Posts by Emma Hart
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I have the strongest suspicion that if we were to reverse the philosophy of our disability services - from the withdrawal of resources to the provision of resources - we'd waste a lot less money and spend no more than we are spending.
Certainly a huge amount of money is just wasted in persecutorial* practices. How much money and time would be saved by just never making people with permanent disabilities reapply for their entitlements? By assuming GPs aren't fraudulent bastards and never making anyone have a designated doctor visit? Like Lilith, we had the experience of having our benefit cut for absolutely no reason, and having it reinstated when we complained. That was someone's job.
*It's a word now.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Peter Martin,
While I confess to having little or no understanding of how your daughter's disability affects her cognitively, there is more than one way to get her through those literacy credits to achieve Level 1 NCEA.
Yeah, as I noted, her teacher was on to it enough to ensure that our daughter started Level 1 a year early, under the old requirements, so she could finish it under them as well. They did this for as many kids in the unit as could possibly manage it, regardless of age. And my son has got all his literacy requirements in subjects other than English.
The system can be gamed. It shouldn't have to be. Not all parents and teachers have the nous or the resources to do it.
I should note that my daughter doesn't actually require SACs. She gets assistance in-class (by, yes, banding special-needs kids together and all going in on a teacher-aide), but the SAC regime doesn't actually affect us personally. That doesn't stop me being absolutely filthy on it.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Brent Jackson,
Using Sign Language to talk must be considered a "spoken interaction", surely ?
After the requirement was brought in, teachers of the Deaf battled hard and eventually successfully for students to be allowed to fulfill it in NZSL, but only if that was their first language. So it is, thankfully, sorted for Deaf kids. For those in between, however, for whom spoken English is their primary means of communication but whose speech is not clear enough to pass the standard, the problem remains.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Lucy, no impairment group is soaking up resources.
Lucy was being sarcastic.
What she describes is very reminiscent of our experience of trying (eventually unsuccessfully) to retain our daughter's itinerant hours when she was at primary school. We would get together with her teachers and her facilitator and make her out to be dumber than she was. The help she got let her catch up, so it was taken away, at which point, apparently astonishingly, she fell behind.
She's a teen now and it is simply far too demeaning to her to adopt these strategies.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Robert Fox,
Ha, snap.
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Are people still all being surprised that Russell Brand is a good writer and a deep thinker?
Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just... another one bites the dust..." This demonstrates I suppose that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it is likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.
And on Thatcher and feminism:
It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of Girl Power. I don't see that. She is an anomaly, a product of the freak-conomy of her time. Barack Obama interestingly said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women." Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Hebe,
surely trout is ungendered?
Would you ever use it to describe a man?
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Of course, I've spent all morning grateful for the way my friends and my feeds have been talking about and demonstrating compassion, and what's running through my head? This:
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Glenn Pearce,
No Bragg ?
I know what you mean, the 80s for me was largely sitting in freezing student flats listening to Bragg, but here's what he has to say today.
"This is not a time for celebration. This is a salient reminder of how Britain got into the mess that we are in today."
Mitch Benn has described living in Scotland under Thatcher as like living under a foreign occupation. That Thatcher's legacy is what's happening in Britain right now: the feeling that, if you are of a certain 'class', your own government despises you. How else would any government come up with something like the bedroom tax?
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Hard News: Violence in the streets, in reply to Chris Miller,
the behaviour of all the overly-macho dispossessed men in Christchurch (and in the rest of the country) who think the only thing they can do to have some power over their lives is to smash up other people.
Yeah, but in Aikman's? That's a hard-out stripy-shirt bar. Not too many of the Dispossessed drinking there.