Posts by Hilary Stace
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Great idea Steven. But not sure that it would fit into the car boot with the luggage and wheelchair. And what about the hoist for getting on and off it?
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Yes Jackie. We did feel lucky (most of the time). But you could also sense we were on the edge of something. There were lots of property for sale notices and mortgagee sales, especially in some of those new beach subdivisions with ugly Auckland sized houses on bare sections. And although most of the little towns looked thriving (unlike the last time I went through there in the 90s) there were some closing down sales and newly newly closed businesses.
I also felt that the days of touring around NZ by car might be numbered.
And the environment needs protecting to stay looking so nice. Lots of land clearing for dairying and unfenced waterways through cow paddocks in evidence. And many signs warning of toxic algal bloom, or not collecting shellfish and not spreading didymo.
And why is all that corn being grown in fields labelled with its patent number?
On the other hand some towns had resource recovery centres instead of town dumps and had good recycling practices. The tourists were the problem. But NZ needs the tourists. -
I should just add on the downside - a lot of the good things in NZ are not accessible for people who use wheelchairs. Just a couple of steps, an entrance too narrow, a path too rough, a blocked doorway - that's all it takes to create a barrier, and that's not fair.
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Russell
One of the best things about Wellington in January is the nightly concerts and light show at the botanical gardens. Each night a different group entertains at the sound shell and the lights are on till about 10 pm. Disco balls, Mr Bean light circles, coloured waterfalls, underlit magnolias, changing spotlights at the duckpond etc. Nice family stuff for a warm evening. -
Still reporting holidays. We have been lucky to have a holiday in the Bay of Plenty which coincided with a week of glorious weather. Every day the sky was blue, the sea ranged from clear aqua to deep indigo (and was warm!), and the land - grass, bush, corn fields - every shade of green. There was endless outdoor space and clear air, even in the few crowded places such as Lake Rotoma and Ohope Beach. The mountains from the desert road were the clearest I had seen for a long time.
(BTW it wasn't all perfect and there were some incidents best forgotten eg one of our party had a painful bout of food poisoning, but it was pretty pleasant overall).Some highlights:
-The Haiku Walkway at Katikati (in a park down behind the council building). One of my mother’s haiku are featured on the boulders.
-The homemade macadamia and manuka honey icecream at Pacific Coast Macadamias which is just north of Te Kaha and overlooks a particularly beautiful beach on a coastline of beautiful empty beaches.
-The official pardon signed by Governor General Dame Cath Tizard for the 1860s conviction of Te Whakatohea chief, Mokomoko, on display in the historic Anglican church at Opotiki (see www.dnzb.govt.nz for the full story).
-The tea cosies and tapestry bags for sale made by the volunteers at the Shalfoon grocery museum in Opotiki.
-The peaceful warm sunset at the Opotiki wharf.[Meanwhile the snippets of news we heard were about a war on the other side of the world where people had neither space nor peace.]
And the best holiday read was a book a world away in every sense, ‘Stuart: a life backwards’, the intertwined life story of homeless sometime criminal Stuart and his biographer, Alexander Masters, which won the Guardian first book award in 2005.
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Thanks Christopher Dempsey. Those were the two cafes in Opotiki we tried out. The upstairs one is called Postcards and not wheelchair accesssible but still very nice if you can walk up the stairs. The Two Fish even has Wellington's Havana coffee. And on PA recommendations we tried the Brown Sugar in Taihape which was very crowded with Wellingtonians and probably other PA readers.
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And off topic - although they are probably toasting each other and the activists who went before them - congratulations to our MP Grant Robertson and his partner Alf on their civil union today. It is featured in the Dompost today with a photo of them both.
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Emma, I agree, it's probably simply genetics. There seems to be a wee bit of judgementality creeping into this thread for what is really just the diversity and uniqueness of each human brain. As one of those who never developed that taste for alcohol (nor for meat either), in spite of grown ups assuring me that I would, I can at least save money at the supermarket.
I am much more interested in the historical and political aspects of alcohol eg its role as a tool of colonial oppression. And would NZ women have won the vote so early if it hadn't been for the anti-alcohol activists in the Women's Christian Temperance Union? But probably a discussion for another time.
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BTW anyone have any good recommendations for cafes around Taupo or Opotiki? Wheelchair accessible preferably.
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Have just been doing some research on No Child Left Behind. It came into law in 2002 with admirable intentions of closing the achievement gaps and having high expectations for all students, but was misguided in that it thought it could achieve this through a tick the box one size fits all model rather than looking at how teaching and learning actually happens.
It has now been shown to have done nothing to lower the numbers of high school drop outs and has even lowered achievement in some groups. One recent report details the unexpected consequences of threats of non-achievement on students, schools and parents, with manipulation of scores, inaccurate classification of students, and reduced flexibility in the curriculum. (http://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=13&n=6)
A more thorough overview is provided by the Report of the Commission on No Child Left Behind (funders include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) which although approving the aims of the legislation found it is not achieving its goals. Why? Because they have worked out after actually doing some talking to real people affected including students, that what makes a difference is effective teachers (eg those who can teach and engage with a diversity of students etc ), principals who provide community leadership, and schools that foster learning communities (and BTW individual performance pay does not help this).
(Beyond NCLP: fulfilling the promise for our nation's children, 2007 - it's available onliine)We in NZ already know this and it has provided the basis of our teaching and learning policies for years. So why adopt an American system that has been shown to be deeply flawed, and furthermore which used inappropriate research methodology?