Grrrrrr

Very tired today so my apologies if this turns into more of a rant than I intend. My favourite moderate newspaper has been running a campaign to bring back the death penalty. I'm not going to have a go at the paper for pandering to their readership, or that readership for being who they are. My bile is reserved for Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who while is happy to rail against embryological research and campaign against abortion can't bring himself to say that the death penalty shouldn't happen full stop. What kind of spineless wet is the man? What constituency is he worried he will alienate if he does? What part of "Thou shalt not kill" does he not understand? Has he never in his fifty-two years in the church read the Sermon on the Mount?

The other thing that caught my eye this morning was this piece from Iain Dale about an email he had received. On one hand I agree about the nanny state, there is far to much proscription in schools as was show over the child who wasn't allowed to ware her faith based ring a while back. On the other very little of the discussion is about the most important line in the original email: Of course, they ripped the kitchens out of this school years ago. We shouldn't be making rules about chocolate or going to the chip shop to get the kids to eat healthily, we just need to give them the old the cardinal points of fingering a murder suspect, motive, means and opportunity. Opportunity means a canteen in every school serving a good selection of balanced meals, means means they should be priced to the market^[1]; motive is the difficult one, I would hope that if we get a generation of children growing up under the previous two conditions they may develop a taste for wholesome food on their own. That is almost certainly rank optimism, it may even be just as gullible to suggest that teaching this generation domestic science may catch their kids but I just fear that there are some people that consider obesity like benefits as a right.

While I'm probably not going to go as far as Dizzy and say that Jacqui Smith's new seizure plans are "quite possibily the most anti-liberty, anti-justice policy ever", since I can think of a few that could well be considered worse including most of the anti-terrorism measures, anything that makes peacefully protest less lawful, compulsory or even effectively compulsory by hanging essential services or benefit entitlement on them ID Cards, I do think that (almost miraculously) she has continued the tradition that each Home Secretary is more fascist than the last, this runs all the way back to Kenneth Clarke (it is fair to say he wasn't to the right of Kenneth Baker).

^[1]Of course beanz meanz heinz(scroll down to 1967, I love that factoid)

One of the advantages of insomnia

Is that on occasions you get to see, and comment upon, things that get released in the early hours first. On this occasion, it isn't such a great advantage as it is a subject the author has covered on a number previous occasion. Ben Goldacre is almost certainly known to all of you as the author of the Bad Science column in the Grauniad. When he isn't gaining nutritional accreditation for his dead cat he writes about  people making scientific, especially medical, claims without the evidence to back them up. Proper evidence mind, correctly run trials producing reviewed papers in respectable journals for example.

One example of the utter rubbish he has been railing against over the years is Brain Gym an expensive proprietary set of exercises used in thousands of schools in the UK. There isn't anything intrinsically bad in any of those statements about the system, what is a problem is the pseudo-scientific justifications used to sell these exercises to teachers. The exact nature of the what and whys of how this mumbo jumbo is used to peddle this stuff has even become the subject of a level 3 psychology module.

So while today's Bad Science column is telling us anything new, we still aren't listening enough to ensure that there isn't any more than the necessary amounts of cods wallop being taught to the children of this country.

Heaven forfend that these people are allowed to learn.

I am sickened this morning by the shear amount of bile coming from "the popular press"^[1] about the McDonalds "A-Level". Yes the quotes are required, as it isn't one, it is a diploma that is run to a standard set by the QCA, but to be honest I wouldn't see it as a problem if it was, with UCCA points and all. I will admit that I am on occasion cynical about qualifications, but then I work in IT where there are a million vendor based competencies and the introduction of this kind of formality would let people judge the relative merits of such things as, MCSA, CNNA, OCP etc.
It is also very telling that to a paper they all lead with the burger company (which has a comprehensive system of vocational training in the USA, very little of the fast food content in Snow Crash was Science fiction), rather than any of the other companies such as Network Rail and Flybe who will also be offering them.
It obviously offends all of these people that the "lower orders" be allowed to learn things.
^[1]This includes some bloggers.

How the other half think

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers has released the results of surveying its members on instances of plagiarism.
More than half believed internet plagiarism is a serious problem. I can only assume that the rest either work in subject areas that don't suffer readily from plagiarism, CDT or PE for example, or don't care enough, as I can't believe they have never had any pupil submit anything containing internet content.
That or there is a more optimistic explanation, the other respondents don't see the internet as a plagiarism problem because they have taught their students to use it as a research tool. These kids know about primary, secondary and tertiary sources and how to evaluate their quality, they can distinguish between reporting, comment and reportage. They understand the power of citation and digest while undertaking research and how to apply it in presenting a thesis.
Another statistic was that 90% of the sample were concerned about the impact of plagiarism on their students' long-term prospects. 100% of this author would like to re-iterate the position that it would appear to be an issue more about teaching the students the right way to use the internet rather than that are using it at all. I use the internet to find a great deal of information and content for things I write at work and this is considered a good thing^tm in the most part. Some educators see the internet in a different light, Martha Groom of the University of Washington, Bothell hit the headlines last year when she set students an assignment to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles relevant to their course.

Learning to read

The current labour government is criticising the Tory party for their pronouncement that testing should ensure all children have learnt to read to an acceptable basic standard by the age of six or seven. There is of course the utterly correct supposition that not all kids thrive on testing. But the really big point I am finding difficult to get past is: Six is so very bloody old to learn to read, let alone seven!
I'll happily admit that this may come across as idealist snobbery, but children should should be reading a round about three or four. I personally think that teachers should be expecting that all kids should arrive at school with reading as a skill. Now I don't think that this needs to be an empty politicians promise, it surely would save money to catch those that need extra help reading early and give them a little help before they arrive at school behind. I would like to see the statistics on how many children learn to read by when and any research on why. I would like to know if my knee-jerk reaction that there is a significant cadre of children who arrive at school without having had any proper guidance in reading is correct. I say guidance rather than "being taught" because there is a big body of evidence that suggests children don't benefit from early formal learning (this is the line that the teaching unions are using) but my personal experience is that children want to learn to read, they want to be in the club of deciphering those enigmatic runes. The problem is it takes time and effort, reading stories, sounding out words, playing with phonetics, being willing to spend the time and effort all day every day to help the children in your life to do that sounding out and answer the questions. This is why I may go looking for research in this area, to see how many hours each week an ordinary parent spends helping their child to read and how many parents in this day and age have the extended family or support network of friends to give their ankle-biters the best start in life.
Recently many conversations I have had with new acquaintances have been about the contrasts between the old concept of right and left and how the political compass gives the whole thing another dimension, well this is an issue I am firmly in the authoritarian camp on, the state should do its utmost to ensure parents are kept in line and help their children to read, with any learning difficulties identified early and appropriate assistance rendered. Any parent deliberately not engaging with encouraging this most fundamental of skills, far more so than understanding science or mathematics as hugely valuable as they are as building blocks, is tantamount to child abuse and should lead to the same amount of scrutiny from social services.