Posts by Emma Hart
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Do folks think that mining our reserves will capture the imagination of the public enough to bring the government down?
Nope. See, it's not THOSE bits of the national parks. Nobody's going to be suddenly running across an open cast mine right under Aoraki or next to Tane Mahuta. What you have to understand is that there are lots of silly ugly bits in national parks that don't have kiwis or rimu on them, where nobody ever goes anyway. Those bits. Don't worry about it, you're never going to notice.
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As mother of a child who was always in the bottom percentile on the Plunket graphs (well, actually she slid off the bottom of the page), I can only imagine the distress and anguish of seeing 'Plunket charts' for learning.
You know, Kate, that's what came back to me when I was reading the lovely Explaining National Standards pamphlet - the brief hell my family went through because my son wouldn't gain weight as a baby, no matter what proportion of the grocery bill was going on shovelling carbohydrates into his face. Our solution was the same as yours: rather than constantly be called a bad parent because my perfectly healthy child's lines weren't where they should be, we stopped going to Plunket. He still looks like he's just popped out of a concentration camp for the weekend, and he's still fine.
What really got me, reading Jolisa's column and sniffling, is that the system she describes appears to have completely lost sight of the point of education. Or, it seems, any idea that the things being measured are people.
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Also, this
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Seriously Emma? It isn't just an n=1 problem? Cause if that's true it says something interestingly weird about either English or Sign in their ability to communicate numeracy.
Well, not according to various ITODs and facilitators I've spoken to, although there does seem to be a tendency to say 'this problem your child is having is perfectly normal for deaf/hearing-impaired children.
There's a lot of technical language in maths that they have to learn from scratch - we had to teach Rhiana that subtract and minus and takeaway and less all meant the same thing, for instance. Deaf/hearing-impaired children tend not to pick up new language from context. I suspect science is also a problem for the same reasons, but the language doesn't hit at such an early age and is better explained when it does.
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Robbie: that's a great story. Go yous.
I think I’ll be sending my youngsters to one of the posh schools where they’ll probably get a mediocre education accompanied by some prize twits but at least they’ll be less likely to make a woefully uninformed decision about their career at 16 before they know anything about who they are.
At the risk of getting a pixie bottom-kick, I'd hope to be able to prevent this as a parent, regardless of where my children went to school.
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There was a worry on mainstreaming them that they'd suffer in english grammar but they didn't. Maths was their weak point.
Interestingly (with usual caveats) it's the same with hearing-impaired kids. Their problem is not literacy but numeracy.
Sounds grand if a bit dodgy. Would stand them in good stead if they ever wanted to become politicians though:)
Maybe it'll sound less dodgy if I give you a concrete real-life example. Some kids put a band together and make a CD. They design sleeve art for it, make promotional posters, and sell it.
They get credits in music, economics, ICT, art and english. Because they've demonstrated skills in all those areas.
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If the compilation of League Tables is genuinely not desirable, why doesn't the government keep the standards testing more or less confidential? ie: why should I know the results of anyone else but my own children?
Because we have an Official Information Act. You don't need a compelling reason to release data, you need a compelling reason to keep it secret.
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For some time now I have had an uncharitable urge to... poke her in the arm. Really hard.
Would it help if a pixie kicked her in the bottom?
the new curriculum covers the early years, yet is missing the detail of what happens over the NCEA years.
Well, we do know what happens in discovery-based high schools. (Yes, I know, with the wittering about Unlimited again, but it's the school I know, kay?) Kids pick projects they want to do, and then their Learning Advisors work out how to get NCEA credits out of them, across multiple subjects.
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and it is evident to me that you, Emma Hart, are deeply defective
Well, duh. Know what my partner's getting me for my birthday? Porn. Awesome. (He's also slightly concerned that the ordered by and addressed to him magazine full of pictures of naked men is going to arrive while his father is here minding the kids while we're at Foo, and he's going to have some 'splaining to do.)
Carry on.
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Widgets can be defective in three different ways.
Keir, your example assumes that 'defective' is an objective measure. 'Moral' is subjective - people's ideas of what is moral vary. Middleton Grange, for instance, prides itself on producing 'moral' children, along a moral code that I find absolutely repulsive. I think 'acceptance of homosexuality' is a moral value, they think quite the opposite. So... who is defective? And who gets to decide?