h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

{[caer csd] I'm glad to hear that life is working out for Mark, FG. He and Nate seem to take to life there much better than the others. Karen's son seemed a likeable tough nut too. I have no idea how I would have coped in similar circumstances, not well I suspect. But I could cope with life above stairs in the Edwardian Country House

Only a week to go till we fly to Boston! I have been keeping an eye on the foliage reports and so far it looks as though our timing will be just right, but Mother Nature could well have changed her mind in a week and speed things up. We shall have a great time anyway.

I have been into our local branch of Talbots and checked the prices, so shall be comparing them when I come across a branch over there. If any of you remember, I said awhile ago that I heard a rumour that Talbots just swop the $ for £ sign here. At the current exchange rate of $1.55 to the £ it is something of a rip off. A $169 sheepskin coat might seem reasonable in the US, scaringly £169 sheepskin also doesn't seem too a bad price here, if you have the money!}

[Amy]

[-B-]

[kin] but I am on holiday as of five this afternoon

/* The cardboard Zeppo gives a sharp bark and runs back into the room holding a picture of sneakers in his mouth. */

Bad dog! No shoe! Find the bomb!

*sips in desperate attempt to warm up hands*

Perhaps the bomb is shaped like a sneaker and Zeppo is trying to tell us as much?

Or maybe he just has a thing for shoes...

[i]
wishing Munchers good hols
noting reliable sign of cold weather in cats coming indoors in order to use catbox

{[caer csd] *waving to Munchers as he sets off up the Nile*

I wish the geese would decide in which direction to fly, at the moment they are flapping about any which way!

I just know the autumn flowering bulbs and corms I planted in the new border are going to do just that whilst we are away.}

[H]

[]

*doing the snoopy dance*
I have an interview at the pub on campus today, the one place I wanted to work! He can't promise me anything, but so far, I think it's going well....we've laughed everytime we've spoken, so that might indicate a good working relationship....

Wish me luck!

Luck!

I got another wedding present today. From work. I mention this, cos it's another tea pot (and cups). You have no idea how many people gave me teapots (and steamers, of course, but I may have mentioned that one ). I can't imagine why as I spend most of my time at work pouring coffee down myself.

Oh.

Hang on a second...

[fg, whose poor , Lucy, has a urinary tract infection and is going to the vet today]

Will someone please comment on this? My anger needs to be let off by sane discussion: F86085?thread=211442&latest=1

Well, since you asked, Sol, here are some expansions. Everyone else can skip this if they like.



In the first rant, I talked about how schools divide kids into winners and losers and ensure that the winners are the children of winners, thereby maintaining the current social order. Here's how they do it:

- where schools are streamed, the kids in the streams correlate almost perfectly with family income. Thus streaming is a method of separating winners and losers

- the things taught in school are much closer to the life experience of rich kids than poor kids.

- the judging criteria favours the rich, especially in language. Ostensibly, the idea is that the schools are trying to improve the poor kids' language, but in effect, it causes the poor kids to talk less and less, meaning that they get less and less practice.

- schools and teachers have been shown time and again to discriminate in favour of middle-class kids - asking them more question, etc.

Thus, for a really poor child to become a winner in public school, he must somehow dodge the low tracks, escape or ignore the prejudice and contempt of his teachers, meet the risks of learning without emotional support, face increasing hostility from his loser friends, and find meaning in instructional materials which have little or nothing to do with his life or experience. Above all, in spite of never hearing it outside school, and barely being allowed to talk in school at all, he must learn to talk middle-class english.

Most people say they want equal opportunity for low classers to move up. But not if *their* kid moves down.

Another expansion: I said most modern work was moronic. Here's why.

- In WWII, when all the men were away fighting, the women were called on to take their places in industry. They proved that even the most highly skilled industrial jobs, which supposedly needed years of training, could be learned from scratch by most people of average intellegence in a few months.

- modern work is moronic by design. It is based on the principle that nothing should be left to the intelligence or judgement of the worker. Even unions encourage workers to look at their work as a comodoty to sell to the highest bidder.

- any movement to improve the situation will not go far as long as we care more about productivity, efficiency and growth of industrial output than we do about the happiness and growth of people

--------------------------------------

New stuff (not expansion)

I was going to talk about what schools really teach, simply by the fact of being schools, of having the power to compel kids to attend, to tell them what to learn, and to grade, rank and label them.

- First of all, the schools transmit a message of distrust and contempt: "If we didn't make you come here, you wouldn't learn anything, would waste your time, grow up to be a bum"

- another message: "even if you could be trusted to want to find out about the world, you are too stupid to do it. You must learn from us, broken down into tiny bits."

- Main message: learning is separate from the rest of your life. You have to get it *from* a teacher, *in* a school.

- schooling kills curiosity:
- why should kids ask questions when teachers already know what the kids should know?
- everything good is rewarded, therefore the things we do because we like to and want to, must be frivolous, useless or harmful.
- to rank kids, schools test and measure. This teaches us that we *can* be measured (at least everything important - all else must be unimportant). Therefore we are only what the tests and measurements say we are, can do only what they say we can do and deserve only what they say we deserve

- schooling teaches us to believe in the divine right of experts. We come to believe that all through life, there must be experts somewhere who know better than we do what is best for us and what we should do next.

- schooling teaches us that real life is a struggle, a zero-sum game, where no one can win without someone else losing. Making sense of the world can not be done cooperatively, only in dog-eat-dog competition. This follows from the ranking process, which sets students against each other.



*Steps down from soapbox.*

Er, sorry about that. Got a bit carried away.

Ok, GL, so how do we fix the system?

Home schooled kids will only learn up to the ability of their parents to teach them. The poor kids have poor parents who are a product of the same lousy educational system. So I say that home schooling poor kids will never result in lower classes having an opportunity to move up. In fact, if rich kids are given individualized and enriching learning opportunities in a home environment, I would think the the gap between rich/smart and poor/dumb will get larger.

It's impossible to individualize learning with 25-30 kids in a class. The current system tends to homogenize towards the middle, which I am by no means endorsing, but is it really such a ?

Sol, if all the tea pots are different, you have the beginnings of a collection.

FG, my deepest sympathy to you and Lucy. Have you tried the cat foods that are sold for urinary tract health? I have a cat - Rocky - who has problems now and again. The vet gave me medicine for him, a liquid, that usually wound up on me instead of inside him. So I bought the Science Diet dry food from the vet and nearly choked at the cost. But he got better. For the last year or so, I've given him the Purina UT formula. He hasn't had another infection, so it works. And it sure is cheaper.

[PCT]

*Groans, pondering whether to bother reading the backlog.*

Best of luck to Red and Lilly.

[BB]
A Weekend off for a change