[MisterMuncher]

I see someone had too much sherry over Xmas

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... -says.html

Either that or went for a run through the skunk farm.


Seriously, expect all manner of dirty tricks form the client media.
* Mail to revive Beergate "The judge bought his story, but we know better eh readers!".
* "Donkey farm millionaire" to become a dirty word.
* GB news to lay off the culture war and turn its guns on Labour full-time.

Considering that Beergate was a total disaster I'm not sure why they would repeat it.

Acceptance that the Tories are a beaten docket and the best they can hope for is deligitimising any future Labour government. A tactic one may have observed in its malign glory across the pond.

[kreuzberger]

All this points to, "are you in business?", was merely Sunak angling for a new job.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Speaking now.

It's pathetic. Utter nonsense, and you never get anyone on-side if you end every other sentence with a dying fall...

Just a bunch of hopes, wishes and aspirations dressed up as '5 promises'.

Worst speech I've witnessed in years. Sounds like a Year 8 reading an unprepared text.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Summarised:

[Andy McDandy]

As for his maths thing, more meat for the thick, who want to picture rows and rows of schoolkids doing Hard Sums while Gradgrind looks out for any signs of fun to be squashed. After all, it won't be the thickoes who'll be doing compulsory maths, just the young people who they're convinced are all know-it-all slackers anyway.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

I'm not surprised but I am disgusted by how much of a nasty little shit Sunak is.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

[Youngian]

Rishimania no longer appears to be a thing.

Who told Sunak that reinventing yourself as the ‘do the maths’ guy would be a good idea?

[Andy McDandy]

A good chunk of Tory education policy could easily be replaced by a 70s club comedian going "Kids, eh?".

[Crabcakes]

He may as well have promised “on average, warmer weather over the next 6 months”.

That said, he was very clear on wanting to be held accountable for failing so I look forward to his inevitable petard hoisting and/or weasel-words redefinition of success to somehow encompass reality not matching his pledges.

[Crabcakes]

On another note, the maths thing is the Tory equivalent of Corbyn’s broadband wheeze. There’s something to it - increasing numeracy skills is only a good thing. But the people tasked with implementing it would do so in a way that would simply make it a punishing grind more suited to an Edwardian classroom exhibit in a living museum.

Still, yet more reason for anyone young to develop a healthy life-long loathing of them. They really are going out of their way to build in their own obsolescence.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

As Mrs A growled a moment ago - "bastard's never heard of a curve of distribution".

[MisterMuncher]

On another note, the maths thing is the Tory equivalent of Corbyn’s broadband wheeze. There’s something to it - increasing numeracy skills is only a good thing. But the people tasked with implementing it would do so in a way that would simply make it a punishing grind more suited to an Edwardian classroom exhibit in a living museum.

Still, yet more reason for anyone young to develop a healthy life-long loathing of them. They really are going out of their way to build in their own obsolescence.

It's aimed squarely at an audience who consider the ability to do long division on paper the pinnacle of maths, but using a calculator to be "cheating".

The same shit you did in year 8, with bigger numbers isn't progress.

[satnav]

I think my main issue with the Maths stuff apart from the fact that there are not enough teachers to deliver it is that so much focus seems to be on exams rather than genuinely helping children who struggle with maths. When my daughter did her A' Levels a few years ago she opted to do Biology, Psychology and PE with the aim of going to university to train as a Midwife. The school were happy with her choices but persuaded her to also study additional Maths as an extra topic to help with her science. She wasn't over keen at first but when she went to the first lesson she realised that virtually everybody else in the group was in the same boat as her. I think the entire class was made up of girls who had opted for a Science 'A'Level but not opted for Maths because they really didn't have the confidence.

Instead of ploughing through the syllabus the Teacher encouraged the class to highlight which areas of maths they wanted to work on to help with their other subjects. My daughter really liked the teacher and the course and the way it was taught and her confidence grew. I think eventually students were given the option of taking a final example or opting out to work on their other subjects. My daughter did the exam and in the end the grade she picked up from the exam just pushed her over the points she needed to get into university.

We have a lot of kids at school who really struggle with maths but because all the emphasise is on taking and passing exams very little is done to actually analyse what specific problems pupils have so that proper intervention can be given.
Kids who finish up in the bottom sets for maths are either very weak at maths or they have behaviour issues or they have missed a lot of schools.

Just feeding all these kids the same diet of failure achieves nothing apart from causing a great deal of stress and the kids and the staff. In the last 3 years we have lost at least 6 maths teachers due to stress.

[Youngian]

Maths man is going to be thrown back at Sunak like family values was for Major.

[Bones McCoy]

On another note, the maths thing is the Tory equivalent of Corbyn’s broadband wheeze. There’s something to it - increasing numeracy skills is only a good thing. But the people tasked with implementing it would do so in a way that would simply make it a punishing grind more suited to an Edwardian classroom exhibit in a living museum.

Still, yet more reason for anyone young to develop a healthy life-long loathing of them. They really are going out of their way to build in their own obsolescence.

It's aimed squarely at an audience who consider the ability to do long division on paper the pinnacle of maths, but using a calculator to be "cheating".

The same shit you did in year 8, with bigger numbers isn't progress.

They also think people who memorise Pi to 9 places are demigods.

[Bones McCoy]

In these people's world, you just got the PE teachers (and Gullis) to teach the remedial class. - simples!

Like most "post 16" subjects, the syllabus is honed primarily for university entry.

An excellent post above identifies maths as a support structure for other subjects (notably sciences).
This is how it should be, many of my class (I'm speaking from 40 years ago) were better able to cope with the abstract concepts in the context of a physics equation or chemical or biological reaction rate.

I enjoyed A-level maths, but don't think I would have if we had the whole 120 of my year sharing the classes.
Probably more important, I don't know how many of my overqualified teachers might have stuck around to teach a class of pupils who'd not "got it" between ages 4 - 16.
"Just two more efforts, the law of averages means the penny's bound to drop in time".


Twitter's "school of hard knocks brigade" are explaining that we don't need maths, they've never used it after leaving school, and we should teach things like reading a payslip or calculating mortgage rates.
There's no reason why such material cannot feature in the school of hard sums (though probably well before age 16).
I do think that dangling mortgages in front of 17 year olds if an unneeded bit of gammon triumphalism through.


My own story ends with University.
I struggled badly with the 3 dimensional calculus involved with Maxwells equations and various electromagnetic problems. (These days it's almost all done on computers using finite element analysis, with calculus as a backstop).

Scraped onto a postgraduate course with those newfangled computers.
That was a very different type of maths: all matrices, set theory, Aristotlean logic and category theory.
I really got on well with that - its not all about crunching numbers.

[Yug]

Twitter's "school of hard knocks brigade" are explaining that we don't need maths, they've never used it after leaving school,

Except for

things like reading a payslip or calculating mortgage rates.

Both of which require some mathematical ability.

Just can't help contradicting themselves, can they.

[MisterMuncher]

Twitter's "school of hard knocks brigade" are explaining that we don't need maths, they've never used it after leaving school,

Except for

things like reading a payslip or calculating mortgage rates.

Both of which require some mathematical ability.

Just can't help contradicting themselves, can they.

It's the same old fear of (someone else) knowing too much. They'll mock the young for any failure to have a skill that they themselves learned but that has limited utility/relevance now, and also mock the young for knowing how to do "useless" things they themselves couldn't perform with a manual and all the time in the world.

Bitching endlessly about how everyone under 30 is useless on the Twitter account their grandkid set up for them on the phone their other grandkids have to monitor for scam messages.

[Bones McCoy]

We make our weekly return to Geroge Carlin's

Consider how stupid the average voter is.

I don't have a fix for that, but it doesn't stop me despairing.