Posts by Rob Hosking
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Ditto.
Wagging is not cheating.
Just remembered one other celebrated wagging, from 7th form. A Dutch exchange student was going back home so a bunch of us decided to go see her off at the airport.It was a Friday, we didn't ask permission of school or parents.
They would have said no.
The difficulties began when the other car driver (we had two carloads) backed his dad's Morris Maxi out of someone's driveway and wiped out the driver’s door. It became plain from that point we were going to have difficulties hiding this trip from parents, let alone teachers.
Then we get to the airport and one of the teachers has also come to see the student off. In retrospect we should have seen this coming, since the teacher was a member of Rotary and had hosted the student for part of the stay. The teacher does not say anything, but glowers menacingly (and he was a good glowerer).
We’d planned to go back to school that afternoon. But at this point we figure we're in a power of shit anyway so we might as well postpone the inevitable bollocking and take the rest of the day off.
We zoomed around south Auckland trying to find, firstly, a car wreckers yard with a spare Morris Maxi driver’s door. Hopefully the same colour as the car.
This is not a huge success.
Not much with the other effort either, an amateur science project by the classes' three chemistry nerds. (Not me: I was the history nerd).
They had decided it would be really cool to make napalm. They’d got together a list of the necessary ingredients, and had managed to accumulate almost all the necessary substances.
One eluded them (I have no idea what it was). We stopped at numerous industrial supply places around the back of Onehunga and Penrose. Suspicious looks and refusals were all that were obtained.
Now, this was winter 1981, a sad and paranoid time in our country’s history. A bunch of youths making inquires about explosive ingredients was going to attract a certain amount of attention. Fortunately I don’t think it got any further than a few stern inquiries by the Plods, but I do recall the Riot Act being well and truly read the following Monday.
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I'm trying to figure out how one would stop a kid who was ready to learn to read from doing it themselves. Unless you just stop reading to them, never answer their questions and remove all printed material from their vicinity. I can't imagine that was advocated even back in the day.
I knew the alphabet and I think some stuff, but how much was just memorising and how much was working out what the words actually said I don't know. I do remember pulling Mum up when she tried to skip bits of 'The House at Pooh Corner' - my favourite book when I was five. (Eeyore RULES)
Interesting theme in the discussion around schooling being geared to different learning speeds. It is a real problem even for individual kids, let alone classes of 30 (or 40 in my day, at primary school anyway).
I skipped a year at primary school, went from upper primers to Standard 2. They gave us some test, decided about four of us were bright and shoved us up a class.
Which worked quite well, initially. It was the first time I remember feeling stimulated by what was going on in the classroom.
But in the process some fairly basic maths was skipped - and of course maths is often not a strength of primary teachers anyway. It was Form 2 before I could do long division, for example.
The odd thing was - well, I think its odd - I got a really high score in maths in those PAT tests they used to give at the start of the year in around Std 4-Form 2.
I used to love doing those tests. That sounds show-offy but its not - the idea of doing well or not doing well never entered my head. They were just fun. A lot of time, the most stimulating thing all year.
I never considered myself a high achiever. I just wasn't that into external achievement, I was just into Not Being Bored.
This is one big reason why I'm a journalist - its a job where, if you're bored, its your job to go and find something not boring. (Mind you, I'm into things like tax policy, economics and superannuation, which would send some people slumbering. One man's Mede is another man's Persian, as it says in the Bible)
I got some very good marks in English and History, but the other subjects were a bit more umm...well, my UE range was in the eighties for English and History, down to 28 for biology. And I think they'd give you 25% just for knowing what a semi-permeable membrane was. (a damn good metaphor, I've always thought)
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Waiuku College, 1977-81 (and a big hi to Dave Patrick)...
I don't think I ever wagged from high school except maybe in the 7th form. I was in the s**t a lot in the 7th form. 'Attitude'.
The rest of the time...well I was a fairly dreamy kid. Very Very good at mentally absenting myself when I felt like it.
I did run away from primary school after three weeks though.
I'd been sold the idea of school on the basis they would teach me to read, which I was busting a gut to do. Back then the official thinking was parents should not teach kids to read before they started school but should leave it to the experts.
Anyway, I'd been at school three weeks. They hadn't even started teaching me to read. I was feeling quite short changed by this whole school thing. The fact someone kept stealing my lunch didn't help. Also having to sit on the mat with everyone else for story time when I could hear perfectly well from my seat. (I remember getting whacked for that).
Then after lunch one day we were sat down on the mat (very grudgingly in my case) and shown either different colours or how to tell the time, I can't remember which. I just remember it was something I already knew. I was utterly furious.
So when 'little playtime' at 2pm came around I was off. Walked home, which was 6 miles away (that's 10kms in New Maths).
I nearly got there, too. School noticed my absence, phoned home, Mum was on the way in when she saw me walking the other way through 'the cuttings' a hilly bit of road near home. She probably spotted the little black cloud above my head a fair way off.
I remember the ensuing discussion, one of the main points of which was I had to go to school. There was a law, apparently. Also because they would teach me to read eventually, when they got around to it.
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Don't bother trying to work out what it all means, just wait for the next clarification - now issued daily.
Very simply (and I say this after 15 years covering select committees, and also with a weary sigh)....although the inquiry will have its own terms of reference, people will make submissions along whatever lines they feel fit.
Case in point: last year's monetary policy select committee inquiry, which heard from social creditors, gold standard zealots, you name it. Not within the terms of reference, so those kinds of suggestions were ignored when the committee reported.
It'll be the same with this one. It's nothing special.
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Also, reminds me of a modernised song:
Old McDonald had a farm, 925200When in Standard 3 (no, I don't know what that is in the New Maths, but I was nine) the kid at the next desk came out with:
'Mary Had a little lamb, the doctor was surprised;
Old Macdonald had a farm, the doctor nearly died.'I was in hysterics for about an hour.
Amazing, the things you find funny when you're a kid.
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__Niall Ferguson's Vanity Fair story on the history of the credit explosion is a top read.__
Russ, he has a series called The History of Money on Channel 4 here in the UK at the moment. It is very good and he is good. He makes the bond market look interesting which is no small feat.
He did a big fat book a few years back called The Cash NExus on the bond market, finance and war. It's a good, if long, read.
Last year I read his 'War of the World - History's Age of Hatred' which is about the wars of the 20th Century. It is very good but awful.
He's a one man History Channel, without quite the same propensity to make World War II the subject of every second programme.
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'Boof-head' is a term I first heard from an Australian colleague when I worked on a gardening labouring gang.
He used it a lot, and I always understood it to be a sort of Australian equivalent of 'bogan'.
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My failed attempt to coin a phrase was 'Tinkerblogger', defined as the author of a blog who believes that by writing about something with great frequency or conviction they will cause it to be true.
I call that sort of thing auto-cranial-proctology but for some reason that term's never caught on either.
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I think it makes a kind of sense to date a few dickheads during the undergraduate years.
You mean there's a choice in the matter?
And does 'dickhead' apply to male and females? because as a term it sounds very XY chromosomeish.
Personally I use the term 'f-wit' because it sounds less gender-specific, and in the usage we're talking about here, it is applicable on more than one level.
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Erm, it was more in the nature of... ceremony? Like taking communion.
Church services down your way sound a damn sight more interesting than the ones I've been to....