Posts by HenryB
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So the quantitative statement in the Overview that 30 percent of [Year 1 & 2] teachers had "minimal understanding of effective reading and writing teaching" involves mistakenly taking some sort of average of confused percentages relating to other things from the body of the report and attaching it to anecdotal observations of a small number of teachers.
Perhaps ERO reports ought to be given the same sort of witheringly critical scrutiny that the IPCC reports are. I doubt that the ERO reports would stand up for long.... Nor would we need to have ERO emails hacked to undermine their credibility: critical analysis of the reports themselves would probably be enough.
You quite rightly ask: Who reviews the reviewers? Do the ERO make their data accessible for alternate intepretation? The methodological section is a bit short on detail and it would have been good see a sample of the way the evaluations were done.
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No replies so far to my belief that our literacy rate does not depend on tests AFTER you get to school, but what happens BEFORE kids get to school - so we are defining the wrong problem, and therefore the wrong solution.
I call bullshit on that.
So you think literacy depends on a series of tests after someone gets to school rather than what happens before they get to school? My reading of everything you have written about your children says exactly the opposite to me. It seems to me that you paid/pay a lot of attention to your children's reading before (both in terms of age and in terms of engagement outside the classroom) they got/get to school.... and surely this must have made a huge difference to their literacy.
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@Sacha
Hard to beat this classic exchange at the end of a Kiwibog thread:
LOL! Thanks for the clip. Couldn't have found a better example of the what illiteracy can mean.
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What I would like is a screen that folds in two so it is about an open paperback size, thin, and can download mags and books for reading on the train or in bed.
Ditto. The form factor troubles me. I have been waiting to see what would be on offer as an ereader and am disappointed. I just can't imagine using this for the reading on the run I do. I imagine it would be great for newspapers and magazines, but then the size is closer to the tabloid sizes of these products. I don't thin the paperback is the size that it is by accident. Yes, there is variation but its not huge. Something closer to what we are used to would have been better.
But then we would have had a different product. Gamers, TV/Film watchers would not have liked it.
And as for the absence of Flash: I don't understand why some are so against Flash products (I am sure there are good reasons). The only thing I would say is that by not having it, isn't Apple running the risk of locking itself out of a huge educational market where Flash products are being used in such Learning Management Systems as Moodle?
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what do you think the likelihood is that the gender balance has altered in the space of a year to make 90:10 representative
No idea.
Gender balances can change dramatically for all sorts of reasons... but I grant that a change in gender balance would have to have been truly dramatic to have been the reason behind the change in figures at the detox venue.
All I am suggesting is that there may need to be a bit of caution about the "statistics".... a caution prompted by experience (Yes, I know, hardly the basis for anything in particular) of noting that a whole lot of young males that I have some contact with NOT going this year because they couldn't afford to .
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Do we have any sense of the gender balance of those attending R&V and whether this has changed over time?
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@Rich Lock
You are right:
`Catholic' and `guilt' next to each other isn't exactly unknown.
The `Religions of the World' t-shirt that I was given and never dare wear in public has Catholicism represented by "If shit happens, I deserve it". But guilt in and of itself ain't always a bad thing.
However, thanks for the reference. It took to me to the interesting idea of a `Recovering Catholic' - not that that describes me either: too much respect for those Jesuits who educated me (which education, by the way, was in India so I can't say I lived in society that swan in `Christian religion').
@Simon Grigg
But that's the fundamental difference. In NZ, and in most developed nations, it's wrong. We know its wrong, the people doing the bad shit usually know it's wrong. For most of the nations sitting in the lower reaches of the Transparency International annual rating, they simply don't have that societal mental barrier
In my time in India I did meet on extremely rare occasions individuals whose moral blindness to "corruption" was almost total - but it was really, really rare. Most who engaged in corrupt practices knew it to be bad shit but did it anyway...with guilt as a consequence probably: a bit like, perhaps, my taking the car to work when I could walk or bike.
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As a sometime Catholic, reared by Jesuits, I don't find the slogan on the bus particulary sensible. I know too many atheists who suffer from persistent anxiety and too many theists of all sorts who seem to be enjoying life already.
Ataraxia is good most of the time but worrying might be a good thing sometimes too: e.g. over climate change.
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Steve, since you are quoting from a summary of the Wegman report it might be an idea to turn to the report itself, particulary `finding' 10 on page 50 and, in particular the very last sentence of their report:
..the average ocean height is increasing by approximately 1 millimeter per year, half of which is due to melting of polar ice and the other half due to thermal expansion. The latter fact implies that the oceans are absorbing tremendous amounts of heat, which is much more alarming because of the coupling of ocean circulation to the atmosphere.
Their answers to the House Committee on Science questions on pages 65-66 are also interesting. I don't read this report as a particularly ringing endorsement of the views of climate change deniers.
On another matter, and linking two threads, what happens to Foreshore and Seabed ownership issues if sea levels rise and cover property currently `owned' by coastal property owners?
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George Harrison was sued for over £3 million for using an old song by the Ronettes ( He's So Fine )...
Not the Ronettes; the Chiffons.
But George Harrison's use was more than thinly veiled.
Wouldn't a "I made a mistake. I am sorry. Here is a corrigendum with ALL unattributed materials properly attributed which will go out with every volume sold" have done, rather than tearing down another tree to reprint the other 520 something pages? Like others it is attempt to bluster his way through this by talk of writing a new kind of fiction that is truly hard to swallow.
I know that Jolisa would like a novel which tells the story well ... but that may have to wait for rewrite some years down the track.