Primary school closing early.

Owain_Moneysaver

economic wrote: »

These are low iq or !!!!!! people. They should just get basic easy jobs requiring no intellect at age 15-16.

There are a lot fewer of those jobs than there used to be.

economic

Owain_Moneysaver wrote: »

There are a lot fewer of those jobs than there used to be.

Then i guess they are pretty screwed then.

[Deleted User]

Cakeguts wrote: »

You know when you see something on the telly and there is immediately something that strikes you as wrong but you can't put your finger on it straight away?

There was a primary school that was closing on Friday at lunch time because it had run out of money. I have never seen so much stuff in a classroom. There were containers with crayons in them obviously provided by the school. I thought that parents bought their children's pens crayons and pencils. Please tell me that I am not providing simple stationary items for all the children in the local school in my borough from my council tax.

The other thing about that school was the amount of paper they had and were using. Children writing words on A3 size pieces of paper it had to have been a fire risk. How can the children practice writing at home if the pieces of paper they were given to write on were too big to fit in a school bag? What happened to exercise books? It looks as if the school could spend everything they got on things not education just things. Because of all these things that their budget had been wasted on they couldn't afford to open on Friday afternoon.

I agree entirely children must use slate boards and chalk at school, school which they should leave at 8 years old to work in t'mill.

I wonder if you missed the day when they explained that its with an e if its paper envelopes etc. and an a when its not moving?:D
Sorry to be pedantic.:D:):beer:

Cakeguts

venison wrote: »

I agree entirely children must use slate boards and chalk at school, school which they should leave at 8 years old to work in t'mill.

I wonder if you missed the day when they explained that its with an e if its paper envelopes etc. and an a when its not moving?:D
Sorry to be pedantic.:D:):beer:

I haven't got a clue what you are talking about but I have noticed that it is the wrong spelling of practise.

The problem with answers like that is that I am old. I have done what I needed to do with my education so apart from the fact that I can't get any paper work done correctly the first time or the second time or often even the third time because of the mistakes. (Please bring back one chance exams, no repeats and no course work to reflect the real working world) It isn't going to make any difference to me but it isn't fair on today's children. Why should they have to have second best to what my generation had?

I am finding that there is something very peculiar going on with some parts of the teaching profession. If challenged over why children today are so far behind my generation in terms of maths and language skills they immediately attack the person making the criticism. How does that solve the problem for the children who are being taught badly now? I actually don't care what I can't do or what I don't write correctly but I do care about the people who are not being taught well now because they will get a life sentence from bad education.

There is not enough personal responsibility going on in the teaching profession at the moment.
The situation is that anyone who has taken GCSEs and then A levels have themselves taken the dumbed down version of UK education. Before the introduction of GCSEs anyone who gets an A at A level now would have got an E in the past. You could not get a place at university on a prediction of 3 grade Es at A level. You needed a predication of at least 3 Cs. That would now be 3 A**s now which doesn't exist.

So if you believe that all teachers should be graduates in order to be fair to the children you are teaching that means that anyone who gets less than A*A*A* at A level should take personal responsibility and not go into teaching in case you add to the problem we have already got in some parts of the education system.

There appear to be people who don't care enough about the education of children who do enter the profession without good degrees from top universities.

Cakeguts

westernpromise wrote: »

I did O-Level Maths in 1978 (Oxford & Cambridge Board) and it did not include calculus. That was part of what was called the "AO"-Level, sometimes known as "Further Maths", which we sat the year after O-Level. Two years after that you did Maths A-Level if you were going to.

"Poisson and binomial distributions, complex numbers represented on Argand diagrams, resolution of forces, division of polynomials" were part of neither O- nor AO-Level, so as long as 40 years ago, nobody with just an AO-Level would have been able to do any of those.

There is certainly some content in a Maths GCSE that wasn't there in an O-Level 40 years ago. It came as a surprise to me, flicking through my daughter's maths homework a week or two ago, to learn that there is a way through trigonometry to work out the area of any triangle including scalene triangles. I didn't know that was even possible (although now I know it is I might be able to work out how for myself). I definitely didn't cover that at school though.

What has changed I guess is the boundaries between grades. Actually failing a GCSE seems to be quite hard, as witnesses the fact that very few people do. When you consider that fewer than 50% of the populace sat O-Levels yet 50% are now presumed fit to go to university, that means there are kids who in the past would not have been thought fit to sit an O-Level who are now being told they are good enough to go to university - which does not compute.

Now working from that perspective Some of those 50% who would not have been thought of as fit to sit an O level are now going to university getting a degree and then entering the teaching profession because that diploma or certificate from the technical college that you got at 18 is now called a degree and if you have a degree you can train to be a teacher. I remember people going to teacher training college and you had to have A levels and you had to be 18 before you went to teacher training college so there is real danger that there are people entering the teaching profession who would not have passed O level. I think that this is part of the problem.

Also going back to the O level and A level maths situation. There were no calculators in the 60s. It was done with slide rules and books of tables. I wonder how many of today's children would be able to do maths like that? As I said I am old. I did my arithmetic in imperial measures. Try working out 23% of 2 pounds, 10 shillings and 4 pence halfpenny to get the interest on your savings. It is much harder than doing it now when everything is decimal.

Pennywise

economic wrote: »

These are low iq or !!!!!! people.

No they're not. Something like 40% of 16 year olds don't even get the "good pass" grade in Maths and English GCSE (old C grade). That's shocking after 10+ years of compulsory education. There are so many, they can't all be low iq or !!!!!!. They've just been failed by the system.

economic

Pennywise wrote: »

No they're not. Something like 40% of 16 year olds don't even get the "good pass" grade in Maths and English GCSE (old C grade). That's shocking after 10+ years of compulsory education. There are so many, they can't all be low iq or !!!!!!. They've just been failed by the system.

Then there are a lot more !!!!!! and low iq people then i thought.

Malthusian

Owain_Moneysaver wrote: »

There are a lot fewer of those jobs than there used to be.

Nonsense - there's 1500+ in the Houses of Parliament, plus tens of thousands more on city councils and county councils throughout the land.

HO-OH! *fist bump*

Cakeguts wrote:

It was done with slide rules and books of tables. I wonder how many of today's children would be able to do maths like that?

Same number that could do it in the past. I used logarithm tables in my dumbed-down education for millennial morons, and normal distribution tables as well. Anyone who can compute normal distributions and logarithms using a calculator can do it using a table. It just takes longer.

Try working out 23% of 2 pounds, 10 shillings and 4 pence halfpenny to get the interest on your savings.

2L10s4.5d = 50s4.5d = 604.5d. 23% * 604 = 139d rounded down. 139d = 11 and sevenpence. Do I get a Werther's Original?

Working out figures in pounds shillings and pence is exactly the same as in decimalised currency, it just involves an additional, totally pointless step. People who worked in pounds shillings and pence were therefore worse at maths involving currency than those doing the equivalent calculation in decimalised currency, as it takes them longer to achieve the same end.

westernpromise

Cakeguts wrote: »

There were no calculators in the 60s. It was done with slide rules and books of tables. I wonder how many of today's children would be able to do maths like that?

I'm not sure how useful it would be. A slide rule is just a !!!!!! calculator. That it is difficult to use is a bug, not a feature.

It's a bit like saying a modern soldier is ill-trained because he can't use a sword or a musket. Or like saying, as some whiskery admirals actually did in the 1890s, that steam ships should continue to be built with masts, sails and ratlines because without them you couldn't train the crew to be sailors.

Cakeguts

westernpromise wrote: »

I'm not sure how useful it would be. A slide rule is just a !!!!!! calculator. That it is difficult to use is a bug, not a feature.

It's a bit like saying a modern soldier is ill-trained because he can't use a sword or a musket. Or like saying, as some whiskery admirals actually did in the 1890s, that steam ships should continue to be built with masts, sails and ratlines because without them you couldn't train the crew to be sailors.

The point is though that going through all that takes longer and in the modern services they do different things instead to defend the country which works better. The thing with the use of calculators is that they use this time saving and still manage to do less. If they were doing more they would be getting to the standard of old A levels at age 16. Because they aren't they must be doing less.