Posts by Tony Parker
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It just dawned on me that when Tolley tries to get her drive to mediocrity through parliament the Nats wont have enough votes and ACT will come in and insist that they privatise the schools ...
Vouchers, Paul, vouchers..
I also think there's a hidden agenda here with the National Standards being implemented to set up a very blunt instrument with which to bring in things such as vouchers and performance pay for teachers. Or maybe I'm just paranoid. Then again there's this from John Key yesterday.
"the Prime Minister’s suggestion made yesterday at the Council of Trade Unions’ conference that school support staff could have a pay rise if their teacher colleagues were prepared to fund it by foregoing a salary increase." -
"If they do nothing other than teach our children to read and write and do maths and be good socialised New Zealand people then they've done a really good job."
Jeez. I would hope I've done more than this with my children to have done a good job as a teacher. Like seeing the value of music, learning to run, jump, throw and participate in physical activity, get enjoyment and satisfaction from creating art, think, discuss, experiment. And that's just with 5 year olds.
Increasingly I'm beginnning to think that Tolley, with a lot of her utterances over the past few weeks, is out of her depth as Education Minister, not that I ever thought she'd even entered the water but now she's drowning. -
First off the important stuff.
Great about Southland winning last night, eh!
No Geoff, not for Hawkes Bay it wasn't!!!!
National, and its minister, Anne Tolley, really had no grasp on the implications of its policy at the time it was promised
Tolley has a very simplistic, narrow and uninformed view of education in this country that is driven not by educational outcomes but tory ideology. An example being the budget-She was going to change pupil-teacher ratios back to higher levels until she realised that the previous administration had already implemented these. 700 teachers would have lost their jobs so the proposal was canned. Not because it was unsound educationally but because it would have caused even more dissent in the teaching profession and she wanted our support for this stupid standards policy. As soon as the policy was announced I felt insulted as a teacher. It was as if I and the rest of my profession weren't doing our job. That aside setting standards does not raise achievement, good teaching and supportive policies do. I set standards in my classroom, I inform parents about their child's progress and I focus on more than just literacy and numeracy. Why should I be tied to a narrow assesment regime that is more about scoring political points than soilid educational outcomes.
Ah well-today's a holiday (HB anniversary) and the Magpies will win tonight. -
Dicks of the week.
There's been a lot of support for him too with offers from decoraters and paint companies to waterblast and repaint his house. So there's also some good people out there too.
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Have you guys tracked down that touch-judge from Thursday’s game and driven him out of town yet?
His house got egged, his kids have been hassled on Facebook and he's considering giving up refereeing.
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Hah. Zac Guilford. Well done that young man. C'mon the Bay.
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27-20
We were robbed! -
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But, damn it, if I happened to be bisexually inclined there is no way I'd kick Robyn Malcolm and Kirk Torrance out of bed if they were offering.
There's a number of older single women teachers at school who would quite happily have Judd/Torrance's shoes under their bed.
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>You need money to involve your kids in sport whereas this wasn't such a pre-requisite before.
This is a good point but I'm not sure it's a so called "PC" thing(a term I hate as it is often thrown at people/actions that are in fact showing they care for others but that's another arguement) . The increased costs of sport are coming I think from the different associations and their increasing costs to make their sports more professional and to an extent fund their elite. An example here is hockey. I've had my school teams playing in the Saturday morning leagues up until this year. The reason-The Hockey assn charging subs/turf fees that make the cost per child upwards of $50 before they buy their gear etc. For some kids in my school who would like to play this prices it out of their reach. Fortunately another school organises a midweek league that costs nothing, is played on grass and means I have Saturday mornings free. In fact most school organised sports are like this, but once again it falls back on the teachers. It's the different codes and their organisations that incur the costs.
One of my favourite memories is as a 6-year-old playing bullrush with the entire complement of students at Maketu Primary School. Everyone was respectful. No-one got hurt. It was great fun. You'd never see it happen today
Yeah and one reason for that today is that some of our kids are so self centred and angry that as soon as they are tackled (also applies to tackle rugby) they want to get up and argue the toss/punch someone rather than just getting on with the game. Therefore we ban bullrush and only have tackle rugby when a teacher is watching. The last few years at our school has been a bit like that but this years group of kids is better so we've allowed a bit more freedom. Kids today are different than we were.