Posts by Emma Hart
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The prime difference between the two, is that at the bottom of the order, he largely has one option: smack it. At the top of the order he can do that (and single-handedly win a match, as he did with that 158), but he can also play through an innings and set up his team - as he's done for both the last 20/20 matches.
I'd add that the McCullum-Ryder partnership at the top of the innings appears to work (though it's early days yet) and if you've got that going, then you leave McCullum at the top of the order. If you had another opening partnership that worked well that didn't include him, then you might move him back down, because he's a versatile enough player to cope with that.
If we works well in both positions then you open with him, because he wants to open. Surely if he's happy he'll produce better results.
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what is the potential for bullying? it would be very hard to feel good about a name not given with warmth. for instance two of my classmates went on an immersion weekend and came back with sign names, one of the two was visibly discomfited by how he was perceived and so named.
Well, being given a name sign is like being given a nickname, in any social context. If you don't like it, but people are determined to use it, there's not much you can do about it. I do know a guy who didn't like his name sign and asked people not to call him that. It worked, but... I guess like any social situation, you have to have sufficient standing and confidence to be able to ask, and have people listen to you. This is one of the reasons why it's good to have name signs given by teachers rather than peer group.
I know what you mean, ali, about it being confronting. I think we're SO conditioned not to stare that to have someone watching you that intently, and to watch back the same way, feels horrible until you get used to it. It's physically exhausting, too, in the same way listening is for a hearing-impaired person.
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Someone came up with a handy compound word for that
A wrod which, unfortunately, was already being used to describe men who cruise for under-age gay sex...
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Test cricket is Shakespeare, ODI cricket is Chekov and T20 is Everybody Loves Raymond.
Holy crap, Dan, have you SEEN any Chekov? I suppose there have been times when our cricket team have left me that depressed, but still, that's just mean.
Can I just take this opportunity to recommend that everyone begin regularly listening to the Friday Night Newsquiz
Seconded. The BBC Friday Night Comedy podcast is a never-miss for us.
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Most New Zealanders have no idea quite how distrustful and tiring the system is. The deeply-embedded assumption seems to be that disabled people and our familes are out to rip off the state.
It's exhausting, absolutely go home and cry exhausting. To spend two months trying to get an IEP to actually take place, to then have people make promises about what they will do and then not do it... I told Sacha at Foo that we've pretty much got to the point of deciding that it's easier to get things done without our Ministry of Education facilitator.
That said, she is heinously overworked. There are THREE doing all of Canterbury at the moment, and every service is more stretched since the introduction of newborn testing last year. We spent months with no designated audiology provider - we struggled to even get hearing aid batteries over the holidays.
Whether there's any advantage to starting at four as opposed to ten or thirty-seven is a whole nother question.
I've retained much more of the French I started learning at about seven than the extra French from high school and uni, and almost none of the Russian I learned at varsity. I feel like it's much harder to learn new languages now that I'm old and my brain is slow.
I struggle to learn sign, oddly, because I'm left-handed, and it's very right-handed. I end up doing everything backwards.
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I'm just going to have a tiny squee and say, Brian Waddell is commentating the Masters Twenty/20 on Sky. They have Brian Young wired up behind the stumps and Dion Nash still appears to be able to bowl.
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I want to say a general big thank you for all the lovely things that have been said, both in comments and via email. I find myself all choked up and inarticulate, so I can only hope my silence is correctly interpreted.
I've had said daughter home sick from school all week. She certainly seems to find the prospect of a week on the couch watching old Buffy and Red Dwarf episodes preferable to going to school. She was made head librarian there last week (school, not the couch) and she's very proud of that, even though it appears to be because she's 'detail oriented' and doesn't mind telling other kids off. She's doing Kapa Haka again this year, which she really enjoyed last year - it's loud, a little larger than life, and everyone has to put effort into learning the words for the songs.
She's not perfect, mind. She's been bullied quite a bit at school and prefers not to interact with people her own age. She struggles to understand irony and sarcasm, which makes her home life difficult. She gets as stroppy and difficult as any pubescent girl can. Sometimes she uses her hearing as an excuse to avoid things she doesn't want to do.
I wouldn't trade her, but no-one would take her anyway. If we'd been going to sell her, we should have done it when she was little and blonde and cute.
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Rachel McKee edited a lovely book called People of the Eye. She transcribed the signed stories of a variety of Deaf kiwis, from teenagers to people old enough to have been taught by Gerrit van Asch - a man with a big bushy beard who insisted deaf children learn to lip-read and forbade signing. It shows just how much things have changed.
My great-aunt was at van Asch in the thirties, the result of a childhood bout of scarlet fever.
As a teacher this reaction from teachers and schools annoys me. It's like they are putting the school first and the child second.
The resistence to the FM was much worse back in the days of the Madonna mike. The teachers really didn't want to wear the headset. They would complain it was uncomfortable, and then forget to take it off when they, say, talked to other teachers or went to the toilet.
I got my sign name confirmed today. I am 'goat'.
My daughter's name sign is 'book', three times. It was given to her by her itinerant, a wonderful woman who made sure her whole class got some exposure to NZSL. My daughter's class performed a song at assembly after NZSL got official language status - in English, Maori and Sign.
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can I ask how "impaired" (seriously, I have no grasp of appropriate words today) her hearing is once it's enhanced with hearing aids?
The problem is not so much the volume of sound as the quality of it. Her aids amplify sound in the speech range of pitches - but ALL sound in that range. She lacks the ability to focus on one particular voice and exclude others, and the ability to locate sound directionally. Some speech sounds such as s and f are very quiet and hard to pick up, yet change the meanings of words completely.
The FM system channels the teacher's voice directly into the aids, allowing her to concentrate on that more easily than background noise - and school classrooms still aren't routinely being designed with good accoustics in mind.
One of the things van Asch does with mainstream teachers is take them out to the school for a course and show them a DVD which simulates what a classroom sounds like to a child with hearing aids. They come back just about in tears.
But there are also things like swimming - which she's naturally talented at, but almost impossible to coach verbally, because she has to take her aids out.
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I don't know about compulsory - I'd like Maori to be compulsory, and a foreign language to be encouraged, so if you add sign and English that leaves twenty minutes a week to attend to everything else. Plus talk about the backlash you'd get. But widely taught, heck, yes.
Yeah... I'd like to see it more widely available as a language option at high school. One of the problems with spreading NZSL is the chronic shortage of interpreters and people skilled to teach it. It is available at my son's high school.
Unfortunately, I know exactly what you mean.
One of my friends has just said this was exactly how she felt when her father was diagnosed with MS. I think there's a valuable lesson here: if you're going to give people bad news, and you have to give them important information as well, write it down.