Posts by Stephen Judd
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Another question for poor old Graeme, who ought to be getting some sort of compensation for being the PAS House Lawyer: would it still be possible to lay other charges? I'm thinking about conspiracy to commit a crime sort of thing. Because if I were a conscientious copper, and I thought I could nail someone on a more ordinary charge, I would, and I am interested that all we seem to be left with is firearms charges.
Michael: you're torturing my inner pedant with that gross misuse of begging the question, and you know that torture violates her human rights. (My inner pedant is definitely modelled on my late mother).
But in principle I'd much rather the police deal with domestic issues, and leave the Army for fighting foreigners. One of the things that gets right up my nose about the TSA is that we've bought into the hysterical Global War On Terror frame. If there's a local myth I'd like to foster it's that we are calm, skeptical and low-key, and consistent with those values I want to see the law applied at the minimal level that serves the public interest. Anyway, if people are upset about what happened in Ruatoki now, imagine if the SAS went in!
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I have a little sympathy for the police, who may have viewed this as a test case and an opportunity to try and exercise the new law.
But only a little. Because the execution seems to have been completely bollocksed.
I wonder if there wasn't a certain amount of sunk cost mentality going on - we've got all these tapes, we've spent all this time and effort, surely we can build a case out of this?
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Yay, I think Rich and I largely agree.
Should we be teaching context specific skills in what is now a rapidly changing world ?
A heavily qualified yes. Yes, because there is a "meta" level of learning: practice, discipline, patience, memorisation techniques.
(I suppose I'm biassed because having devoted a lot of my formative years to music and languages, which are inherently useless in everyday life outside a fairly narrow context, I still feel I got a lot out of the experience of mastering them.)
And kind of no, in that we should be honest that what we're teaching is either for its own sake, or because you're practising learning, and not pretend that of course being able to write Attic hexameters fits you to govern India.
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Are we using different definitions of "rote?"
I mean "repeated practice", but I think you mean something else.
Indeed you do learn by doing - again and again and again.
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Tom: point taken about the need to understand what you have learned, and to engage with the material. All I was trying to say is that memorisation and recall are themselves skills that are a valuable part of your mental armoury, and rote learning, even of apparently useless things, is the best way I know of to practise them.
Your pilot ought to know about the significance and meaning of all the controls in the cockpit, but to fly, the pilot has to have learned their position and use by rote.
Anyway, I don't see it as an either/or thing.
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Re the memory vs "learning how to learn": false dichotomy. Rote learning is a valuable and useful skill which is essential to higher learning. Not only are your times tables useful but the processes you experienced in learning them are useful too.
Learn how to learn BY learning.
(I'm pretty sure Jackie B or one of the other PA System readers made this point in an earlier thread.)
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His suggestion that there be one elite university would make it impossible, as there wouldn't be another institution of sufficient quality to send your material to.
I'm sure an elite university would have no trouble coming to an arrangement with a similar overseas institution.
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Me too, Heather.
But at least in an operational though not legal sense it would set a good precedent.
The online Herald says there will be an official announcement at 4 PM.
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I was just wondering if Tuhoe do use the Tribunal, and if that makes their position on not having signed the Treaty less tenable.
Remember the whole flag shooting incident? That was when the Tribunal were visiting to hear Tuhoe claims. So yeah, they definitely are using it. You could write to the Waitangi Tribunal registrar and ask for a copy if you want (scroll to bottom).
I have no idea whether there is a Tuhoe consensus on the treaty or not. I'm not sure how the average Pakeha would easily find out, either.
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Well, I wouldn't push the analogy too far. I guess that strictly such a strategy IS hypocritical, which in my mind only goes to show that there are worse things than hypocrisy.
Oddly, your position can be summed up in a classic feminist quotation (Audre Lorde): "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."