Posts by BenWilson
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Perhaps part of my anxious insistence on this is based on the fear that my marvellous and currently fairly useful capacity for just soaking stuff up, and making good guesses about what I don't know, might be an obsolete party trick pretty soon.
You too, huh? I think a lot of adult opinion on the education of their children is anachronistic. It certainly was when I was a child, and my parents reported the same thing.
What you study, how you study it, what skills will be useful, etc, changes over time. Right now I think it's rapidly changing. Which makes me uneasily suspicious that whilst kids these days are less literate than in my day (which was less literate than in my parent's day), they're still smarter than me. They have skills for the modern context.
Just as I didn't really obsess about mastering long division (I can do it, but not quickly) because I always had a calculator, so kids don't need to really know about general knowledge because there is Google. Why waste brain-space (or more accurately learning-time) Also, pottering around is a lot cheaper than it used to be - you don't need to master some arcane text before you learn to do stuff, you can just buy pieces and fool around with it.
Obviously parents are not totally useless in guiding their children, and there's no-one else to educate them but adults anyway, but I think many totally overrate themselves and the value of what they themselves know. I'll probably be retiring when my son hits the workforce, so I really don't know what it will be useful for him to know, other than the broadest lessons. I have no idea how much specialization will be required by then, or what the average amount of time spent educating oneself will be, or what tools will be available to do it with.
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Kyle, yup, and nup.
Yes the human enjoyment of dog fighting is a factor. The animal cruelty outweighs it, IMHO.
I think the reduction of withdrawal symptoms is a part of the ritual of smoking, but not even the biggest part. The physical addiction ends after only a few days. What the smokers I know who have tried to quit and failed have said is that it's the psychological addiction to the ritual itself that was the hardest to kick. Substituting another ritual works quite well. I have personally enjoyed stress relieving smoking without ever getting addicted. Like I said, it's the ritual, the socializing, the attention and care that the taking of it demands etc. I don't do it very often because it's obviously very unhealthy, but there are times in my life when it has helped me to calm down and focus.
And you're making your heroin point to the wrong guy. I think it should be allowed. I think the enjoyment that a large number of heroin users might get is not an irrelevant factor over the smaller number who will no doubt ruin their lives. Although I would suggest that injecting it would seem less appealing if other very similar drugs were available to be taken in much safer ways. Like eating or smoking it. The particular appeal of that form of use seems to be dictated by the convenience it gives the drug traffickers.
As for foot massages, that stuff is sick man. Imagine some guy lying there in a dreamy haze feeling pleasure from something that is a human invention to trick the nervous system. What's wrong with someone who likes that, couldn't they just get a job and save money for their kids education and charity? They might as well flush the money down the toilet for all the real benefit it gives them.
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Stephen, I so agree. I don't see how you can learn a foreign language without a massive degree of rote learning. But other mental skills are of great value too. And they are sooo interrelated. Problem solving is 90% memory, in my job. Of course you need a system to establish which of the 200 already known problems this particular one might fit into, or to prove it's a new problem. But you also have to remember the 200 known problems. You could develop a system, but it's usually just easier to fix the problems. Naturally you have memory-aids like your database of problems, your help texts, your paper notes, your diary, Google, etc. But the difference between being skilled and not in some support role comes down to having done it for a while and got good at remembering how your system works, how it should work, how people are using it, etc. That speeds up your use of the supporting tools hugely.
Even with a foreign language, the outcome we are seeking is not to be able to measure how many words the kids have learned. It is to get them to be able to use that language in a useful way. It surprised me when I went to Germany that they considered me extremely fluent, when I only just passed first year Uni German. It surprised them, when they heard that was the first time I'd ever been to Germany and had only learned it at school. Until they heard that in 7th Form I had the luck to get 1-1 language classes from a 'heisse Fraulein'. That cracked them up bigtime, and it was only later that I remembered that heiss=hot, but not when you are talking about people. In that context it actually means 'horny'. But I'm happy they think I was luckier than I really was. Can you put a price on understanding German humour? Can you measure it? Can you teach it? Should you teach it? Certainly I would fail a test as a translator.
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Actually it sounds like even more of a fizzout than I thought. No drugs charges...just firearms.
I do think hoarding a bunch of illegal firearms is criminal behaviour. Obviously I wonder what they were going to do with them. But terrorism it ain't (yet).
Now we can start the fireworks over why they are still in remand.
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LOL, Herald is there, but with a broken link.
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Angus, honestly, have you actually spent much time around people playing pokies in pubs? They do not appear to be enthused with "the buzz of risk taking, the sparkle of the lights"; they're usually silent, fixated and excluded.
Sounds much like many activities, which the people indulging in them seem to enjoy. I remember very similar expressions on the faces of kids in art classes, especially the ones who were really into their art. Hardcore gamers look a lot like that too. I play chess much like that. In fact most things I do that involve concentration show those symptoms. People watching TV are much the same.
I'm totally against Kyle's wanting to ban cigarettes for the same reason. To say there is nothing good about cigarettes is wrong. It is for many people a stress relieving ritual, and an excuse to socialize. That's worth something.
Anyway, we've got Ben over from "I don't hold with any of this harm reduction stuff" to "communities should have a choice" inside 24 hours
LOL, yes you've clarified me to that. In the interests of trying to contain my usual verbosity, I didn't caveat my first claim with the entire theory surrounding it. Harm reduction coming in at a national level annoys me a great deal, having people from the South Island saying what pill poppers in Auckland can or cannot do with their spare time. Harm reduction at a community level makes me all warm and fuzzy. I'm glad they asked my whole street if it would be OK to build a massive retirement village down my street, laying out the number of years it would take etc. That's due process. But following my principles I also said 'yes of course you can'. If they proposed pokies in my area I'd say 'I don't want them'. But I wouldn't say 'I don't want anyone to have them'. If the community goes for it, then I'll just continue to be puzzled by gambling, and shake my head as I walk past about my own business, as I do for so many other vices.
It goes to choice. Banning stuff at a national level means that if I really like my gambling I've got to leave NZ. But if it's just banned in Avondale (I was wondering what you were going on about with 'targetting poor communities' driving around yesterday and failing to see one single pokies outlet. Then I went past the racecourse and all became clear), I can still drive to, say, Pt Chev, where folks might not be such killjoys. Or is it the other way around?
If all those poor Maori women vote against pokies in their area, fine. I personally doubt they would. I think that's just one suburb being snobby on another.
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"learn how to learn", "dont remeber, just derive", "problem solving skills are better than memory", "method is more important than fact", "active learning"
Heh, I found those pearls of wisdom especially useless in foreign language classes.
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It's a joke to get so bitter. If they'd said we'd like our kids to be musical and artistic, no one would give a shit. Personally I didn't and wouldn't study music, it not being an interest of mine, and I failed art. I didn't feel oppressed that my school pushed those subjects particularly hard - I just ignored them.
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LOL, looks like my fizzout theory is coming true.
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I guess it kinda matters what sweeping words are used in some sort of 'Vision' section of a document - sweeping visionaries. Most people just want to find out what actual stuff their kids are actually going to be taught, not what the vision is.
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