Posts by Emma Hart
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that's some massive benefit of the doubt you're giving
Benefit of the doubt can be hugely amusing. For instance, during the Civil Union debate Gordon Copeland said he didn't know any straight couples who wanted civil unions, ergo it was just sneaky gay marriage. So I wrote him a nice email explaining that my partner and I intended getting civilly unified, that I was sure he'd be pleased to know that and be relieved of the burden of ever being able to say that in public again. I also wrote to Ashraf Choudhary after the vote and thanked him for abstaining.
I'm nice. It really throws people off.
In fact, I think I'll go write Tolley a nice letter now and explain some stuff to her.
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Tolley made no apologies for increasing the fines for truancy. "The maximum fine for (not) registering your dog is $3000. I think it is more important you send your children to school than register your dog."
I'm going to take a deep breath and a fistful of valium and give her the benefit of the doubt. Obviously, Tolley has a picture in her head of what every truanting kid is like, and honestly believes that truanting is always caused by lazy and neglectful parenting. She doesn't understand and genuinely hasn't thought about the needs of kids for whom conventional schooling simply doesn't work. If she had to take the Bill through a select committee and listen to submissions where those issues were raised, she might have learned something.
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I always think of lesbians.
We have a pill for that.
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So when they say "irony", do you think of a clothes-presser or a blacksmith?
Spider Robinson's God is an Iron.
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Okay, so my outrage goes from a column to a long comment. Straight after yoga, I said...
I read through the Education (National Standards) Amendment bill this morning, and three things struck me
1) National Standards is a phrase rich in irony
2) WTF is the spurious justification for putting this through under urgency? So the last govt was anti-family, but ramming this through so no families get any input is... what?
3) two things are missing from this bill - individuals, and causes.
The bit that made me laugh out loud was this:
Benefits
Once the national standards are implemented -
- parents and the community will know how their children are progressing compared to the national standard and compared to other children their age. This will help them understand how they can help their children to learn better, both at home and at school, and emphasise the importance of information for producing systematic school improvementHOW? This bill does absolutely nothing to address or even identify the reasons that children under-achieve. It certainly does nothing to help parents become better teachers.
The simplest way for a school to improve its performance against national standards is to boot out the under-achieving children. How long before we see the back of zoning? The schools that take the 'worst' children, the 'problem' ones, and work to help them will be seen as failing, while the schools that cherry-pick the bright kids and then sit on their prestigious reputations will be successes. Yeah, that'll make us better at science.
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little miss solo mother
Steve, dude, srsly? That didn't feel at all unnecessary when you typed it?
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Emma- has his eyesight been properly tested?
Oh, he's blind as a bat, gets it from his mother. He's short sighted and has astigmatism. He wears glasses, and still runs into trees.
Even as a teenager, I climbed up the outside of buildings at Canterbury university with my mates. Thinking about the consequences of a slip makes me shudder now.
Sheesh. My *cough* friend Mike and I used to smoke on the huge concrete ledge outside the fourth floor Honours common room of the English building - a mixture of bravado and being too damn lazy to walk all the way down the stairs. People never look up.
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And then when they come to you crying... having just minor-ly injured themselves while doing something that went entirely predictably (by an adult) wrong... and you say to them "So, why do you think I told you not to do that?"
My daughter is the fearless unmanageable daredevil. We leave her to it, as she appears to be nearly as invulnerable as she thinks she is. My son, however, runs into trees. Five times now. Perfectly stationary trees.
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