Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: The Music for Occasions, in reply to James Butler,
Totally with you on the Church funeral acoustics, James. If you could, why wouldn't you go out with the full Tomás Luis de Victoria "Officium Defunctorum," all 60 minutes of it, live and loud, in the gaudiest, most Cyclopeian counter-Reformation cathedral you could find? I know I would.
-
Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Russell Brown,
Parents want only to see their children in schools that promise the best results. They do not care about the home circumstances of other pupils.
Which is to claim that they do care, greatly. And want to keep themselves and their children away from "those people" and their unfortunate offspring as much as possible. Segregationism ahoy.
-
Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Yamis,
I heard several years ago that a certain school in Auckland had the highest proportional dropout rate from the University of Auckland BUT of course that can change year to year, and it doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't preparing students well for university. It could be that large numbers of students from that school are expected to go to university when it isn't for them, and quickly they and their parents find this out.
I went to the "certain school" I think you're talking about, and yeah, anecdotally this seems entirely accurate. At the beginning of the year, literally half the guys in my 7th form class were taking the same Law Intermediate lectures I was. Because we'd all been told to, basically. Within a few weeks it was noticeable how many had dropped out once they realized that there was no-one keeping them in those lectures other than themselves. A few drifted back as mature students, others twigged that they didn't have to be lawyers and could switch to more interesting majors if they wanted, and the rest dropped out to ... go scuba diving in Madagascar? Serve beer in the Bay of Islands? Work for Daddy? Who knows? I guess Facebook could tell me what happened to those guys, but I never kept up. One or two are probably lawyers, but the thought of that is altogether too depressing.
On the other hand, though, one guy I did get back in touch with via Facebook chucked in the job he drifted into after dropping out of his degree early on, went back to University, and graduated this year (at 37) with a BA. So inspiring things can still happen, even to those of us who went, you know, there.
-
Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Scott Chris,
my philosophy of education ... is, in a nutshell, setting clear educational aims and expectations and measuring the level of attainment relative to those stated aims and expectations. Makes assessment and evaluation of performance so much easier on a broad scale as well as an individual scale.
Not to pile on here, but ... this isn't a "philosophy of education." It's a regime of quantification masquerading as a system of value. It's part of the same long, slow cultural tragedy that sees managerialism eventually destroying the ethos and, well, point of every institution it invades.
-
Bailterspace! Awesome! I remember finding a whole bunch of new (really good; kinda loose, garage-rocky) material of theirs on Myspace a couple of years ago and assuming they were working on a new album. Then it all went away. Nice to hear it will actually be surfacing in a tangible form.
-
That strip blew my mind when I was a kid ...
-
I guess I'll come around to them eventually, but streaming services -- Radio and Spotify -- don't really really work for me, and I never really got the hang of Last FM.
What really makes last.fm useable, I think, is the Chrome extension that queries the entire database seamlessly and behind the scenes for you, revealing the stored riches behind the interface. I have a Spotify subscription, too, but that's really only for Spotify mobile and its way of making long train/tube journeys bearable. I love last.fm and spend way too much time there (this is me); it's really opened up a whole new world of music for me, though its charts are a little worrying for the way they lay bare my Stereolab obsession. Oh well.
-
Is the use of a private email address some kind of OIA work-around? Remember how Sarah Palin (infamously) used Gmail for certain communications, in the belief that she would therefore be outside existing retention and disposal schedules for records-keeping, and could essentially do what she liked and be exempt from FOI requests? I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case here, but there are possible motives for the use of a non-governmental email address that go beyond simple incompetence or cluelessness.
-
Hard News: Media Mathematics, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
You really believe [speaking truth to power] is in any way the role of the Herald (or any other NZ newspaper)?
They *are* the 'power'. The newspapers support the government, the government supports the newspapers.
Exactly. It's a form of patronage. The ideal of an independent and impartial fourth estate seems very quaint at this historical juncture. Do many journalists in the privately owned media actually believe this is their role? I've always assumed they didn't, simply because the day-to-day nature of their jobs would disabuse them of any notions pretty quickly, but I'd be interested to know.
-
The first blame for this idiot math must lie with the minister and his office. I am not paying my taxes for this kind of ineptitude.
But is it ineptitude? The Minister knows exactly what he wants: a justification for defunding the channel. He knows that no-one at the Herald is going to challenge him, because senior figures there agree with him ideologically and want his continued patronage. Thus, any figure will do. That's not ineptitude; that's contempt. It's well past time for imagining that the minister and his journalistic enablers are acting in good faith.