Posts by linger
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Legal Beagle: Johndotbanks - the law is…, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
So he'll be lying at the next election? Well, won't that be a change :-P
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Up Front: Let's Talk About Sex, Baby, in reply to Isabel Hitchings,
Yes. I'd note that Dan Savage is usually pretty good about calling in other voices (I'm thinking here especially of his podcasts, rather than in his column) when he fears his contribution on a particular topic might not be entirely useful.
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Up Front: Let's Talk About Sex, Baby, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Oh, you see, that there’s an endorsement of making babies. Which creates this kind of logical disconnect:
Parthenogenesis? Fully approved, hey, it’s fully What Jesus Would Do. Go for it. Oh, wait, you can’t do that? Well, fuck.
Hence: Sex for making babies? Implicitly if somewhat grudgingly approved in an “the end justifies the means” kinda way.
Any other sex? Not mentioned, therefore not endorsed. -
Up Front: You're Telling My Child What, Now?,
... which is to say, I respect that both of you have genuinely-held positions, which I strongly suspect are not as much in conflict as it would appear.
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Up Front: You're Telling My Child What, Now?,
Dear Islander --
firstly -- I am grateful that you are sharing your experience & telling your story (however this was triggered);
but secondly -- I think you may have misinterpreted or overreacted to Ben's message, which was simply "this is not how it should be, ideally" -- which seems true enough of the situation your mum was left in, too. -
Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Islander,
Brian Easton, in a Listener column from 7 Nov 2009 (vol 221 no 3626), p. 54, cites Bruce McFadgen’s book Hostile Shores in arguing that —
About 500 years ago the North Island and north of the South Island were hit by one or more great tsunami. […] Given the widespread impact and that most Maori lived on coasts, a third of the population may have perished […]. […T]he tsunami triggered a significant change in the way Maori lived. The kainga they rebuilt were set further back from the sea. Single-hulled canoes replaced double-hulled ones. The quality of stone adzes declined, and fishing gear, ornaments and other artefacts were simplified. The whakapapa of some tribes go back to the 15th century but no further, possibly because many of the knowledgeable were lost […]
Presumably this was one important factor in the isolation of Māori from other Polynesian cultures?
(Also, though not stated in the column in question, it should be made explicit that the simplification of design was temporary, and later design developed in new directions not found together in any other Polynesian culture.)
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Russell Brown,
>Data are plural (that’s what a good education does for you :) )
I think I actually knowingly committed that sin in the post.
No sin: in modern English, data is commonly (and IMHO correctly) used as a mass noun. As such, it fits into the pattern of many other words in the same semantic field, e.g. information .
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?,
I do remember some degree of "teaching to the test", especially for Scholarship exams -- though, fortunately, this was not merely in terms of learning facts, but (mostly) in developing strategies for thinking about problems -- which my teachers recognised as the best preparation for the range of possible test questions.
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Scott Chris,
If you're going to trust Wikipedia to define basic concepts without bias, care to have a look at philosophy of education ? Its scope is rather broader than you present it as.
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Scott Chris,
Apart from the tone, what Tom was saying is the same as what I said, i.e. :
if you really think evaluation should be the number one priority of education, you’re ignoring a lot of what education is trying to do.