Posts by A S
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Why students think HE classes should be like school. Why students reject challenging teaching in favour of shortest possible route to an answer.
My suspicions rest with:
Large class sizes and results driven assessments that do not reward excellence sufficiently.
Repeat after me smaller class sizes please
ALso, how about not expecting all students to conform to a single method of learning, or not subjecting generations to teachers that in many cases are simply going through the motions?
What one person sees as challenging teaching, another finds tedious and pontifical. It needs to be about making sure that the student gets what they require to reach their potential, not what the educators feel like delivering. The latter approach is what we have now and is reflected by the dismal education stats we see year on year.
Smaller class sizes would be great. But so too would a greater proportion of teachers who inspire their students to want to learn.
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I think Key's falls into this category not least of all because the training is not likely to lead anywhere i.e. a qualification.
Lets not overlook the horrific numbers of people who leave compulsory education every year with no qualifications.
Given the base they are starting from, most second chance education providers do a fantastic job, and the outcomes many of them achieve surpass the fairly dismal results that schools achieve by comparison. If allowing for education provision that actually fits the learning needs of these kids is what is proposed, I'm all for it.
We should be encouraging a diverse and effective education system, which allows for teaching useful things that people want to learn.
If we are talking about low quality education, lets look at the inflexible, largely unsuccessful compulsory and tertiary education systems that we currently have which privilege arguably largely useless (i.e. university) quals over qualifications where what is learned might actually be used by the student. The argument about value or otherwise swings both ways.
From my own perspective, I would be hard pressed to think of a situation where I have ever found any practical use for anything I learned at university, other than the ability to knock off a jug in fairly short order and to regurgitate whatever the lecturer wanted to hear. Not exactly the best use of $40k of student loan.....
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I can't help thinking that the poor old Labour government should pull some of its comms people away from reaching out to the masses and updating websites (or whatever they all do all day) and put 'em to work defending their besieged MP's. For a government that's supposed to be 'based on spin' they've been REALLY bad at managing the media recently. Hell, they can't even pull off the New Years honors list without having it explode in their faces.
Perhaps this is a perfect example of where an increase in quantity does not equal an increase in quality....
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Thanks for that, Graeme. It's great to have so many people who have waded through the detail, and who can explain it so succinctly.
When you put it as simply as you have, it does look a bit like the system will now probably provide a greater advantage for sitting MP's.
I'm not sure that is a good thing, particularly in terms of the ability for all candidates to run equal campaigns come election time, but I guess time will tell on whether the EFA was a good, bad or indifferent idea...
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As someone who has struggled mightily to understand the rather labyrinthine provisions of the new EFA, (actually, I gave up some time ago) can someone explain whether the new act impose restrictions on members of the public (both financial and in terms of freedom of speech) that MPs and political parties aren't bound by?
From a somewhat confused outside perspective, it appears that the new arrangements skew the playing field quite a lot towards the sitting government. Is this perception accurate?
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....And leave nothing alive but cockroaches, real estate salespersons and giant, man-eating, mutant painted apple moths.
So no real change then? :-D
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On the iwi thing. According to quite a few kaumatua (from quite disparate parts of the country) I've talked to over the years, iwi was a structure that was historically a useful mechanism to identify shared whakapapa. Their contention was that whanau and hapu were the actual structures of Maori society, while iwi was a more distant concept (clumsy wording, but hopefully this makes sense).
They also made the (quite fair in my view) observation that iwi only gained the status they have now amongst Maori, mainly because government actively sought to engage with iwi rather than deal with the various whanau and hapu, as that meant there were an awful lot less Maori for government to have to deal with.
So my comment, perhaps not the most elegantly put, was trying to say that iwi appear to be given a prominence that seems to be due to bureaucrat's wishing to minimise their interactions with Maori, rather than because they represented a clear desire amongst Maori to have these structures represent them in so many issues as they do currently.
Since that time, iwi have had the lions share of attention from government, in terms of cash, attention and giving far too many old men far too much opportunity to pontificate on a regular basis.
In terms of the land administered by the Maori Trustee, the way I look at it is: Maori own around 6% of land in NZ. The Maori Trustee (based on what I've been told) administers around 6% of that 6%. It could be seen as a relatively large amount of land, but it represents only a fraction of total Maori land.
Most of that land isn't compulsorily administered by the Maori Trustee, so if I'm somewhat callous about it, if the owners can't be bothered sorting out their own interests, then really they get what they deserve.
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As far as I can recall, the Maori Trustee has been Maori for the last twenty years or so. If the Maori Trustee has been holding back Maori development, it seems a bit of a longshot to say that pakeha are doing the holding...
While the institutions were set up by Europeans (the Maori Trustee was originally the Native Trustee - so you get an idea of how far back it goes), the vast majority of the money they administer is generally to benefit Maori or some other such term.
It is really important to also remember that using the services of the Maori Trustee to administer your Maori land (assuming you are Maori and you have shares in a land block) is optional, it is not compulsory, and in fact you would probably be much better in terms of returns to shareholders etc. to administer any land interest independently of the Maori Trustee (The trustees job is to administer it, making productive use of it is optional).
In terms of the list of organisations invented by pakeha, we shouldn't forget to add iwi. A fairly strong argument could be made that iwi have played more than their fair share of a role in holding back Maori development over the years also.
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the bottom that is.
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fascical it is then. Nice work all.
On a different note, isn't the title of this thread fantastic?
I'm amazed at how so many posts have managed to stay in the region of it too...