Hard News: Dunce Dunce Revolution
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To assert that we should be happy to settle for the most basic skills and socialisation as a result of eight years of schooling is bollocks. There may indeed be some kids for whom just that is an achievement...
Some grow up to be Minister, and continue to set their horizons by their own competence. Put a smug fool in charge of learning and this is the unambitious twaddle you get.
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It just dawned on me that when Tolley tries to get her drive to mediocrity through parliament the Nats wont have enough votes and ACT will come in and insist that they privatise the schools ...
Vouchers, Paul, vouchers..
I also think there's a hidden agenda here with the National Standards being implemented to set up a very blunt instrument with which to bring in things such as vouchers and performance pay for teachers. Or maybe I'm just paranoid. Then again there's this from John Key yesterday.
"the Prime Minister’s suggestion made yesterday at the Council of Trade Unions’ conference that school support staff could have a pay rise if their teacher colleagues were prepared to fund it by foregoing a salary increase." -
It just dawned on me that when Tolley tries to get her drive to mediocrity through parliament...
As Russell notes, the standards thing was passed under urgency first thing. Much all the urgent things they've been advancing under urgency in the last five weeks. And a third of their term. Car crushing and surveillance and so on.
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We must urgently spy on those crushed teachers.
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I also think there's a hidden agenda here with the National Standards being implemented to set up a very blunt instrument with which to bring in things such as vouchers and performance pay for teachers.
Not so much hidden as ideologically consistent. No surprise.
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Try this one which pops up in quiz evenings now and then: what is the next number in this sequence: 20, 1, 18, 4, 13, ?
10?
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5?
hell, I don't know either. -
6.
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@Sacha
Oh and also (this from a month ago) :
PAUL One other little bit of information, of intelligence, which has come to the ear. Are teachers' advisors, who are teachers who go around teaching teachers and advising teachers, are they going to be scrapped at the end of this year if they are not advisors on numeracy and literacy?
ANNE I'm not aware of that...
It would certainly be embarrassing if it turned out that she had been just a little bit aware ...
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6.
Now this man has courage in his convictions, which Sacha and I seem to lack.
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It would certainly be embarrassing if it turned out that she had been just a little bit aware ...
But consistent with her mediocre intellect if not.
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which Sacha and I seem to lack.
Guilty as charged.
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The question I remember went something like "Congress is to gubernatorial as senate is to ...?"
I think the answer to that question would be "gubernatorial", but it really makes no sense.
True, maybe it was more like "Senator is to Gubernatorial as President is to...?". But the point is really that you can coach people to pass this sort of test, just like you can coach 12-year-olds to win Spelling Bees or kids to pass National Standards tests. But a high GRE score (or knowing what 'gubernatorial' means, or even recognising common adjectival suffixes) is not a useful predictor of success in grad school and beyond. Just like getting a higher proportion of kiwi kids to spell tricky words correctly is not going to help John Key with his plan to...er...(what was his plan again? Something to do with cows and our beautiful scenery?).
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Used to have a board on the back of a door in a flat. Passed it many many times.
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Something to do with cows and our beautiful scenery?
Cycling.
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Meanwhile, under the new curriculum the big question currently being studied throughout the school is within the area of biology and there are seeds sprouting in classes all over, compost making going on ...
I love this.
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Used to have a board on the back of a door in a flat. Passed it many many times.
1...2...3... [little light goes on in head]
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I think most people kind of hoped last year we went from people who read the Guardian online and watch the BBC to people who read the Telegraph online and watch CNN.
Unfortunately, this government clearly aims no higher than the Daily Mail and Fox News.
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I have a kid who absolutely will not do stuff like writing unless he can see a purpose to it (and getting better at writing is not a purpose for writing thank you very much) so, for him and probably many other kids, subjects like science are the way to teach him literacy and numeracy skills.
Isabel, that is one of the most intelligent comments I've read in a long time.
I tautoko that. I have a pretty extreme version of that kid.
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I tautoko that. I have a pretty extreme version of that kid.
My partner's the same - As in physics, Cs in maths, because it was the same maths but physics taught it in an applied rather than a theoretical way. Literacy and numeracy seem to be becoming ends, rather than tools, and that is extremely fucking depressing.
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Graeme, you're being logical. Wrong approach for Friday afternoon. Someone is bound to come up with teh answer.
The answer is "fish". Because its as irrelevant to the US Senate as state governors are to Congress.
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FFS, TVNZ "news" manage to turn the issue into a toss up between teaching kids to count strawberries or putting on calf club days.
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I have a kid who absolutely will not do stuff like writing unless he can see a purpose to it (and getting better at writing is not a purpose for writing thank you very much) so, for him and probably many other kids, subjects like science are the way to teach him literacy and numeracy skills.
Isabel, that is one of the most intelligent comments I've read in a long time.
I tautoko that. I have a pretty extreme version of that kid.
Yeah that was me too. My parents took me out of school when they realised how much it was driving me insane, and homeschooled me (not perfect, for a number of reasons, but better). When I eventually did go back to school I hit that wall again.
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Literacy and numeracy seem to be becoming ends, rather than tools, and that is extremely fucking depressing.
I've written before about what a bad fit the existing system was for Leo.
When we tried to bring him back in at intermediate level, it began rather well: with a spelling test that he pretty much aced. He was the only kid in the class who knew how to spell "attorney".
I asked him afterwards how he knew: MMORPG chat and forums, basically. He needed to learn to communicate to achieve his aims, and did so. I do wonder what might have happened had there been more for him in the system.
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I have a kid who absolutely will not do stuff like writing unless he can see a purpose to it (and getting better at writing is not a purpose for writing thank you very much) so, for him and probably many other kids, subjects like science are the way to teach him literacy and numeracy skills.
Nice post, and it reminds me of the fact that although English, German and History were always my top subjects throughout secondary school, I think I even enjoyed the idea of science even more. Its disciplines still fascinate me, I guess it's the naturally inquiring nature of them, and the fact that you do (of a sort) come to a conclusion that's vaguely concrete, but often after exhausting a lot of other options.
I guess it's the fact that the sciences that aren't strictly linear that appeals. When I was features writer for Critic, the piece I most enjoyed writing (other than the John Key article or the "persons of the year" spiel) was one on the University's Bose-Einstein Condensate Lab. I mean, they're in the business of discovering a new state of matter. That's off the hook.
I've linked it down below if anyone's interested (apologies for self-promotion)
http://www.critic.co.nz/about/features/57And yeah, National Standards is just a ghastly idea, the only good thing you can say about something that will, ultimately, encourage "teaching to test" is that at least it's not based around a complete funding rort ala No Child Left Behind (thank you, GWB for peverting the original intention of Ted Kennedy's legislation by gumming up the funding and then watering down the curriculum).
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