Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The New New News, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
Nah, top 7. That’s roughly the size of the human memory queue, plus or minus 2. The average random list length that people can recall on one hearing, and say back. You can make it 11, but most people are only going to remember 7.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to NBH,
Sorry for the slight rant
Not at all, and thanks for the correction. It is good that this happened. I must have been remembering the whole time that MIT was trying to get into this, all of the time Mum spent talking about them trying to get this status and not understood that they had actually failed.
I was most definitely NOT trying to say that tech degrees are taught poorly! They seemed to me to be much more focused on teaching than research, that the lecturers are teachers first and researchers second, if at all.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
I don’t know if you meant to type “worth nothing” or “worth noting”. But either way is good.
Oops. The latter! But yes, the former works, if you presume sarcasm.
How is the “rising tide” idea markedly different from the “trickle down” idea, other than the volume of liquid (warm and yellow, or otherwise) with which those at the bottom find themselves surrounded?
I actually originally said “lifting all ships on a rising tide of equality”, which isn’t quite the same thing as everyone being lifted at the same rate. But my point is that in a battle of ideologies, stalemate is the likely outcome. Furthermore, while large ideological differences may be claimed, the two large centrist parties are really not exemplars of either extreme ideology at all. Both support elements of both ideologies in a balance, just a different balance. The chance of winning points in a general push is like trying to win a battle by “turtling”. You close ranks, crush together, meet in the middle and push. The whole thing moves excruciatingly slowly, and generally favors the side with the better weaponry/training and/or superior numbers.
This is a strategy that suits a large incumbent power, not a smaller, disadvantaged group with limited time and resources. If they genuinely wish to win, rather than just minimize lost ground, then there are much more dynamic battle strategies. A smaller group should really rely on mobility, changing targets continually, possibly dividing into targeted commando groups, keeping the bigger group constantly moving and getting tired, picking off and retreating. The larger group can end up being forced back, even without direct confrontation, just to avoid losing resources from being outflanked.
I translated this metaphor into the political battle, which is “make attack on all policy fronts, targeting weakness, and never risking all out battle without significant advantage”. It’s not guaranteed to win, but the other strategy is, IMHO, guaranteed to lose.
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Which is not to say that I'm not a "general socialist" or that I don't believe in the rising tide idea. I do. But I don't think it's the thing to be trying to sell at the moment. That debate is old and tired, and the camps are well formed and not very dynamic.
Of course I'd hope that a Labour/Green government be generally more socialist, as well as specifically. But it's the specifics that are going to make for the best debate, especially if they come in large numbers. If the Government is in a situation that it has to come up with a counter policy for every Opposition announcement, then it's lost control of the narrative. Even if it wins (which is likely), it will be dancing to the Opposition's tune, and that could do a great deal of good, no matter how the election goes.
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While I'm not in the slightest agreement with Baxter, it does seem that the best way to answer his question is not to show how these idea have been debunked, but to lay out the many ideas that are successful, haven't been debunked, or haven't even been tried. Because the meme of "At least National are going to do something" is going to keep coming up unless there are strong alternative positive suggestions. This is a comment that applies far wider than education, IMHO, too. If a Labour/Green coalition is to stand any chance whatsoever, then it will from relentless presentation of positive alternatives. Negative campaigning has very limited success against Key's National. That might make some people hesitate to vote National, but it won't draw them to any consistent locus.
The most problematic aspect is that the long tail and falling rankings of NZ educational standards might indeed by a result of increasing poverty, but solving poverty dissolves into an issue not targeted at education, and muddied by all the numerous value judgments that go towards poor people in a society where human value is predicated around work and remuneration.
Far better than a "generally socialist" approach of lifting all ships on a rising tide of equality, is to make many piecemeal and populist proposal to eliminate highly specific problems. This is IMHO a far more powerful response to the general "We'll just tough out the austerity, in absence of any ideas, thanks".
For example, children going to school hungry is fixable. It's not even expensive. Children having cheap access to swimming facilities is fixable. Universal access to completely free ECE is possible, and might even be an employment bonanza, considering the number of daycares struggling to make rolls, because people can't afford to send their kids (thus double-downing on the poverty trap because that means the parents also can't get paid employment). Poverty targeted literacy programs need not be outrageously expensive, presumably the teachers amongst us can elaborate what is currently in existence and what they'd like to see.
Tertiary achievement levels should probably also be somewhat decoupled from the high school debate, although, of course, they are related. But it's quite a cop out for universities to take no responsibility for the quality of graduates, pushing blame at the school system. It's also worth nothing that since the 80s there are a lot more places calling themselves universities, where before they were called Techs. Having a mother working as a senior Tech lecturer, I've watched this process slowly unfold, and there is no doubt that she has felt no less valued or consulted through the gradual Americanization of the Tech system than school teachers have. It's a pretty fuxored world to live in, where you're in the University option for people who are more likely to want to work as tradespeople, and yet be held against the standards of high achieving academic Universities. But even to be constantly assessed purely in terms of how much you raised the students is demoralizing. It's as if each lecturer is an island of accountability, rather than the entire system into which the kids slot, as if they personally are at fault for the kids who don't even come to lectures at all, never do any work, and scream blue murder that the tests are too hard. The end result of that kind of accountability is that of course they want to dumb down the assessments. Which doesn't feel good to them, but when their job is at stake, that's what people do.
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Gah, read "two or more networks" above. On tablet in bed atm editing features are hopeless.
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Anyone vaguely techy these days can distinguish The Internet from The Web. But "little i" internets are lesser spoken of these days and they definitely existed before 1980, and continued well after then. IPX/SPX was a common internet protocol even in the 90s. It was just mostly on Novell networks, many of which were true WANs. From my hazy memory of networking terms from a horrible varsity paper, an internet was a collection of one or more networks, with traffic able to route between them. The Internet was just the biggest one. But definitely TCP/IP was a great leap forward, slaughtered the performance of IPX/SPX over big WANs. Less efficient on a LAN though. I supported dozens of sites using both in the early noughties. My own home file server was Netware one until around 2007, faithfully running without a glitch on 10 year old hardware, until I set up a Linux box.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to HORansome,
Yes. I had a parent teacher interview last week and inquired about just where this drive to give my 7 year old heaps of homework was coming from. She sighed and said "parents want it". Jesus! He's a kid, let him relax when he gets home. I hate that we now have neurotic arguments about when to do bloody homework, because other parents want it for their kids, to make sure they don't slip behind standards.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to Pi Roy,
for Gods sake what is wrong with trying something new to try to see if there is another way to help these kids.
There's nothing new about this idea.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to HORansome,
The ongoing trend of teachers to become a whipping boy has pretty much put me off it as a career change. It's quite astonishing that the opinions of the bulk of the people in a profession would count so little for how their profession is driven by politicians.
But I'm not sure that it's only politicians who don't get it. A large slice of the general public have strong opinions about how to teach. But they don't have an opinion about how to, say, prescribe medicine, or give legal advice. It's like teaching is not a job in which experience or training count for anything at all. It would seem to these people that the only really important thing is motivation, and of the possible motivations, the only one that matters or works is money.
Which is interesting since I can't think of a single person out of the dozens of teachers I know who got into it for the money.
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