Nice People 12: Nice in Nice

PasturesNew

Generali wrote: »

On my phone on a sunny morning it looks like a really dirty old master painting of some kind of monkey/ape.

Super curly haired half a dog's face/paw on the left..... looks like teddy bear material.
Cat on the right.

lostinrates

The cat does look quite like an ape face on sometimes.

chewmylegoff

16wk appointment with doctor today, the consultant was on holiday so we saw a spotty youth who talked over me on several occasions, I was probably being annoying though... Got a quick look at zig and zag on the mobile scanner but no pictures I'm afraid!

Highlight of the day was finding a parking space on the road behind the hospital and only having to pay £1.20 instead of the £3.60 it would have cost to park in the hospital car park. :money:

Last time I drove there it took nearly an hour to find a space so it was a relief not to have to go through that again...

michaels

chewmylegoff wrote: »

16wk appointment with doctor today, the consultant was on holiday so we saw a spotty youth who talked over me on several occasions, I was probably being annoying though... Got a quick look at zig and zag on the mobile scanner but no pictures I'm afraid!

Highlight of the day was finding a parking space on the road behind the hospital and only having to pay £1.20 instead of the £3.60 it would have cost to park in the hospital car park. :money:

Last time I drove there it took nearly an hour to find a space so it was a relief not to have to go through that again...

Only 3.60 to park at the hospital? You have got it cheap!!!!

CKhalvashi

Generali wrote: »

Would it be possible to write a computer program along the lines of the Daily Mail Headline Generators to do the reports for you?

If you put a spell check function on it, you could sell it to the DM

neverdespairgirl

Glad to hear all is well with the babies, chewy - do you know or will you find out beforehand if they are blue or pink? Or will you stay on team yellow?

LydiaJ

GDB2222 wrote: »

That software exists. Free to download. I think it would be easy to implement in a spreadsheet, though.

I'm sure it does exist. I doubt there's pre-existing software that would convincingly read as though it was me as an individual writing about my particular students as individuals, based on their work this particular term, though, unless it included such a mammoth library of phrases that it would be quicker to write the things from scratch than to read through so many phrases to pick the apposite ones. With a reasonably small library of phrases, the resulting reports would certainly not convince anybody who read a whole class's reports. Any teacher caught using such a thing at my school would be in deep trouble anyway. Off the peg reports are not what our kids' parents are paying exorbitant fees for. It's very clear that providing bespoke reports is part of the deal of working there.

I'm OK with that. I get to teach smaller classes with fewer disruptive pupils than most state school teachers. Writing more detailed reports about them is fair enough.

TBH I was pushing it even using a spreadsheet to make my own jigsaw reports, and at least all the phrases were in my own words, and every kid had a different combination of them, so they were genuinely all different. I've only done it a few times. The first time I did it was at a previous school, where I taught 72 Y7 students, and saw them rather less often than once a week! It's easy enough to do the "making the spreadsheet work" part of it, because excel is the part of IT that I'm best at. Picking phrases to put in the spreadsheet that would sound (a) relevant to the class, (b) different from each other, (c) convincingly like me, and (d) naturally linking to each other rather than clunky and stilted - that was the difficult bit.

neverdespairgirl wrote: »

Glad to hear all is well with the babies, chewy - do you know or will you find out beforehand if they are blue or pink? Or will you stay on team yellow?

What NDG said.

neverdespairgirl

Generali wrote: »

I don't know how many of the nice people know about bonobo apes but they are interesting animals. Most/many are bisexual and their answer to anything is basically vigorous sex.

OH and I were watching something about them on TV not long ago - they are very close to human indeed, I think. They show empathy, and use complicated tools.

I think it's more and more obvious that killing great apes is very close to murder indeed, and should be treated as such.

LydiaJ

neverdespairgirl wrote: »

OH and I were watching something about them on TV not long ago - they are very close to human indeed, I think. They show empathy, and use complicated tools.

I think it's more and more obvious that killing great apes is very close to murder indeed, and should be treated as such.

I think I remember reading somewhere about somebody who brought up an orphan baby gorilla or chimp or something at about the same time as they were bringing up their own (human) baby of the same age. I think the two infants made very similar progress intellectually until about age 2, and then the ape got stuck and the human went on learning.

neverdespairgirl

I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Watching my current experiment develop is a lot of fun. When he was newborn he was, of course, very sweet, but didn't do anything apart from process milk. Now he recognises people, smiles a lot at people he knows well, laughs, grabs things, explores things, he's changing all the time. And getting more interesting.