Whilst many of the other exampes on www.mydavidcameron.com make one titter, this example is a stroke of genius.
The choice of picture alone is worth a million quid, pre-international exhange rate fluctuation quids too.
The caption is great, but it’s not until you read the tag line that you realise that you have witnessed something special, true and timeless.
“We shall buy this place and fire you immediately”.
I just spent a very happy half hour reading some of Kevin McKenna’s contributions to the guardian. I agree with every word, it was a bit of a revelation. Take a look at the one about private schools. If it weren’t for Mr McKenna’s obvious talent and writing skill, I could have written that.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8423043.stm
Look, I’ve never been in this position, and I don’t know how I would react if this happened to me, but I’m damn sure that I don’t want to live in a country where people can be chased into the street and beaten by members of the public, no matter what those people have done.
Reasonable force seems to cover it for me. Perhaps there may be circumstances in which it would be reasonable to beat someone to a pulp in the street after chasing them from your home. Perhaps that person kept coming back, and perhaps you found yourself living in a hobbes-like state of nature, or perhaps the police were too busy hassling some Italian art student to come and help you fend off this deranged nutter who kept breaking into your house and threatening your children. There’s quite a few perhapses in there though. If those perhapses came true then ‘reasonable force’ would cover you.
Judges and magistrates are pretty conservative types, if they can’t shoehorn your actions into ‘reasonable force’ then you have probably strayed quite a long way from that which should be sanctioned in a country where the rule of law applies.
Of course if the hang n flog brigade want to live in a place where one is sanctioned to shoot people who come to your door, whether looking for directions or the family silver, then there are many places around the world where you could try.
All I’m saying is that we should buy a frozen chicken and put it in the freezer, just in case it snows and we can’t get out of the house. That’s all. I don’t want to dig a bunker under the dining room, or buy a gun to ward off frozen zombie hordes. I just want to buy a chicken. Does that make me an urban survivalist?
Whilst reclining in a very hot (and very well deserved) bath, reading A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century
“As soon as wealth came to be a mark of distinction and an easy way to renown [...] virtue began to decline. Poverty was now looked on as a disgrace and a blameless life as a sign of ill-nature. Riches made the younger generation a prey to luxury, avarice and pride [...]. Honour and modesty, all laws divine and human, were alike disregarded in a spirit of recklessness and intemperance.”
(From Sallust, Catiline 10.6)
You could have lifted that from last year’s reviews of the year.
The acceleration of time continues. I’ll be 36 in January, (I think, can’t actually remember it it’s that or 37). Anyway, I’m hurtling towards 40 at an increasing rate of knots.
In keeping with this I seemed to have joined a choir for Christmas, and have recently spent two brilliant evenings meeting people and singing with them at St. Nicholas Church in Newbury. I can’t help thinking of the sense of continuity, and of course of continuation when singing in a church.
As we were singing there were people ordering the church for Christmas, putting up a tree and decorations, setting up displays. It reminded me powerfully of the activities of the people of Morebath as recorded in Sr Christopher Trychay’s parish journal and set out in The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village
It seems there is! The Story of Newbury (Local History)
The last post about this was quite directly focused on the administration of OCR Nationals exams. This time, inspired by a comment on the last post from Andrew Field (of the excellent and venerable www.schoolhistory.co.uk), I’d like to think about the more generally applicable things I’ve learned from leading this team out of a bit of a hole.
Find out who gets things done, and how to ask them to do it.
This is mainly about working out where the real power in the school is for day to day getting things done. Examples might be the photocopy room, the caretakers’ room, school secretaries’ offices, bursar’s office. These people are really important – they work very hard and, through this hard work, can make things much easier for you.
Work with office systems, give them plenty of warning when you want something done, say thanks when things are done and make sure that if any of these people need you do do something, that you do it as soon as they ask. I’m not being machiavellian about this, nor, I hope, creepy or patronising. You can have all the plans in the world, they’re not going to work if you don’t have the support of the people who actually get things done in your school.
Ask for help
People will help you, if you ask. Chances are that there’s someone out there who can do part of what you’re doing much better and quicker than you, especially sending letters (thank you Jules!), exams administration (thank you Sarah!), or calling parents (thank you SLT!).
My team were also prepared to pull together, to take several hits for the team, so that we got closer to putting things right.
Ask for advice
Ask for advice – not to follow slavishly, but because other people will have thought of things that you haven’t – and their insight will be invaluable. This is one of the biggest things that I’ve learned – and the thing that has changed me the most in the last couple of years. Learning that I don’t have all the answers, that experience and insight from others is just as valuable (and in many cases much more valuable) than my own opinions has been an important lesson.
Serve your team
Make sure there’s paper in the printers, tea in the caddy, ice-lollies in the freezer, milk in the fridge, marksheets on the intranet, clear instructions and deadlines in emails. If your team is working twice as hard as usual, they won’t want to be confused about expectations, looking for treasury tags or bitching about their milk being stolen when they want a drink.
http://bit.ly/joUN9
I hope so. Clarkson is thalidomide in the nation’s bloodstream; he hinders our development.
His kneejerk ‘is it just me’ thinking and ‘common sense’ and ‘man on the street’ approach legitimise the continuation of a tedious, moronic, boorish, emotionally and intellectually stunted masculinity that makes the world a worse place.
Phew.
in addition to which, it’s about to make me out myself as an occasional mumsneter.
I note from a twitter post that the Telegraph leader writers are peddling myths about the good ol days of British education, claiming that an incoming Tory government,
must implement reforms that rebuild the ladder of opportunity for gifted students from poor backgrounds, and so secure Britain’s place in a globalised, highly skilled and meritocratic world.
This ‘ladder of opportunity’ is surely a pretty clear reference to grammar schools, the 11+ etc. Funnily enough, there was a thread about this on Mumsnet last week, to which I responded as below:
Don’t know if anyone’s mentioned this data before, but I had to comment on the opinions that rammars somehow enabled greater social mobility that comprehensive education does.
Anyone really interested in this should read ’state schools since the 1950s: the good news’ by Adrian Elliot. The book (albeit a polemic) counters much of the anecdotal stuff one reads in the press about the parlous state of our schools.
I should probably admit a bias too, before we go on – until this year I was a secondary teacher in a successful state school.
There’s a bit of data coming up, but I don’t think one can really understand this debate unless one is given a bit of perspective.
So, Elliot cites several studies, including Jackson and Marsdenn (1966) who found that social class B (lower professional) children were 4.5 times more likely to complete a full seven year grammar school course than children from those from skilled manual classes. These children were in turn than 3.5 times more likely to complete grammar education than unskilled, class E children.
When they looked at their data in more detail, some of those working class children in groups D and E who went to grammar school were ’sunken middle class’ – their families had formerly been in the middle classes, had owned businesses or had close relatives in middle class occupations.
Zweig (1961) found that only 8% of semi and unskilled workers’ children passed the 11+. Coates and Silburn (1970) found that in St Annes, Nottingham only 1.5% of the children obtained a place in a grammar. shock They didn’t study how many completed their courses.
Right – there you go – Grammars were highly selective places, which served to maintain inequality in society. Discuss!
I suspect however that even if they were aware of such studies the leader writers at the TG would find a reason to discount the strong evidence that grammars merely helped maintain the status quo.
A warm fuzzy feeling. Reaching the end of the writing of the first complete draft of the lit. review of second Warwick assessment. Another couple of hours and I’ll get to work on the references. I’m starting to fall into a pattern, typing in the morning the stuff I’ve scribbled the night before. Gives me a chance to revise and a chance to increase my word count whilst Iris and Maddy squabble over their breakfast!!
