Nice People Thread No. 15, a Cyber Summer

zagubov

silvercar wrote: »

I thought the system was different there. Both on tuition fees and on entry requirements and 4 year course because they only have one year in the sixth form and finish after 'highers' that are equiv to AS levels not full A levels. I may be years out of date.

It was like that when I went to uni in the 70s but I gather more students stay for a sixth year now. It's what they used to call a 7:5:4 system of education (primary: secondary: tertiary if a person stays to complete an honours degree - ours is a 6:7:3 system). I did a thesis on the differences between the two systems back in the 80s. Prepare to be bored!

The basic philosophy is that you can leave fifth year at 17 and go into a one or two years course (very high proportion do HNCs and HNDs instead of degrees compared with outside Scotland) or the first year of a three- or four year course ( the last one would get you an honours degree by age 21 as elsewhere in the the UK).

Because everybody in the rest of the UK is given free education in school or sixth form college up to 18, that makes it very difficult to not offer local students free higher education. The second year of A levels covers material most other countries cover in Higher Education, but it’s free at point of delivery due to England’s extended school system.

It would be very complicated to fund local people at uni till they're 18, and then start charging them as people switch from shorter to longer HE courses routinely (- I certainly did). Also the main universities were big city commuter universities where you lived with your parents and followed your schoolmates to the local uni. There wasn't really such a big tradition of leaving home to study elsewhere like there is (or was) down here in England. The two systems had never really been connected up and you can transfer between them but there will be differences ( and people crossing between Scotland and the rest of the UK will always have to get a loan to pay for degrees, regardless of whether they're going to England or Scotland).

There were massive studies done on suicide rates among students sometime way back and it led to all sorts of recommendations including
-putting new students in shared rooms for (at least) the first year,
- and making all students start in the first year even if they had A levels, so they didn't end up being some kind of isolated Billy-no-mates once all the friendship groups had formed by the time they joined the course.

vivatifosi

Pastures, if you get a big black bag and put some random stuff in it, you can drive off, reload random stuff into carrier bags and stuff it in your boot. Then next time you can go out and pretend that you've been shopping. You can carry that out ad infinitum.

What could go wrong? Other than you get a reputation for doing a lot of shopping and taking a lot of stuff to the tip, and being very symetrical in your visits.

PasturesNew

vivatifosi wrote: »

What could go wrong?

I will probably end up doing something like that. Earlier I went out, opened the boot, swept it out, then came in again .... then 15-20 minutes later I went out, moved the car, then got out and loaded the rear .....

I can't keep it up forever though

What could go wrong....?

Well, for starters, they might never notice, they might never care that I appear to be omnipresent. It needs somebody else, bigger than me (a man), preferably a parent (unless you've got kids you can't question the actions of parents unless you want a biff on the snozz)...... somebody else to have a word with them.

GDB2222

PasturesNew wrote: »

I will probably end up doing something like that. Earlier I went out, opened the boot, swept it out, then came in again .... then 15-20 minutes later I went out, moved the car, then got out and loaded the rear .....

I can't keep it up forever though

What could go wrong....?

Well, for starters, they might never notice, they might never care that I appear to be omnipresent. It needs somebody else, bigger than me (a man), preferably a parent (unless you've got kids you can't question the actions of parents unless you want a biff on the snozz)...... somebody else to have a word with them.

Maybe, just maybe, you ought to encourage a reputation as being seriously sinister? Erect a guillotine in your garden. Then stare at the feral, measuring the length of his neck. That sort of thing.

PasturesNew

GDB2222 wrote: »

Maybe, just maybe, you ought to encourage a reputation as being seriously sinister? Erect a guillotine in your garden. Then stare at the feral, measuring the length of his neck. That sort of thing.

I'm not sure of the household makeup, but there seems to be a number of them.... so, I have to be careful. The oldest one's about my size, he'd be about 10.... but I think he might be a mate from school. There are 4 that might all live there. Today they had another "weapon of choice", but my approach so far seems to be working ... but if somebody else says to them "Oi", or I stop being omnipresent, they might shuffle back up this end!

Good tip though; I'll save it. Trouble is, they'll continue growing and I've stopped.

I don't want to become so sinister that I become "the dare to knock" victim ... "dare you to knock on the witch's door" - come on, we all know about that happening when we grew up. Either overheard it, observed it, were challenged, or some of you (I bet) said it.

vivatifosi

Just answer the door with a really big cleaver. You'll have a reputation to maintain, after all.

Apparently, round here, we had no ball games signs erected. They went away, thankfully. This is before my time, but they used to use the gable end of an elderly couples house as their goal, so all they could hear was thud thud thud. Poor souls had a bit of a time with it.

PasturesNew

vivatifosi wrote: »

.... they used to use the gable end of an elderly couples house as their goal, so all they could hear was thud thud thud. Poor souls had a bit of a time with it.

That's bad parenting.

michaels

I can not talk, our kids can't go into tthe garden for 2 minutes before there are screams, cries etc and then of course we have put the basketball hoop on the front so that can happen very loudly into the evening....I would hate to have neighbours like us....

PasturesNew

michaels wrote: »

I can not talk, our kids can't go into tthe garden for 2 minutes before there are screams, cries etc and then of course we have put the basketball hoop on the front so that can happen very loudly into the evening....I would hate to have neighbours like us....

But they're not out running, cycling, playing with balls and scooters and stuff, with friends too, all around all the neighbours' cars are they.

I've a nasty suspicion something else happened while my back was turned. I know there's a new rental here, where the owner moved out, then tarted it up and bit and rented it out. I think in the last week 2 others have moved in .... so new ones playing that don't know "nobody else's kids do that here" will be seen by the other new ones and think everybody's kids do that .... and I can see this might grow into a dozen of them all over the place, random toys to drive over/reverse over every time you come and go .... and small squidgy people on low/fast moving toddler bikes appearing from behind parked cars. In an area where there are 3-4 directions in a tightly packed spot, you can't see everywhere all of the time. Nor can you see a dropped bike in the pitch dark.

oldandhappy

way back around the 70's or maybe even the very early 80's at a guess Hubby had his pride and joy the old rover 3.5 with the wheel on the boot..police often had them if anybody remembers them...it was parked outside our home on the far side of the road where there where no houses just the river wandle. It was a well used road and could be used for a cut through to the local junior school and housing estate that surrounded the school also had a large green that was used as a playing field...We had some 'new' annoying youngsters hanging around a lot...we use to say 'the new kids on the block have arrived'anyway he had some damage done to his pride and joy so was keeping a close eye on what was going on outside...trouble started after he had a go at them and then mainly verbal abuse actually went on for years until they grew up into something else.... we just changed our natural ways of dealing with these horrors for our sanity....when we moved in 2000 to Bexhill on Sea it was sheer heaven..we had a garage a driveway a large front garden even....but changes around us changed all that in time...
regards Dianne