Posts by BenWilson
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Satire's a tricky form. Danyl puts a quote from Juvenal as his inspiration, but the satires of Juvenal are the sexist, racist, homophobic diatribes of an angry old man. We didn't even study the one where he hacks into women at school, it's that bad, and would have kids wondering why this is considered great literature.
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Hard News: Irony Deficient, in reply to David Ritchie,
I’d like to offer MASH, Cheers and Seinfeld as popular, well-regarded counter-examples to this.
Too right, that chick Klinger was bloody ugly.
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Legal Beagle: Kim Dotcom: We need an Inquiry!, in reply to Idiot Savant,
That’s about 20 times a year....Either way, its something we need to be asking questions about, and scaling back.
I can't draw that conclusion, because their reasons for doing it are still opaque. No real point of comparison for how much spooky people do their thing, but 20 times a year sounds like an absolute pittance to me. You could easily need that many wiretaps in one operation, if there were 20 people involved.
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Hard News: Media3: Standards Showdown, in reply to mark taslov,
The means to make similar assessments (reading age etc) are also readily available as they're required by parents who home school.
Classic, there you go. One of the bands is 6-10 year old. Which means statistically their progress is lost in the noise for several years at a time, but if your child hasn't had any improvement in 4 years of primary schooling, it's not like you wouldn't notice! Unless you weren't looking.
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Hard News: Media3: Standards Showdown, in reply to mark taslov,
but yeah, you are damned right.
Sort of. You can find out what your kids are capable of pretty quickly, but knowing whether that is keeping up with their age group is not something you can do in isolation. Whether that's important is debatable, but I'm always personally interested. I don't get anxious/proud about difference from the mean unless it's too far below/above, but I'm certainly not totally indifferent to how my children compare on a number of measures.
If I found my ten year old (in 4 years time) had a reading age of 6, that would have me wondering if there was something I could do about it. But I do not, myself, know how to assess reading age, just by getting him to read something.
My first port of call on the what-to-do front would be professional educators, though. His teacher, probably, who would almost certainly know where he was at, and might also know why, from long observation and experience.
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OnPoint: Re: Education, in reply to Russell Brown,
I have no idea what national standards would have told us as parents that we weren’t already told.
I guess they're for those people who don't pay any attention whatsoever to their kids, but want them measured carefully and presented as KPI statistics. Workaholic upper management dads, maybe?
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Classic, Keith. The direction of causation is also something that's worth considering when you find a correlation. Is it possible that performing less well in National Standards causes smaller classes? That would hardly be a surprising thing to find, since weaker students need more teacher time, to get the same result. It would also not be a bad thing to find, since it would indicate teachers are helping those who need help the most. The extreme end of this scale is special needs schools, in which the ratios are very high, and the performance against normalized standards are low. At the other end, you can have classrooms with a lot of kids like I was when I studied computing at high school - someone you can basically leave with a textbook, and they'll top the school. The ratios could be quite high indeed, as they are at University level, where students are self-selected and more motivated.
So what you're discovering is pedagogical behaviour of the education system, the complete no-brainer that any 13 year old can see, that the slower kids need (and frequently get) more help. That this is not more strongly correlated is what is surprising, and that to me suggests teachers actually get results, which rather tallies with NZ's performance against other nations on educational measures.
Two causations are working against each other - on the one hand, the weaker students cause higher teacher numbers, and on the other, the teaching they then get lifts their performance. Both of which causations are highly desirable, and also totally the opposite of the suggestion that it is better for students to be in bigger classes.
This is a theory, anyway. There's way more at work than that, stuff that legions of professional educators have known for decades, and that's why we generally leave it to them.
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Hard News: "Because we can", in reply to Sacha,
Libertarians put it that way, but I know of nothing to stop progressive rates or other arrangements being added alongside a UBI.
Nothing whatsoever. We do already have that for Super, after all, which is the semi-UBI.
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Hard News: "Because we can", in reply to Rosie,
Yeah, it’s Gareth Morgan’s idea not mine….
It's an idea that's been around a very long time. At least since the 1930s. Probably before.
To me, it's a recognition of the right of every human in a country to benefit from all the capital built by all the generations before us. The work that is done in our lifetimes is but a fraction of what contributes to the overall productivity of the nation.
That's a moral argument for it. The practical arguments are plenty, too. As you say, the problem is getting enough heads around it. Social welfare has so long been linked to the idea of need, and stigmatized because of that, that most people can't imagine a system in which everyone gets it and no-one is stigmatized. They can't imagine a capitalist system working under those conditions. They certainly can't imagine that capitalism might work better that way.
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Up Front: Submission Pun Goes Here, in reply to Bart Janssen,
What is really scary about that thought is that the future might be only a few years away. How will I adjust?
Yes, unpredictable. It's quite possible that progressive change is proposed that I object to deeply. That hasn't happened to me yet, but I can't rule it out, because I don't know what I'd be ruling out. Each case has to be judged on it's merits.
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