Posts by BenWilson
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Danielle I aim to please. I don't think it's any accident that our species doesn't just provide the capacity for long hard work automatically. We have the most highly developed talent for doing smarter work, and using that talent is a large part of the reason we are not still running around after antelope, or digging for hours for roots to eat.
Caveat: To feel awesome you do need to put in sometimes. Hard. Harder than everyone. And come up with the goods.
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Isabel, that's what I was like at University. Having realized that you're not actually one of the top 10 minds there in the first 20 mins, you stop trying to be. I goofed off everything that bored me and did the same intense few weeks you speak of to scrape out a bare pass. I was a lot happier, and learned a lot more that way (about the subjects that interested me).
But I'm curious that you don't think of it as useful as an adult. Life as a consultant (when I did that) was much the same - endless goofing, followed by bursts of extremely high activity. I think there is a place for that way of doing things. Furthermore, that type of behavior is very useful in workplaces, because goof-offs are always efficiency experts. They spend so much time working out how to save themselves effort that they are always making improvements to systems.
But I think a talent like that is very hard to teach. Seems to me that people work like that because they are like that naturally. It is seen as a failing in our society, rather than how I see it, which is as a 'personality type'. Being hard working is rated very highly, but the goof-off is actually someone who is totally goals-focused. They won't do work just to feel like they are working, because they don't like working. They may do it to look like they are working, because society demands that. But when work actually needs to be done, that personality-type will do it. In fact, when work needs to be done fast, they're the best person to do it. They won't be distracted by what doesn't really need to be done. The person who works hard all the time may justifiably refuse to work harder when push comes to shove. They may lack the energy, having already expended it.
I think over time, the best hard worker will do more work, including useful work. The best scholars were always total swats, you can't beat putting the hours in. But an awful lot of people put in the hours and don't get as much out as the person who leaves things until the last minute. And an awful lot of the time, the last minute is all you have. That's where the slacker's amazing talent comes in - how to do the required amount of work in the least amount of time....
I don't think you can blame the school system for how you do things. It's not like they told you not to do all your homework every night, and to concentrate in class. You just found a way that suits you. If it hasn't worked out well as an adult, maybe you're just in the wrong job?
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Jan, the funny thing was, I went to Selwyn College, which at the time was proud of it's position as a progressive school, valuing artistic subjects very highly. And yet I felt that it failed me completely in the Art department, once it hit the point of national standards (School Certificate). But it didn't fail all the Art students - many achieved very highly.
But that was the problem - the focus went onto achievement. Art became a closed shop to me by simple virtue of there only being 24 hours in a day. What time I did have for Art I gave with all my attention, and I made quite a lot of progress. Just not as much as the kids who were prepared to spend 30 hours a week on one out of 5 subjects. That was discouraging.
Even more discouraging was the fact that I could not continue Music at all. Nor Latin. You can only take so many subjects. In 4th form we took something like 10 subjects, but in 5th you had to narrow it down to 5. English, Maths, and Science were compulsory, so that left 2 electives. How suckful is that for people who have wide interests?
If I knew then what I know now, I would not have let it discourage me. But one of the things about all these national tests is they become a big focus, and everything is subordinated to getting good grades. We were assured time and time again how important it is. So I quit Art altogether, a year after I quit Music altogether (and a bunch of other subjects that I liked too). I was extremely resentful of PE which was a compulsory subject that year because it was wasting valuable time that could have been spent on examined subjects.
So, yes, while I was the kind of student who schools were designed for in the old days, I really don't think the way those schools worked actually did me any favors. They just made me drop my interest in a lot of things, to specialize highly in things that mostly I have never used. I work as a computer programmer, but I can tell you that I have never needed calculus even once. Furthermore I learned computer programming at home, outside of school hours, and found that my schooling got in the way of that big-time.
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I personally found being taught for the purpose of passing exams enjoyable and motivating. But I don't consider myself normal in this respect.
The subject in 5th form I most disliked was Art, because, so far as I could tell, there was nothing to learn and no way to know if you were getting better, other than the occasional comment from someone whose artistic abilities I had absolutely no respect for. This had not been a problem in the 4th form because there was no grading system of any note, you just did some art, and the teacher was clearly good at it.
In 5th form, so far as I could see, what was required of you was not any 'knowledge', or even any talent. It was the demonstration of massive quantities of work. It's pretty easy to tell when someone has done a lot of art because there's a lot of art to show at the end of it. But if someone were to ask me what it was apart from huge volume that we were meant to demonstrate that year, I wouldn't have a clue.
And I had too much on my plate to generate huge volumes of art - 5 other subjects and a lot of sport. So the School C grading system had no choice other than to set me as a failure at Art, and unfortunately that was pretty much the last time I tried at it. There is something very sad about that. I was not bad at Art, I just didn't have the time to be a professional at it.
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Then I went on to high school where national exams like school cert were designed to show exactly half of us that we were failures and were scaled up or down to make sure that that happened.
Yup, it struck me as a very strange system. I'm pretty good at maths. In 7th Form Bursary Calculus I thoroughly checked my exam paper at the end and worked out there were only 6% of the answers given that I wasn't 100% certain I had got right. I expected to get a score in the mid 90s and instead got 84. Which was a carefully calculated scaling to tell me I was merely an above average student. It also served to disqualify me from the accelerated courses I wanted to do at University, which required a grade of 85. Fortunately! Varsity maths was not for me. Maths went from being a subject that empowered you to work out awesome things, to one where proving the bleeding obvious took 20 pages. I'm glad that's someone else's job.
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Plenty of private schools are in receipt of tax payers loot Ben.
Peter, sure they are, but whatever private contributions are given/required, are not looted from taxpayers, and to abolish those contributions is madness. All it could possibly do is lower the quality of private schools, an outcome I can't see as worthwhile, just a manifestation of misplaced class jealousy. You can't stop wealthy kids from being advantaged, and I don't think you should try. Instead the focus should be on raising average standards. Think 'everyone up' not 'everyone the same'.
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@Tom Semmens
@BenWilson:
All right then, how would all your benign middle class voters react if we truly did something revolutionary to ensure equality of education for all new Zealanders?
I've lost the context of this question. Was it meant for someone else?
If it is seriously meant for me, I have to say, the idea of abolishing private schools seems totally crazy to me. They fit so many niches that the public system shouldn't cater for, and they don't cost us anything. I'm well aware of the entrenchment of class that comes with extensive private schooling, but NZ fortunately is not in that particular boat. Our private schools mainly cater to niches like religious groups, and I can't see much wrong with that. OK there are some really good private schools too, but as far as I can see, that's a reason to keep them, rather than abolish them.
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Such a two-tier system suits the middle class bedrock of the National Party, because for the middle class the primary purpose of the education system is to tilt the playing field to their advantage as early and as comprehensively as possible.
Being middle class myself, I can't say that any of that strikes a chord with me or anyone I know personally. Education is not a playing field with a guaranteed winner and loser every time. The idea is that everyone can be a winner, and the middle class want that every bit as much as every other class does. Of course they want their own interests represented, but that does not mean that they need to create a massive set of losers to make themselves higher up some arbitrary scoreboard.
The problem is simply that there is disagreement in the population about the extent to which grading, and the competition that comes from it, is helpful in upping general standards. Most people are not experts and have opinions that date back to their own school experiences. Most people my age or older lived through a lot of grading and competition, and think of it as quite normal, and thus see changes as radical, maybe politically driven rather than practical. You have to be closer to education to see how out of touch this is.
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Is anyone who has this inconsistency in his or her position concerned about this?
I guess the difference is that you're fully in control of whether you smacked someone, and how hard. But you're not anywhere near as in control of whether a child is truanting. But point taken, procedural guidelines for the police to capture the spirit of the law are no substitute for laws that actually capture their own spirit.
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DPF, I'm glad you are criticizing, but I do find it interesting what you criticisms actually are. Your criticism is about how it makes National look, rather than about it actually being bad. What do you really think? Is it bad or does it just look bad, to cram things through under urgency that are not in any way related to the financial meltdown. I personally think it is actually bad, AND it looks bad because of that.
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