Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: Oh, Grow Up, in reply to Emma Hart,
The problem is that, for some reason utterly beyond me, you can’t get NCEA credits in philosophy.
It's been part of the IB syllabus since forever, though? I remember a teacher in Portuguese international school telling me about how she taught philosophy back in 1993.
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Legal Beagle: A little known story of…, in reply to Bevan Shortridge,
There were quite a few guys in my school cohort who only found out that they had Maori ancestry when their parents realized they could possibly get into Law School on a slightly easier ticket. One was rather embarrassed in a Law School interview, when asked which iwi they claimed, to not even know what the word iwi meant.
A boss I had as 20-something, a family friend, was one of the most overtly racist people I've ever met in NZ. Amusingly, he discovered that he had quite a deal of Maori in him, and had the equivalent of a conversion. He joked for years that he was a born-again-Maori, and had a great deal to do with his tribe from then on.
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Up Front: Oh, Grow Up, in reply to DexterX,
I have often wondered why Communication Styles, Behavioural Therapy or Rational Thinking is not taught – that to experience any emotion starts with thought.
I think kids can do critical thinking courses in high school now. I don't know about the psychological ideas you're suggesting, though - they're quite specific, so don't really fit into the idea of a general syllabus. Electives maybe?
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Up Front: Oh, Grow Up, in reply to Andre Alessi,
you're an adult when you've decided for yourself what that means and how you want to answer it.
How many goes do I get?
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Up Front: Oh, Grow Up, in reply to kalypso,
Everything else is just details.
Yup. Can anyone else pick the origin of this philosophical phrase?
"Be good, be kind, in whatever you say and do, and keep cool until after school".
Words to live by.
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This question is kind of huge for me at the moment, having begun my second undergraduate degree at the age of 41. Nearly everyone else is a pimply teenager. It's quite a strange feeling to have the same mental age as them, as pertains to the subjects we're studying, but 20-odd years more life-experience. In some ways that experience feels all unreal.
Curiously, despite being assured that I look my age, or perhaps a little older, by most people around my age (the people who should know), I'm now routinely being mistaken for a 20-something by other students. The context is clearly so odd, and I wear the student mantle so easily, that they just can't see the obvious.
I don't actually have an opinion on what it is to be an adult. Is it something like being an employee? Seems to make the same demands on behavior. And it seems we live for the moments when we don't have to be adults. In other words, being an adult is work, and if you do it all the time, you're like one of those people who never leaves the office.
This possibly explains why bosses are often childish. It's one of the big perks. You get to make the adults run around doing shit for you, and to have tantrums if they don't. When was the last time life was like that?
I tend to think I'm an adult, but then I get a memory hole at a party, and can only presume I was not acting responsibly at all. As a teenager this would not have alarmed me, so perhaps there's some kind of adulthood now.
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It's hard to believe there isn't a BJJ angle in this. Collins has the perfect build for that sport.
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Legal Beagle: A little known story of…, in reply to Chris Waugh,
It frustrates me that one of the persistant Pakeha myths is that Pakeha is a dirty word.
It is a little frustrating, but if people take offense at a word, then using the word for them is offensive. There's no way around that, other than letting people label themselves.
It's much like letting people decide if they want to tick a box saying they are Maori. If they don't want to, they don't have to.
It is of course possible that someone may answer the Māori descent question on the census differently from the Māori descent question on the enrolment form (although lying on either is an offence).
I guess the question of whether you're lying comes down to:
1. Is the question about something objective in the first place? Objective facts need much clearer criterion than seems to be the case for belonging to the set of Maori.
2. Did you know the actual facts? Again, this one is very hard to be sure of, because the knowing itself is not objective either.In other words, good luck prosecuting someone for lying about not being Maori, or about not knowing they are Maori at a particular time. You might get some success catching people claiming to be Maori who aren't, although mostly by putting the burden of proof on them. To prove they aren't you would need to establish beyond reasonable doubt who all their ancestors are for quite a long way back. This is no easy feat at all. My Dad's been doing this for himself for the last year, and it's very difficult to find complete evidence from pre-20th century data. He's been working on it as a pet project for months and months. Even still there are huge holes, and a number of the conclusions about who people are or where they came from are based on some pretty tenuous assumptions. So I really truly don't know that I don't have any Maori ancestry. This may change in the next few months. I can't know if it will.
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Hard News: My Food Bag: is it any good?, in reply to Hebe,
they each eat approximately double that of their gourmand father from the ages of 15 untilt hey start paying for their own food.
Heh. So if there's an average adult consumption x, then a family of 5 will need anywhere from 3x to 8x, depending on the age of the kids. A product really has to cater for the upper end of the range, since wastage is better than kids going hungry, especially since leftovers can be saved.
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Legal Beagle: A little known story of…, in reply to David Hood,
It should be an offence to tick Jedi if you have had sex. Perhaps they could all just be counted as Sith.
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