Posts by Lucy Stewart
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But black humour in the break room is one thing; in front of patients and families. Hell no.
True enough. Although, while I'm not in the group being joked about and so don't get the final say on what is and is not offensive, I still don't think Carr's joke was on the level of dead babies.
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I do think it is a bit rich for any German who is not Jewish/Gypsey etc suggesting to us how to think or deal with Nazi stupidity
It's like they think they used to suffer under an evil dictatorship or something.
Re: Jimmy Carr, I really struggle to understand the fuss; it's a reasonably amusing joke which draws much-needed light to the fact that there are a lot of people coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan with severe disabilities which they - and the British health system - will be dealing with for a long time to come. In light of that, black humour is a coping system.
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Sending good wishes in your direction. You'll do great!
[Well, I mean, I cried after mine, but because of how much was riding on it not because it was hard.]
Thank you! I feel it went quite well. (There was, unfortunately, no opportunity to answer "fish", but at one point fish was part of the question and if it hadn't been multichoice I would have been very tempted to answer "gubernatorial".)
The best bit was actually the analytical writing, which is, of course, the bit universities don't care about - because god forbid two essays should tell you more about a student than sixty multi-choice questions - but nevertheless gave me the opportunity to mercilessly enumerate every logical fallacy in an argument, which always makes for a good start to the day.
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I tautoko that. I have a pretty extreme version of that kid.
My partner's the same - As in physics, Cs in maths, because it was the same maths but physics taught it in an applied rather than a theoretical way. Literacy and numeracy seem to be becoming ends, rather than tools, and that is extremely fucking depressing.
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Maybe science is being dropped because we have already (well.....nearly...if you read on a bit...) achieved Number 1.
I worry. Not so long ago my eldest was at Intermediate and (I swear to doG) came home with a study she had to do about astronomy...well...that was what it SAID. What star sign are you? What star sign are your family? Do you think they tend to agree with their horoscopes?
Evidently, as you say, we're not quite there yet...
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This measure may be a response to the unacceptably high numbers who are not learning much literacy, numeracy or *anything*. There are plenty of excellent students but also far too many failing ones.
Yeah, but it's also not a dichotomy; you don't have to choose between improving literacy and numeracy and everything else, because literacy and numeracy are be *parts* of everything else (and, I submit, far more likely to attract kids' interest when they are.)
To assert that we should be happy to settle for the most basic skills and socialisation as a result of eight years of schooling is bollocks. There may indeed be some kids for whom just that is an achievement; that doesn't mean it's one we should settle for, let alone consider to be "really good work" or a goal for a national education system.
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Bwahahahahaha. It took me a moment to realise that while we're talking about the GRE, I could just as easily be mocking the new standards system.
It's like a reverse threadjack!
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"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."
Minister Anne Tolley on new school standards
I'm not really sure "standards" is the word they're looking for. They appear to have mislaid them.
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Hey, I'm with Danielle - don't knock middle class resourcefulness, it's all some of us have got.
(The question I remember went something like "Congress is to gubernatorial as senate is to ...?". And James thinks this is an IQ test?)There's a whole data analysis question in the practice test in which getting the correct answers requires the knowledge that "Congress", while colloquially used to refer to the House of Representatives, is technically the name for *both* Houses, a distinction I imagine many Americans would have trouble remembering. And another maths question which involves knowing how quarts relate to gallons.
Although the GRE as a test is bound to the US, so I guess it's not too outrageous to have US knowledge questions.
Given that they require it of international applicants, though, they're loading the scales a little. They don't exactly say "we are testing your knowledge of maths and English and the intricacies of our antiquated and useless measurement system."
(It's okay, Danielle, 99% is still badass.)
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Bahaha. Unfortunately NZ's relative disdain for intelligence testing is not overly useful, although perhaps that should be the real criteria for logical thinking.
The ability to identify words like "torrid", "sere", and "limpid" is, quite frankly, far more a test of how much old-school Trek fanfic I've been reading this week than native intelligence.