmons’s utilisation of the image shows a unity of swimmers, mainly displaying children nearing teenage years, thereby causing readers to espouse the notion that young children are not ready to take undertake swimming lessons.

Subsequently, Fitzsimmons stresses on how the tutoring places a large toll on the financial status of parents. Switching to a blatant tone, she states that “lessons are also expensive” to endeavour repelling the readership in providing additional lessons for young children, due to the denotation of “expensive”. To further denigrate the nature of these external lessons, Fitsimmons seeks to declare a more plausible solution for babies and toddlers to learn about water familiarisation by emphasising the free of cost by playing with “your children in water.” As a result, Australian parents are likely to result in disregarding paid swimming lessons for their children, which further motivates them to captivate Fitzsimmons’s contention of delaying child care in waters. Fitzsimmons seeks to consolidate this by underscoring the negligible factor of having an “inflexible schedule.” By denoting the inflexibility of having “formal lessons with a high cost,” the readers, predominantly parents, are reiterated further about the unnecessary need of employing child pool lessons at such a young age.


I would also like to know:
*What is a good way of coherently adding the article details (i.e. Title, Date, etc.) in the introduction
and
*Creating a good conclusion

Thanks
« Last Edit: February 22, 2019, 05:38:16 pm by ngu0038 »

caffinatedloz

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Re: 2019 AA Club - Week 7
« Reply #2 on: July 10, 2019, 09:01:29 pm »
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Hi everyone!
I am a Year 10 and this is one of my first attempts at writing a full argument analysis without prompting questions. Please be kind.

I thought I would start with this article as I was able to  read ngu0038’s wonderful example.

Here goes nothing I guess…

****

Swimming is an essential and enjoyable part of Australian culture, however the tedious nature of teaching as child to swim is anything but enjoyable. In Caitlin Fitzsimmons opinion piece, “The chore that most parents start too early,” (Sydney Morning Herald 17.2.19) she asserts that the many costs of swimming lessons far outweigh the benefits in the early years of swimming lessons. Fitzsimmons uses anecdotes and facts told in a relaxed yet confident tone to assert her position to other parents. This is furthered by her use of an image of a typical swimming lesson.

The writer opens her argument by highlighting the cultural importance of being able to swim in Australia, stating that it is, “our birthright” and furthering this with a statement of her personal passion, “Swimming is also one of the things I love best in the world.” In this revelation, Fitzsimmons both builds her credibility and highlights the importance of her piece. Including a statistic from Royal Life Saving Australia, the audience is positioned to see the importance of children having competence in the water and is open to her further persuasion.

Subsequently, Fitzsimmons retells her own experiences with a host of swimming centres, listing off each of their various flaws. She states that, “Even in the best-case scenario, children’s swimming lessons are rarely enjoyable for parents,” which leads her target audience to feel understood and thus builds her credibility.

****

Eek…

I know that this is probably riddled with mistakes, and I am also unsure of how to write a conclusion. I figured I would stop here as I am not even sure if I’m doing this right? I know that you move chronologically, but must you tackle every argument? If you were to miss a key argument in your analysis would you be penalised, even if the rest of the analysis is of a high quality?