Posts by Lucy Stewart
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Kumara Republic,
He says some principals told him they tried to deter poor families in other ways. One said she removed the names of undesirable students from her school's ballot for out-of-zone enrolments.
Leaving aside the rest of it, if that's true, some metaphorical heads should be rolling.
-
Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
If you look at the actual report, there are only 3167 schools in the whole sample, so 2000 schools represents a majority of schools, where one star pupil might get to Oxbridge some years. 1300 schools (over a third) haven’t sent anyone there in three years. (My very well resourced and privileged state sixth form sent maybe two students the year I was there).
But that's still not the same thing as the "next 2000 schools". Tom's second post provides a much better picture of the situation, which is that Oxbridge and private school graduates are highly overrepresented in the UK Parliament, but not totally dominant.
The ultimate question, though, is how to stop the wealthy embarking on a self-perpetuating cycle wherein they only socialise with each other, whether that's through schools or through universities. In most ways that's the crux, rather than the actual education - a lot of those 3167 schools will provide just as good an education as somewhere like Eton, but they can't provide the same networking opportunities. That's the real driving force there. NZ's university system doesn't allow for self-segregation in quite the same way, fortunately; it's high school that does.
-
Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Tom Semmens,
ut just five private schools send more pupils to Oxford and Cambridge than the next 2000 schools combined, and nowadays almost the entire British
political elite is narrowly drawn from those who matriculated at the Oxbridge universities.Looking at that article, this isn't an entirely accurate summary - the 2000 schools were schools who sent 0 or 1 children to Oxbridge, i.e. the 2000 worst-performing rather than the "next 2000 combined", and those five schools make up only 1 in 20 - 5% - of total Oxbridge admissions. I am entirely willing to believe that a pretty narrow range of society makes up a majority of admissions to Oxbridge, or is at least over-represented there, but the situation isn't quite as restricted as you're implying.
-
Hard News: Women and their representations, in reply to Russell Brown,
I thought I had regained my composure but then I got to the comments and became utterly helpless with laughter.
I reached that point by "try cooking topless and smear some tomato sauce on your nipples".
-
Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Russell Brown,
Nearly three quarters of New Zealanders live in “main urban areas”. And if you live in Greymouth, you have three state primary schools to choose from. If that’s what you want.
It can be a real problem for secondary schools in some areas, however. My partner grew up in Blenheim, where the secondary schooling options, short of boarding, were a) the girls' college and b) the boys' college. It doesn't leave a lot of options for anyone who fails to fit in at one or the other.
-
Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Yamis,
On primary schools though, I'd hate for people to be looking at any stats from small sample groups (relatively speaking) and drawing immediate assumptions.
They should almost come with a "margin of error +/- 1,000,000%".
This was very well illustrated in New York's recent release of teacher rankings. One teacher - who was highly regarded by both her peers and the school community - ended up being labelled "New York's worst teacher" by tabloids due to a cascade of factors that entirely divorced her standards-based ranking from any actual evaluation of her teaching skills.
-
Hard News: Media7 will soon be Media3, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Actually, 99% of the time I was just looking for highlights, but denied about half of that time.
See, I can just about understand them geoblocking the highlights - though that's probably because I had legal, cheap-ish access to all the games if I wanted 'em, thanks to a decent online streaming deal in the US. What I couldn't understand was geoblocking any news item from NZ which contained *even a few seconds of RWC footage*, even when the game itself was not the focus of the item. That's just petty.
-
Hard News: Media7 will soon be Media3, in reply to Chris Waugh,
I had trouble seeing much of the Rugby World Cup, apparently because of all the licencing deals that are done around such things.
That really got to me. I just wanted to watch people back home being happy about winning the Cup, but if a NZ media segment had even a fraction of match footage in it, it was verboten. You'd think there'd be some sort of fair-use provision, but no - you have to ask what they thought they were protecting.
-
Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Moz,
Ooh, this is funny: http://www.babynames1000.com/gender-neutral/ Baby names from 2011 ranked by how often they're given to both genders. In case you didn't notice, my example above used 1970-era gender-ambiguous names.
Excluding all my other middle-class-judgey feelings about most of the names on that list...Blake is gender-ambiguous? Logan? Ryan?
-
Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
Haha. So you’re not required to wear a seatbelt in NH? Is there a big market in services to disable seatbelt-alarms there?
Not if you're over 17. They take their state motto very seriously.
Back OT, I was just trying to understand how many people would be interested in being in a legally recognised poly-relationship. In NZ would it be 10, 100, 1000, 10000 or 100000? I have no idea.
Seriously? Neither do I. I don't think it would be a double-digit percentage of the populace, but OTOH, given current social attitudes to poly relationships and the association of >2-person marriage with patriarchal misogyny, I think there's probably a large gap between "people who, in an ideal world, would" and "people who, assuming the law changed tomorrow, would". Same way gay marriage would have had a lot fewer takers in the 1950s, had it been legal.