I though I’d come in here and find something interesting to read. Instead it’s a tattertale of ‘OMG there were soft plants in the room’ …..I’m rolling my eyeballs by the way….doesn’t that just sound a whole lot DESPERATE to you?????? Please!! Come on Mallard surely you’ve got something better than that?? This is all beginning to sound worse than a group of year 10 students waiting outside for their maths teacher to arrive : )

Having taught since 1996 I actually find it incredibly frustrating to work alongside teaching staff that, in my opinion, are edging toward incompetent. I find it appalling to welcome my year nine students into my classroom only to find that I require the teacher aides helping my special needs students to also work alongside another five or six without special needs just so they can keep up with the class programme.

13 year olds.

Hmmmmmmmmmmm….now there’s a very INTERESTING thought……
Labour reigned for how long before this National Government??
It’s always a bitter sweet scenario watching someone cleaning up the mess you have made. Especially when you deny it was there to start with.

A few facts (I am in the health sector, but work closely with schools, mainly decile 1 & 2)

One of the first thing the Nats did was remove all PD with the exception of numeracy and literacy; all PD for teachers on science, health, PE, art, drama, etc was killed off, no questions asked, minimal media coverage – 3 to 400 advisors at a guess, all experienced, all providing a much needed service. Strangely next year area of attention is science – are the numeracy and literacy advisors to be made redundant and we will then re-recruit the science advisors?

The Fruit in Schools programme, which had a component attached called health promoting schools, has more or less been dismantled too; the valuable component, the effective bit that actually did any good, had its funding removed. This element helped school communities identify what health issues actually existed in schools and assisted them to meet these needs is gone. But the fruit reamins, so Tony Ryall looks like Mr. Nice.

Then there is the HEHA nutrition fund – again, gone (along with NAG5) – I know of one Kura who now provide Burger King for lunch, because then can!

The replacement, Kiwisport, funds all schools, so decile 10 get exactly the same money as a rural decile 1. This government has introduced a swath of policies that just increase disadvantage and hence the barriers to learning.

Interesting public meeting in Onehunga Thursday night, with Minister of Ed Anne Tolley seeking to sell her controversial National Standards policy. About 80 people there, seemed to be quite a lot of parents and those involved in education locally. Trev…

National and Act are the Crosby and Textor types – and having taken part in the last election campaign I speak from experience – they are nasty.

For the latter he cites work by Otago’s Jim Flynn concerning the culture that goes with the meticulous process of rice production, which meant that landlords tended to have a ‘hands off’ approach and kept rents independent of production (you can’t motivate people to do what’s required to cultivate rice if they don’t receive the benefits of their labour – compare that with the history of European agriculture which has long involved a gross plough, sew and harvest form of agriculture. With that approach the temptation for the landlord, to which they invariably succumbed, is to take increasingly higher rents for increased production thus removing the incentive.)

He also notes that, in at least one Chinese language, the very words for numbers make elementary arithmetic far easier for young Chinese children to master than do the English equivalents (e.g., twenty two is ‘two tens and two’, thirty seven is ‘three tens and seven’ – when asked to add twenty two and thirty seven the answer is right there in the words, ‘five tens and nine’. That early advantage is part of the answer to the question of why Asian immigrants in the US outperform white Americans in mathematics, on average. Combine that with a culture that has been based on the material production of rice (with the clear lesson that harder work pays off in greater production – which goes to you) rather than less nurture-sensitive crops, then you go a long way to explaining differences in success (and IQ).

All very interesting, and all ultimately very social and economic causes of success and the cultural environments that go along with it. The explanation for the success of Jewish lawyers is particularly interesting.

is just like fair go pretending to be a customer looking for a low mileage motor.

I’m sure there’s a word for that, but I’m a simple man, so I’ll have to make do with a phrase (cough hack sorry; flu season).

Why would it be reasonable to assume that i) Labour do it to, and ii) nobody here would acknowledge any evidence if, in some alternative universe, you had some?

What that is, is plain old fashioned ‘assuming bad faith’, or as the psychologists spell it ‘projection’.

It’s like when DPF and co went all on the ‘attack the messenger’ routine about Worth. You were here then I believe, also claiming that people here would also out a sexual harrassment complainent if the penis was in the other pants, as it were. Again, without any evidence.

It’s a bit of a pattern mate, and I say this only because I care. (liberal bleeding heart painty waists, we can’t ignore the obvious pain of others). You are obviously not without something at least resembling a conscience. It’s playing tricks on you. It’s making you assume that the whole world is as nasty and cynical as those you have attached yourself to, politically speaking.

Break free young daveski; the water is fine, you have nothing to surrender but your dissonance.

Let’s get into it – what are the merits for the standards?

If you accept my statements, accept them as what I know. If you are excepting my statements from your challenge, how can I pronounce on what I do not know?

Now get off the court, we’re playing singles not doubles.