Posts by Emma Hart
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I'm interested, reading about all this rebellion here, how many people here, cheated on exams?
Okay, I guess it's a fair question. Never, ever ever. Nor would I, nor would I tolerate that in my children.
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which proved to contain several dildos and some stuff that looked like it might be of use in drug manufacture
That's Intent to Supply in Texas and Oklahoma. Sex toys, not drugs.
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Do them worms have any link with our colleagues' failure to write understandable instructions (or these days, design knowable interfaces)?
Sacha, dude, I WISH I got to design the freaking interfaces. What made the BW tech manual such a bitch is that the system was based on Drupal but wrenched miles from its intended purpose by a programmer who disappeared halfway through, and I was trying to explain it to people that yes, we refer to as twelve o'clock flashers.
Still, I like to think I don't do a totally crap job.
Then I moved on to doing the admin manual, which I guess is down the policy end of tech writing. That wasn't so much 'write down our admin policy' as 'write our admin policy', which was a whole lot less frustrating.
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Phew, I was worried she actually meant felched.
That's a different story. You'll have to wait for the book.
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Oh dear, I've outed myself as a big nerdy geek again, haven't I?
Filking is big with Scifi cons or the SCA. Usually it means taking a popular song and altering the lyrics - Weird Al is just a very famous filker.
In this case it was taking Icehouse's Great Southern Land and making it a song about cricket.
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BTW every time they say "Great Southern Stand" does anyone else think of Icehouse?
Filked it, back in the day.
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Not that anyone ever reads the stuff we write, mind.
When doing the Bardic Web tech manual, I was severely tempted to change 'permissions' to 'persimmons' throughout, and see if anyone noticed.
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It gets scarier - I believe we have a certain triple-initial'd acquaintance in common, too. New Zealand - she is a small country.
Ah, that'd be you, me, and two other people on this thread.
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Here's a piece of timing: Alfie Kohn in The Nation talking about education reform in the States.
To be a school "reformer" is to support:
§ a heavy reliance on fill-in-the-bubble standardized tests to evaluate students and schools, generally in place of more authentic forms of assessment;
§ the imposition of prescriptive, top-down teaching stand-ards and curriculum mandates;
§ a disproportionate emphasis on rote learning--memorizing facts and practicing skills--particularly for poor kids;
§ a behaviorist model of motivation in which rewards (notably money) and punishments are used on teachers and students to compel compliance or raise test scores;
§ a corporate sensibility and an economic rationale for schooling, the point being to prepare children to "compete" as future employees; and
§ charter schools, many run by for-profit companies.
politicians keep trotting out the same failed get-tough strategies "with no sense of irony or institutional memory."
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Almost enough now to challenge the PAS Women's team to a game - though there may be conflicted loyalties.
Imagine our play-by-play diagrams, though.
This tech-writer thing is starting to get a wee bit scary.
Liking something doesn't mean it's good for our long-term well-being though (see also my relationship with sugar).
Yeah, this. In fact, surely the fact that as kids we liked standardised testing should make the fact that as parents we're opposed to increasing it more significant. We're not the people who found testing a nightmare.
I got my kids' reports yesterday. They're comprehensive, and appear to be giving me information about their progress in plain English.