Early Risers.

[laurenceb]

It seems to me that today's young people are taught how to pass exams not how to live

[tigerburnie]

44 minutes ago, laurenceb said:

It seems to me that today's young people are taught how to pass exams not how to live

I think it has been thus since the 1960's, to do a job you need to know where to find the things you do not know, you need to know what to do when plan A fails and you need to remember you are aiming to have a happy customer, no one ever mentioned that when I was educated.

[pH]

1 hour ago, Tony_S said:

The dodgy roofed shed is the medium sized one.I think three sheds is normal for Essex.   My friend in Norfolk has about 12.

So this guy just wouldn’t be rated in East Anglia?

https://youtu.be/CA8xTGP_M8g

 

[Gwiwer]

1 hour ago, laurenceb said:

It seems to me that today's young people are taught how to pass exams not how to live

That was the entire seven years of my grammar school education.  Never mind life because you will marry a fine woman who will keep house for you, raise your family and darn your socks.  We teach you how to pass exams because our only purpose in your life is to get you into Cambridge (preferably) or Oxford and if you don't get an Open Exhibition you're a failure, boy.  

 

I scraped through with four O-level passes (one at the third attempt), three failures and two A-levels having abandoned one more.  Needless to say I was considered a failure long before I got to that stage and was tolerated with a certain degree of academic bullying which was endemic in those days.  Being dismissed from Art with the words "Boy - you're a ham-fisted clot with a pencil; God help you if you ever pick up a paint-brush" was just the start of it.  I went on to receive some rather more positive feedback having picked up a paint-brush and decorated various items not least 30 metres of backscene.  

 

It was the same whilst learning to drive.  My instructor, one of the private one-man schools of motoring who traded on personal recommendation and success rather than a commercial name, was quite blunt with me.  "First I teach you how to pass the test.  Then I teach you how to drive".  He did.  On both counts.  I still hear his voice in my ear at times asking "Can we go?"  

 

This evening I have declared a nearby resident to be a C0ckwomble.  Having occupied two parking bays by means of parking one car amidships across both he then placed an unsigned note on my windscreen "reminding" me that the first two bays in the parking area are his and that he needed to get two cars in.  I, therefore, was required to park elsewhere.  No.  I was parked right beside the sign stating clearly that the bay I am using is the private property of our block (which is not his block) and I shall not be parking elsewhere.  The note, photos of the parking and a suitable comment were emailed to our managing agent who also employs car park security and enforcement.  I'll let them deal with it.  I suspect he is trying to elbow for more space because he chooses to drive a pair of large Mercedes (not both at the same time, so why have two?) and is simply being a selfish ah-sole.  

 

On that note I'll depart and wish you all a good evening.  

[pH]

1 hour ago, laurenceb said:

It seems to me that today's young people are taught how to pass exams not how to live

Since the pupils’ prospects in life depend to a large extent on their exam records (those are the first things considered on job applications - other things may be considered later) and the reputations/rewards/prospects of those teaching them (both persons and institutions) also depend significantly on exam results, I don’t find that at all surprising. Those are the rules of the game - people are just following the rules.

[New Haven Neil]

Unfortunately Rick's experience of the dark, sarcastic (thanks, Pink Floyd) Grammar School classrooms echoes my experiences, other than it was preferred to go to Oxford and/or study medicine or Durham for Law.  Not much chance of that for me. 7 O level passes got me started in a career if nothing else, but I could have done so much more.

 

Hence I occasionally get myself in trouble with the teachers on here, as I really did have quite a bad time at school although I was an average student.  I became a holder of many distinctions once I got to college, including highest mark of the year in two finals - oh what a difference skilled lecturers made. 

 

I am sure there are many inspirational teachers (one teacher friend tells me being described as an inspirational teacher is the highest complement she could be paid) on this forum, but there were only a very few I came across at school unfortunately.  I am told the school is superb now - OFSTED highest grade.

[Coombe Barton]

... and staying put ...

 

https://johncolby.wordpress.com/2021/08/11/postcards-from-the-periphery-2021-19-absence-of-sun/

[Ozexpatriate]

On German car drivers.

22 minutes ago, Gwiwer said:

... he chooses to drive a pair of large Mercedes

I popped into the local mall the other day. Close to the shop entrances and parking astride the white line (thereby occupying two spaces) was a very expensive looking Porsche Panamera. There's no shortage of mall parking in these pandemic days, if the driver wanted to park out in the boonies where there would be no risk of door dings.

 

Yet this morning, standing at a zebra crossing / crosswalk, a string of four cars whizzed by. The last car, bringing up the rear, which actually stopped, a nice distance from the intersection, per the right-of-way traffic regulations regarding pedestrians on a crosswalk, was a very nice Mercedes sedan.

 

I did not look closely at the driver, but wonder if there are chromosomal influences as well as Deutsche manufacturing.

[simontaylor484]

I have said before when i started uni some of the other students couldn't even change a plug i didn't mind i charged £3 a time. I wish I had known earlier that they were 3 round pin small plugs i could have got some at trade price and made more beer money

[Ozexpatriate]

A hot one today. It was about 26°C returning from my walk at 10:30am. Two hours later it is 31°C and is forecast to reach 38°C this evening.

 

The forecasters were havering over how hot it would get - depending on the amount of wildfire smoke in the upper atmosphere. There was some haze in the south and east while I was walking but right now the sky is a pitiless blue overhead.

 

It will remain very hot for the next couple of days. Tomorrow is the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. After watering plants in the front garden last night I looked at the sky for a little while. (There's a 'darker' spot at the end of the street, but there was still too much light pollution to see anything.)

[J. S. Bach]

An early Night Owl from the Piedmont today.

[New Haven Neil]

Darkness here after midnight can be complete - the streetlights go off then - the IoM is a 'Dark Skies' location, very little light pollution.  So for the Perseids....thick cloud.  Pah!

[monkeysarefun]

10 minutes ago, New Haven Neil said:

Darkness here after midnight can be complete - the streetlights go off then - the IoM is a 'Dark Skies' location, very little light pollution.  So for the Perseids....thick cloud.  Pah!

Its too far south to see them here, so obviously  every night has been cloudless and perfect.

 

Actually, I dont know whether its the current lockdown meaning less car traffic and industrial pollution  plus heaps less planes but I've never seen the night sky so bright as its been the last couple of months,  its like being in the outback with the milky way a bright band across the sky and the Clouds of Magellan both bright and easily made out.

[Tony_S]

I am usually asleep when the streetlights go off. It used to be at midnight but it is 1am now I  think. . 

[simontaylor484]

The street lights aren't turned off here but they are in the area Jamie is currently staying around midnight if I remember correctly from.seeing the roadsigns 

 

[Tony_S]

12 minutes ago, simontaylor484 said:

The street lights aren't turned off here but they are in the area Jamie is currently staying around midnight if I remember correctly from.seeing the roadsigns 

 

I don’t think there are any roadsigns round here to warn us about the lack of lights. I have only noticed it on early morning trips to local airports. It looks as if Southend Airport will be a bit quieter after EasyJet and Ryanair flights cease there this year. 

[simontaylor484]

We have visitors tomorrow S il and her husband and boys are calling round after they have had a n hospital appointment with one of the lads. We haven't seen them in real life for ages Harvey her eldest was born 3 months premature he is now 16 and six foot plus They live in South Elmsall which is around 10 miles from here they coming by train then calling here then my Bil is taking them.home when he finishes work in his car

[simontaylor484]

The signs are blue and state No street lighting between 12am and 5am (  the times I have quoted are examples it is Leeds City Council. We are under Wakefield Council (my former employers)

 

[Gwiwer]

1 hour ago, New Haven Neil said:

dark, sarcastic ... Grammar School classrooms

If school days are supposed to be the best of your life then consider these:-

 

The Latin master who cheerfully clobbered you with not one but a pile of text-books.  Vertically downwards on the head;  

The Games master who gleefully slippered you (bared-cheeks) for any tiny infringement of correct spotless kit or his own house rules;

The Maths master who threw dividers / compasses across the room at you and in at least one case managed to impale a boy's hand to the desk;

The Metalwork master who threw rivets at you - or a lump of mild steel if no rivets were handy;

The Woodwork master who took clamped your hands in the vice and filed your nails with a large b*****d-cut tool for talking or otherwise misbehaving;

The French master who would never give anyone a credit but happily gave you a "fail" which automatically required a detention for achieving a poor mark - namely anything below 10/10;

The Art master - see earlier post;

The Biology master who would pull you up by your ears if he thought you hadn't heard something he said;

And the R.E. master who was so paranoid (and/or short of budget) that items would go missing that every single thing was padlocked away, including text-books, and would only be released class-by-class on payment of 10p "to charity".  

 

And yet here I am with school and university certificates to show I achieved something and a half-century down the track have found much happier days in very different places.  

 

Ironically amid all of that bullying and - without doubt at times - wanton abuse the one teacher I found truly inspiring was our Head of Geology who sadly passed away from the Big C only weeks after I had passed my A-level and before I was able to thank him and acknowledge the extent to which he inspired me to persist and overcome.  

 

 

[simontaylor484]

I have just had to do a double take Channel 4 have just advertised that they are bringing Changing Rooms back with Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen

 

We are going back in time it would seem

Edited August 11, 2021 by simontaylor484
Autocorrect

[JohnDMJ]

Good Evening Awl, for it has been thus far!

 

Dry and reasonably warm Autumn day was had albeit interspersed with one of @polybear's recent humorous cartoons!

 

Elsewhere, the state of edjukashun seems to be taking a (justified) battering!

 

15 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

Interesting the various posts made about exam results (something I have not really had to worry about for about 30 years or so) 

 

I have noted a significant change in the University Graduates that I have interviewed over the years for a position in my particular industry. 

 

I usually was given the very pleasant task of taking a candidate to the Director’s Restaurant for a slap up lunch and a probing interview (the “Director’s Restaurant“ could be used by any staff member through a reservation system for a good reason [such as an interview, or a team celebration]) but only directors could just walk in and have lunch. The restaurant had “silver service“ and the food was no better than what we got in the general canteen – which meant it was really bloody good).

 

Anyway, what I noticed over the years was that there was a decrease in general erudition amongst the candidates: which is to say although they were very, very knowledgeable about their speciality (medicine, cell biology, pharmacology etc), their knowledge of, and ability to converse about, non-specialty subjects seemed to decrease over the decades. When I started interviewing candidates (early 90s), the over lunch interview would range widely from discussing their specialty to other non-directly related topics such as books, music, ethics, hobbies, pastimes et cetera. When I last interviewed candidates over lunch (about 2010), many had difficulty in discussing any topic that was not directly related to their specialty. Leading me to conclude that many of that crop of university graduates were “well trained, but not well educated“. I wouldn’t imagine that the current crop of university graduates are any better, given the current insane insistence on exam results above all else.

 

Of course, some may argue that this is/was an unfair evaluation, but when you work in a multinational, multicultural and multilingual environment you need to get a good sense of how well rounded the candidate is - which would affect how they integrate into such an environment.

 

I tended to recommend those candidates who were able to show that they had interests (and a life?) outside of their specialty, with (admittedly) a certain bias towards those who had hobbies and interests that required either manual dexterity or provided intellectual stimulation (Needless to say, by the time they got to be interviewed by me their qualifications/ability for actually doing the job from a specialty/technical perspective was already established).

 

Apparently, according to people I had interviewed who joined the company and became colleagues, they considered my lunch-time interview both very demanding and very nerve wracking (one colleague who I interviewed and recommended and who became a good colleague, told me he felt that he had failed to impress me!).

 

Perhaps I am very old-fashioned, but my view is that university education has to go beyond “training you for the job“ (i.e. learning all you need to know to practice medicine, law or do experiments and analysis) and  teach you how to how to ask intelligent questions and how to understand the answers and (if appropriate) act on the information in those answers. It should also expose you to those things you don’t like and which make you uncomfortable and make you deal with this dislike/discomfort (real life does not come with “safe spaces“ or “trigger warnings“)

 

Long live the Renaissance man (or woman), say I!

 

iD

 

11 hours ago, AndyB said:

I remember my PhD supervisor telling me that fellow academics at Cambridge were quiting through boredom in the mid 1990s.

The reason being that what they were being expected to teach undergraduates for the first year was effectively what they expected to be covered at A level. 

 

I seem to remember similar comments from my father who was a senior lecturer at a London poly.

 

Thinking about iD's point about fully rounded graduates one option is to take either a joint, major/minor or "with" degree. The idea of the "with" being to expose the student to thinking from a vastly  different subject area, e.g. geography with astrophysics. 

 

There are also study abroad and year in industry formats as well to broaden horizons and add real-world skills. 

 

My own industrial year was with the RAF and set me up for life. Others in my year did placements in various other medical research labs and now either head up swathes of big pharmacy giants. Or in one case created one herself! 

 

2 hours ago, laurenceb said:

It seems to me that today's young people are taught how to pass exams not how to live

 

All of the above (sorry for not snipping but most seems relevant) reminds me of the Millennium Bridge across the Thames. Designed using CAD but the designers not, apparently, able to interpret the results it gave them!

 

As a corollary, ISTR the first Space Shuttle launch was aborted because one of the computers disagreed with the other three (all with a computing power less than a mobile 'phone today!) Turned out that the one was right and the other three were wrong!

 

It used to be the case that, in GCE Math exams, if you showed your route to the result, even if you reached the wrong result, you would score higher than someone who hadn't. Of course, you should always check your work!

 

On the subject of self-checking, all to often I see x, c, v, b, n, m & , representing the space bar as the poster has (probably) not checked what they have typed!

 

I recall an old Engineering adage that suggests: "there is never enough resource to satisfy the success of a project but there is more than enough to put it right afterwards!"

 

31 minutes ago, simontaylor484 said:

The street lights aren't turned off here but they are in the area Jamie is currently staying around midnight if I remember correctly from.seeing the roadsigns 

 

 

Our street lights go off at about 00:45 and come on again (if needed) around 06:00. No signs advertising this but it seems to be only in the side streets.

 

6 minutes ago, Gwiwer said:

If school days are supposed to be the best of your life then consider these:-

 

The Latin master who cheerfully clobbered you with not one but a pile of text-books.  Vertically downwards on the head;  

The Games master who gleefully slippered you (bared-cheeks) for any tiny infringement of correct spotless kit or his own house rules;

The Maths master who threw dividers / compasses across the room at you and in at least one case managed to impale a boy's hand to the desk;

The Metalwork master who threw rivets at you - or a lump of mild steel if no rivets were handy;

The Woodwork master who took clamped your hands in the vice and filed your nails with a large b*****d-cut tool for talking or otherwise misbehaving;

The French master who would never give anyone a credit but happily gave you a "fail" which automatically required a detention for achieving a poor mark - namely anything below 10/10;

The Art master - see earlier post;

The Biology master who would pull you up by your ears if he thought you hadn't heard something he said;

And the R.E. master who was so paranoid (and/or short of budget) that items would go missing that every single thing was padlocked away, including text-books, and would only be released class-by-class on payment of 10p "to charity".  

 

And yet here I am with school and university certificates to show I achieved something and a half-century down the track have found much happier days in very different places.  

 

Ironically amid all of that bullying and - without doubt at times - wanton abuse the one teacher I found truly inspiring was our Head of Geology who sadly passed away from the Big C only weeks after I had passed my A-level and before I was able to thank him and acknowledge the extent to which he inspired me to persist and overcome.  

 

 

 

Don't forget the flying board rubber!!

 

2 minutes ago, simontaylor484 said:

I have just had to do a double take Channel 4 have just advertised that they are bringing Changing Rooms back with Lawrence Llewellyn Bowes 

 

We are going back in time it would seem

 

Let's do the Time Warp again!!

[PhilJ W]

Evening all from Estuary-Land. Just had an interesting Zoom talk on the 'Old Gentlemans Carriage' (from The Railway Children). A vehicle that has undergone many changes in its 150 year history. In fact there is very much of 'Tiggers broom' about it. A fascinating story nevertheless. I have the requisite three sheds for Essex if you count the brick shed attached to the house though the wooden one at the bottom of the garden is in a state of collapse. Tea is ready to be drunk, be back later.

Edited August 11, 2021 by PhilJ W

[Gwiwer]

11 minutes ago, JohnDMJ said:

Don't forget the flying board rubber!!

Mostly harmless. To quote Douglas Adams. The worst you’d get was a bruise and a patch of chalk dust. Very mild compared with some other events. 

[polybear]

3 hours ago, laurenceb said:

It seems to me that today's young people are taught how to pass exams not how to live

 

Several years ago I asked a retired Chemistry Teacher (the FIL of a friend) how could young 'uns be taking so many exams compared to 20 or 30 years ago.  He explained that in those days we were first taught the subject, and then taught what was required for the exam.  Now it seems that the norm is to teach the students only what they need to pass the exam, and so they don't have such a good grounding in the subject in general.

[leopardml2341]

Goodnight folks