Posts by Deborah
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Language. Or to be precise, she said it was language, and that even though she had a high score on IELTS, she was nowhere near the proficiency level she needed. I guess the point is that even if we set the IELTS entry standard higher, many students would still need a great deal of assistance in the first few months as they learn how to live in English, not just read, write and speak the language in test situations.
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I went to a course on teaching international students a couple of weeks ago, and got some fascinating insights from other staff members who had come here as international students. One woman from Guatemala (true!) said that she had arrived with an IELTS of 7.5 (that's very high), to do a Masters, and she struggled to understand anything at all for the first three or four months.
We face a further problem with our international students, in that many of them don't want to be doing business degrees, but their parents insist on them doing it. They get perfectly respectable grades in the subjects they want to study, but their business grades are appalling.
New Zealand tertiary education as a whole is not particularly poorly funded, but the split between support for students and support for institutions is... interesting. We spend a high proportion on students (allowances, interest free loans), at the cost of institutional support. Investment in tertiary institutions has been declining, and now the costs of that decreased investment is starting to show in our falling rankings. However, there are more students, or votes, than there are staff, or votes.
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One thing that I've only just worked out is that my children have been little repositories of disease this year. In the last couple of years in South Australia, they had relatively little time off school, but this year back in New Zealand has been quite different - there has usually been at least one child home for at least one day every second week. I think it may be something to do with reacclimatising to the NZ germ pool. I'm hoping that by next year they will have developed some resistance to the local bugs.
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We have moved far too many times, including four (4!!!!) international moves, and we have learned one thing from it. Moving is hell. Even moving home to New Zealand is hell.
Also, seconding (thirding / fourthing) what other people have said about bringing cars. Don't.
My very best wishes for the big move home.
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Hard News: The Minister's Brain Has Exploded, in reply to Grant McDougall,
Bagsy not look at Kiwiblog to see if they're whinging about "nanny state" taking control...
Come on, Grant. EVERYONE knows that it's only nanny state when Labour do it.
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Hard News: The Minister's Brain Has Exploded, in reply to BenWilson,
I have a great photo of the crowd with 8 people standing above them all on narrow bollards, looking like lemmings peering around.
Surely you mean meerkats?
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A friend of mine put this comment on Facebook:
Miss half a game of rugby because a train breaks down: personal apology from Prime Minister John Key and compensation up for discussion.
Have your doors kicked in, automatic rifles pointed at your kids, and four years of your life stolen because of police incompetence : Apology and compensation immediately ruled out.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to jessica scott,
Perhaps breastfeeding advocates should be targeting these issues rather than individual women
I think that's part of the problem, Jessica. There are systemic factors that militate against breastfeeding (as listed in your post), and yet pressure is put on individual women to provide the fix.
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Interesting how just having a word for the sort of thing you are engaged in can make a difference. It implies that the activity is real, real enough to be named.
It’s my view that with a greater acceptance of polyamory, monogamy would come to have more meaning, because it would actually be a conscious choice, not a simple default.
I've often made a similar point w.r.t. women choosing to keep their own name. It makes the *choice* to take your husband's name a real choice, not just what everyone does.
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martial bliss
Too apt, perhaps?