Nice People 13: Nice Save

lostinrates

LydiaJ wrote: »

While of course I accept that there are some teachers who torment students, it's a sad day if we start describing that as normal rather than unacceptable.



l:

Apologies! I meant that it wasn't bucolic or perfect. It has the flaws any one might recognise from an stereotypical school, or book or film about a school.

But it was nonetheless an option I am tremendously grateful for. We had far more choice, flexibility and personalisation in education, both academic, and extracurricular. To counter the awful teachers were very excellent ones, the poor teachers were few, and replaced quickly in the main ( how are physics teacher was a fixture I have no idea. He was very religious, and it think he maybe hung on by the power of prayer,) . For the nasty ones there were amazingly inspirational ones.

Just as in the class room there will almost always be children who are poorly adjusted young people in any group of anyone their are odd bods.

LydiaJ

Generali wrote: »

Isn't that an argument in favour of the NHS becoming less efficient? Where I work we pride ourselves on doing the same job whilst spending less money. The department I used to work in (4-5 people) shaved about $3,000,000 off costs in 2 years.

Two points:

Firstly, I object to politicians *claiming* to have increased spending on the NHS and patting themselves on the back about it, when in fact the spending per capita has gone down.

Secondly, efficiency savings don't always apply in the same way in caring professions as they do in financial ones. If you reduce the treatment of patients to a conveyor belt mentality and make health care staff see more patients in the same amount of time, then, surprise surprise, the patients don't do so well.

I'm not saying, of course, that there are no efficiency savings to be made in health care. But reducing the length of GP appointments means that patients leave without understanding what's what, increasing the number of patients per GP leads to the difficulties that NP describe in getting an appointment, and running A&E departments at close to max capacity under normal circumstances means that a sudden influx of flu or norovirus patients completely overwhelms the system.

tom9980 wrote: »

I agree there needs to be basic standards and that there should be ways to measure a child's ability on entering school, what their likely peak ability in the future is and a way to measure their ability at various points throughout education. All of that should exist there is no question, but maybe the current method leads to too much whip cracking and negativity. It really is no fun being told your useless despite working 60 hour weeks and doing everything possible to get your class to progress. Before the school Ofsted last year some parents with an axe to grind where starting rumours of special measures and the head being sacked as the outcome because of league table results. The inspector said he thought the school was failing based on that data but had completely changed his mind when he saw the actual situation on the ground. He would have graded the school as outstanding if those results based on 13 children were better however that group of children were not at all academic many had SEN but had all met their expected peak grades which unfortunately were below national average. If you look over the years at those tables for the school that particular year group is a big outlier in the stats yet the school got a lot of grief because of it quite unfairly.

There is one pants teacher at wife's school and she works directly with her, this was deliberate in the hope the not so good teacher learns some things and improves. The best people to work out who the good/bad ones are other teachers, pupils and parents maybe not a random person who has little knowledge of the unique challenges they face within that school/area? start with some retraining and monitoring by the known good teachers, if that fails then it is time to sack them. At the moment its really hard to sack a failing teacher (i blame the unions for that one), from what i have seen a head teacher in such a situation either puts that teacher in a place they can almost not fail or treat that teacher in a way that they will likely leave in the near future.

This.

And I wish politicians could understand that increasing the amount of time teachers have to spend filling in national curriculum paperwork doesn't make them teach better lessons. (That's another reason why I'm sticking in the independent sector where I'm allowed to focus on teaching my subject as well as I can, and doing the best I can for my students, without having to assess each of them against dozens of criteria every time they change their socks.)

PasturesNew wrote: »

Free education was originally provided by the Churches - they wanted to tackle falling attendance rates and boost their pew/bum count. By providing free education, where the kids could count and read the hymn books etc, it gave them a chance to control their behaviour in general and to get bums on pews.

I'm not sure that was entirely the churches' motivation. The Bible* is rather full of injunctions to help the poor, you know. And after all, if they were just out for what they could get out of the people whose bums they were getting on their pews, don't you think they would have gone after rich bums who might have money to give, rather than poor ones who would then turn to the church for help requiring further money to be spent on them?

*Other sacred books instructing followers to bless the poor are also available.

PasturesNew

Nikkster wrote: »

Thanks for pointing it out PN - I even got out of my nice hot-water-bottle-bed to look at it. Then I text my mum to tell her about it as I know she'd like it (I described it as a 'halo' which I see from LIR's link was a good guess ).

There is what looks (from here anyway) like a single star, close in the sky to the moon. I think that might be Jupiter.

Yes that's Jupiter. It was brighter the last two nights.

I saw a proper/big halo about 2 nights ago.

LydiaJ

Masomnia wrote: »

The case of the NHS shows the problem with 'increasing it with inflation' when the CPI rate of inflation bears no resemblance whatsoever to healthcare costs; it's completely meaningless. They may as well link health spending to house prices in Aberdeen. Now I think about it that's probably closer to the cost increases faced by the NHS than CPI!

People living longer is the biggest issue, as in a few years time 25% of hospital admissions will be people with dementia, who are harder to treat, more expensive. Staggering really.

Indeed.

zagubov wrote: »

It seems to me the A level system only caters for those who have an obvious path clear at 16, which is rarer than it sounds. Your future career's almost determined at 16. At least I had flexibility at 17 on leaving school and even the option of switching faculties at 18 after 1st year uni.

There's a move to switch too far the other way via the International Baccalaureate which has an enforced mixture of subjects but lacks flexibility - you couldn't include three sciences in your mix so it's not such a good base for say medical subjects.

Plenty of IB students do apply for medicine. They do higher level in maths, chem and bio. Phys beyond GCSE hasn't been required for entry medicine for the last 20 years.

Yorkie1

Generali wrote: »

Isn't that an argument in favour of the NHS becoming less efficient? Where I work we pride ourselves on doing the same job whilst spending less money. The department I used to work in (4-5 people) shaved about $3,000,000 off costs in 2 years.

Masomnia wrote: »

The case of the NHS shows the problem with 'increasing it with inflation' when the CPI rate of inflation bears no resemblance whatsoever to healthcare costs; it's completely meaningless. They may as well link health spending to house prices in Aberdeen. Now I think about it that's probably closer to the cost increases faced by the NHS than CPI!

People living longer is the biggest issue, as in a few years time 25% of hospital admissions will be people with dementia, who are harder to treat, more expensive. Staggering really.

Mas has said quite a bit of what I was going to say. The cost of health care per person is going up, with an ever increasing population. So you're not even trying to run to stay still, you're running to catch up with moving goalposts.

Add in to that the fact that the formula for allocating funds (Barnett???) is not equal. The NHS in my part of the North was significantly less well resourced per head of population than a neighbouring urban area, which got a lot of funds for 'deprivation'. They were always in profit, our area was always in deficit - because the formula didn't take any account of a) the far older population, and b) the rurality. Both of which mean that health care costs more to deliver.

lostinrates wrote: »

I purposely kept my choice broad til university, partly because I wasn't sure till the very last minute which way I was going to jump for my university choice.

I did maths, French and geography for A level. Nice and broad (and studied none of them at Uni!). There was no logic in my decisions, I just enjoyed some and was good at French.

PasturesNew

LydiaJ wrote: »

I'm not sure that was entirely the churches' motivation. The Bible* is rather full of injunctions to help the poor, you know. And after all, if they were just out for what they could get out of the people whose bums they were getting on their pews, don't you think they would have gone after rich bums who might have money to give, rather than poor ones who would then turn to the church for help requiring further money to be spent on them?

*Other sacred books instructing followers to bless the poor are also available.

I think the rich were giving, but the churches weren't very full - and you needed a full congregation to justify your easy life dossing around with a bit of preaching on Sundays and drinking tea with people the rest of the week

Yorkie1

lostinrates wrote: »

Then I started wondering whether I should buy some more cerinthe seeds as have been chatting about that glorious garden must have with davesnave et al this evening.

Cerinthe seeds are fab. You only ever need 1 packet and then they self-seed gloriously all over the place. They still keep coming up on my allotment, some years after I last deliberately grew them!

They are easy to pull out if required, and also to transplant I would imagine. :T

lostinrates

Yorkie1 wrote: »

Cerinthe seeds are fab. You only ever need 1 packet and then they self-seed gloriously all over the place. They still keep coming up on my allotment, some years after I last deliberately grew them!

They are easy to pull out if required, and also to transplant I would imagine. :T

I have cerinthe here, but believe it or not, its not going crazy. I'm wondering if the chickens are pestering it.


Its one of my favourite things. I like the way it seems to colour the air around it when its planted on mass. I only learnt today its also called honey wort.

LydiaJ

PasturesNew wrote: »

I think the rich were giving, but the churches weren't very full - and you needed a full congregation to justify your easy life dossing around with a bit of preaching on Sundays and drinking tea with people the rest of the week

You have no evidence for that. You've said yourself that you're not and never have been a regular church goer, or not since you were sent to Sunday school as a kid. How much do you actually know (rather than assume) about clergy workload?

Because I do, in fact, know quite a lot about clergy workload. To suppose that its "a bit of preaching on Sundays and drinking tea with people the rest of the week" is on a par with describing teacher workload as "standing about doing playground duty for 20 minutes every morning" or describing setting up a business selling craft goods as "half an hour a week of playing about with pretty things and sitting back to wait for the revenue to come rolling in", or nurse workload as "prancing about in a sexy uniform chatting up doctors, and putting on a bandage once in a while".

Clergy workload isn't new, either. A couple of hundred years ago there were, no doubt, some younger sons of rich men who accepted a "living" as a vicar, collected the money and paid a fraction of it to some poor drudge of a curate who actually did all the work, but there has always been somebody doing a great deal of work. Within the last 50 years or so it's improved a bit - clergy are at least technically supposed to work only 6 days a week rather than 7, although not all of them do actually manage to take their day off each week.

And finally, I'm pretty certain that the whole thing about churches educating the poor for free (18th and 19th centuries) predates any significant decline in church attendance in this country (late 19th and 20th centuries).

SingleSue

tom9980 wrote: »

:rotfl:

Dont worry too much about all the other stuff, you are a wonderful parent and importantly kept working out the problems as best you could. There are too many parents who want someone to blame instead of trying to work it out sensibly. I wish some of the parents of wifes class were as open as you, one in particular dismisses her childs antics as part of his SEN and gives him no consequences for his behaviour. The result when he enters the real world is not likely to be pretty.

Aww, thanks for the kind words.

I must admit to being guilty of this when they first got their diagnosis, it was only when I sat down and really thought about it, that I realised that I was not going to be around forever (think it was in one of my depressive moods) and that somehow, I would have to equip them with the ability to cope with the very confusing world.

To be honest, I was probably a bit of a nightmare parent to deal with in those early days. Nowadays, if the boys dare try to blame something on their condition, they get short stock from me, my mantra is that their disabilities are not barriers, they are something they have to find a way through, under, over and around to achieve the same result but they are never ever ever to refuse to do something without trying to do it first..and if that fails, to try again until they find a way through.