Gravity
If an Avalanche is
Crashing
Down a mountainside
Shall we believe
That the atomised snowflakes are engaged in
A tacit
Conspiracy to crash
Through
Their destination
Or would
It be rational to conclude
The destination to be
Inevitable: a result of
Critical mass.
.NiK(00)
from the collection: Random Notes...
I decided some years ago to rename Gauteng, the so-called "Golden Province" in which i live, as Zone One. I intended it as a literary device wherein my Zone One could be many things that I choose it to be, without it necessarily being what it was when I was not choosing.
Some of the rationale for this had to do with the difficulty offshore citizens had with pronouncing the name [where is this place called Gouting? For instance] and I am sure that if people can't remember or pronounce your name they will tend to avoid using it. So I unashamedly appropriated the name from another part of the continent. Like other places this one defines its regions by Zones rather than by pretty names. In my view the name 'Zone' reflects a continental reality emphasized by our beloved leader's supreme masterstroke of turning our Zone One into the 'Washington's of Africa/Azania'. There are Zones where people can make loads of money and live well and there are Zones where they can only eke out a decidedly miserable existence. I am pleased that I live in one of those where people can live well without having to be politically connected.
Now I see that a new so called 'factional' novel is about to be launched onto the market and the setting for this book-Zone One. Is the name use spreading or is the new factoid novel one written by Moi? Is this the stuff of conspiracy?
Why would a place in Africa simply reduce regional segmentation to the abstraction of Zones 1- Whatever-. Does the numbering itself reflect the State's priorities? Or perhaps -
No one thought about it at all. There was no careful conspiracy. Or perhaps someone somewhere among the initiators thought it out: some genius of pre-modern communication theory. Don't you find that to be the most fun about conspiracy theories. In our general day to day lives we encounter nothing but broad ranging incompetence, foul-ups, plans shot down due to misinformation, disinformation or just plain thoughtlessness-and yet in conspiracies all is perfection-I'm always most curious about the seemingly supernatural powers of the unsung participants in the conspiracies that are the basis of conspiracy theories, aren't you?
The Zones are places that have been geographically segmented. All over the continent there are zones where no nothing lives, something lives, some people live and many people live. The places where many people live are always the most free: citizens are free to merge their shadow with darkness and slip unknown through their scurrying lives.
Zone one is the primary liberated Zone. It is vast, one of the world's mega states in a globalising world. It could be argued that Zone one is vulnerable to implosion. It could equally be argued that the issues arising that indicate potential implosion are soluble with money, effort and enthusiasm. Broadly speaking Zone one is the fastest growing region amongst a toddling but nonetheless growing region.
A while back people who obsessed about conspiracies placed the big corporate monster identified in the book S A [Inc] published some dozen or so years ago as the prime mover and shaker in the transition. They were allegedly the architects of change. The Liberal SA writer Jill Wentzel added to that fire of speculation with her evaluations of policy adaptations of SA [Inc} over the decades of the dispossession era in a groundbreaking book on the Liberal perspective around the time the country was liberated.I don't have it to hand and the local library has misplaced their copy-possibly someone wanted it and took it before someone else did?
According to the venerable Robin Mc Gregor, SA[Inc} owned some 90 odd percent of the SA stock market listings in the late 80's. Now they don't I'm sure, and the press is increasingly muttering on about the stark reality that SA Inc has ducked out of the country altogether and is divesting itself of its SA holding with almost unseemly haste. Now that would have been a strange outcome for a conspiracy wouldn't it-unless there wasn't a conspiracy and all the various players were doing was 'adapting their skills to the situation' as the lead character in the above mentioned soon to be published factional novel set in Zone One, is frequently apt to point out.
Notwithstanding this, the rump of the old SA [Inc] that remains will no doubt continue to exercise formidable resources with the possibly over cautious dexterity that we never saw, experienced or cared about with the late large murdered mining man [about whom I alluded in my blog story called 'the Apprentice Hit Man' in an earlier blog. This overweight life connoisseur undeniably, to my mind, holds sway as the most flamboyant, over-the-top criminal we have ever experienced, and being a country rich in diverse resources we have experienced many. There was theft on the grandest scale ever conceived and it just went on and on-Significant commentators have pointed out huge discrepancies in the man's dealings for over a decade -and the party as we all know went on-My personal favourite in all of that scam was the fake Arts awards thing where the artists got zip and the marketers won the prizes.
When you can have crime on that scale, taking place with impunity, then who needs more secret conspiracies if indeed there are such things. And was it a conspiracy or was the BIG BAD MINING MAN simply someone seeking attention on a vast scale.
I have mentioned before I'm sure my favourite conspiracy. Growing up in a small now forgotten mining town on the eastern edges of the eastern quarter of Zone One, east of Jozi-my journey to school was one undertaken daily through hostile territory. There were warring factions and tribes that hated each other and one tribe in particular; a newly ascendant one was violent in the extreme. I grew up believing that the members of that ascendant tribe were the most hateful of people and was later most surprised to discover that to be reasonably untrue.
Decades later, in my mid-forties I befriended an old Septegenarian who told me- in confidence over a few too many dops of Klippies and iced water - that the fathers of his generation would pay their sons two and six [refers to currency prevailing in 1950's -had a purchasing power parity index value of about R150.00 in 2006 currency-using the 'how-many-times-could-you-go-to-the-movies' index -five times for two and six.]. If that is not a pretty solid incentive to beat the shit out of your neighbour than what else would be.
I suggested this to him. 'Did the orders go out?' I asked. He shook his head for awhile, thinking back over a confused life of ups and downs. No-he said eventually. 'It wasn't as though he had ever been told he should do it;' he said. It was just that he didn't want people to think he was a 'joiner', as he called it.
So a wave of terror-certainly on me-was unleashed for two and six. A tacit conspiracy whereby we all agree without formalising our position.
I would suggest that the recent decision of a labour court to rule in favour of a Black man of the now ascendant ruling class dominant ethnic source, over a Black man of mixed blood/original colour origins reflects a tacit conspiracy in favour of the wrong recipient.[see Escom appointment saga recent press reports]
There is wide agreement that the dominant black part of the population are themselves usurpers. The so called 'coloured' man derives [frequently] from the ancient remnants of the Koi and San tribes who were engulfed by the southward migration of pioneering agricultural settlers and were effectively dispossessed centuries before the pioneering [so-called black] settlers were themselves displaced and dispossessed by an even later invasion of differently hued [so-called white] settlers.
In this new more materialistic post revolutionary age who was the more sinned against is slowly becoming a divisive issue as I predicted in a piece published in the Mail in Guardian back in '99.
Conschmiracy
I couldn't find the things I wanted today, they're in
The computer somewhere,
Probably neatly filed in place
Under a name I've given it
And a category I deemed appropriate at the time.
When I read of hackers entering the domain
And looting the contents
Of one's hard drive and thus
Becoming privy to these thoughts
I wonder if they find the things I can't.
Were I a conspiracy theorist I should believe that 'they'
Had taken
My thoughts away
And that is why I can't find them.
Then perhaps there is a more prosaic side to
This belief that groups meet in huddled rooms
And plan the enslavement of the world [and perhaps they do?]
Do herrings shoal from tacit conspiracy?
Or is it simply
Sensible
To pursue the pulse.
.NiK[2002]
from the collection: Rehearsing Nietzsche.
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Friday, April 14, 2006
Ruminations on the state of the weather and a triple nuclear double-tap
Some years ago I constructed my favourite personal hypotheses, in support of a science fiction novel I have been working on for decades. The hypothesis concerns what I called 'the Ringing', and a sudden and confounding pattern of weather change that occurs at the beginning of the 21st Century, and was intended as fiction. I am starting to wonder if this hypothesis could have validity.
I published this fictional hypothesis some years ago in a different Bloggosphere, under a general series of chapters regarding what I called 'the Azanian Konfederacy'. Since it hasn't been read by huge numbers of people [compared to the many billions of hits the Bloggosphere receives daily, I am presenting you with my fictional scenario instead of doing the Easter egg thing:
In 1998 we all read that India and Pakistan, between them, exploded six nuclear devices, over a period of some six months, as I understand it. Even if it was a year these explosions were inherently simultaneous in geological time.
Applying the principle of the double-tap body shot, to the planet, there is a possibility of a fatal dissonance and that we are truly in 'the last days'. To elaborate: We know that the shock effect of two bullets striking the human body in close succession over a tight piece of space, say about ten centimetres apart, could knock a large human down, where one or even two or three or even four or more may not. This is why military people are trained to use double-taps, repetitive double shot bursts, and why Heckler and Koch [for instance] make a three-burst firearm, the VP70 9mm Luger fitted with an eighteen shot magazine, as their weapon of choice.
We know the planet survived the double blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Well, maybe it didn't and we're only just starting to notice it. Then there were others Bikini Atoll and the whole fifties test series in the years leading up to the general treaty to abolish testing. Well maybe the planet survived. But what if the resonances of those explosions began to play a tune as they merged with the natural resonance's of the planet: from the fifties to 2006, may be long for us but for the world it's less time than it took to write this sentence.
Now we have six nukes in succession in 1998. That was new. That was three double taps, with maybe one, ever so slightly dissonant. Perhaps, rather like a nail being driven into a plank with successive blows with a hammer, a slightly disyncronous blow causes the nail to bend perhaps marginally perhaps badly.
Now it is still only six nuclear blasts; it's not going to have an impact like six meteors crashing into the planet. The overhead object that allegedly exploded over Jakarta and was reported briefly on page four in the Star newspaper [Jozi] a few days prior to the Big Tsunami [22 December I think]-a Christmas or two ago, didn't cause the planet to disintegrate, assuming it had anything other than co-incidence to do with the huge tidal wave that engulfed Banda Acre immediately afterwards.
A bunch could do. But could six nuclear devices of indeterminate strength? We don't know [well maybe more technically empowered bloggists than me, out there reading this would know?] But we do know inescapably that the global climate has suddenly become far less predictable than it had seemed to be only a generation ago and that perhaps the sudden global conversion by all the various spheres of society over this decade to the global warming theory of degeneration and decay is suspicious like a hand of Marabaraba, except as you know, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I trend to chaos theory. We fool ourselves most of the time and the rest of the time we have no idea what is going on. We're all still in Plato's cave staring at the shadows on the walls.
Maybe, during the two decades or more that people have been warning about the immanence of disaster from all the environmental damage wrought by our fossil fuel devouring industrial techno culture, this issue was compounding; and suddenly we are experiencing battering ram upon battering ram of 'weather phenomena': earthquakes tsunamis, hurricanes the like. We are assuming that all this is the outcome of What we've done to the planet and I'm by no means suggesting that it is not-it is pretty obvious from the growing body of verifiable data that radical change is occurring and that its speed of increase seems to be accelerating. The idea that this is exclusively a natural outcome of the past few centuries of industrialisation is seductive-easy to blame. On the other hand we have experienced a series of earthquakes in Afrika reported this past year: in central Afrika and in Mozambique-that is unusual. Further, on another other hand, maybe we have had an intervention. Not a divine intervention as some might choose to suggest: but a mistaken intervention in the form of three double tapping nukes. Mistakes happen all too frequently and this 6-nuke thing could have been a mistake.
So. So my fictional scenario went on as follows.
What if the battering ram of six astronomical explosions in quick succession mixed with a spice of dissonance from earlier slightly off key shots has dislodged the planet slightly-Do the people who explode these devices take the planet's vibration patterns into account when they go bang-or is it like it was then- all nationalistic fervour overriding scientific common sense.
What if the planet was knocked off key by a micron or two, the most marginal of wobbles, but it doesn't return to quite the same place on the rebound. And that initial micron gradually turns the spin onto a subtly different route; and naturally it cant stop and the movement has sent up ripples of change as the planet adjusts to the new momentum. The most marginal of movements but like the lash on the end of the whip those on the surface are closest to the end. We didn't have the competence to pick up the tsunami until it was done what are the probabilities we can even measure with consistent 24/12 accuracy a few microns here and thee in the planets axial direction. Fiction? Perhaps; but in a post Katrina world incompetence is an overriding probability.
It was notable that the 'Ringing' had shaken up the entire tectonic belt, east and west extending along the tectonic plate formation as far west as Algiers and Athens I believe and East to beyond Banda Acre in the south and Japan in the north and including a huge disaster in Kashmir. It shows no sign of letting up. The city of Bam in Iran disappeared a few years ago; another urban facility went this past month. Even New Orleans has disappeared and is barely making a comeback indicating just how difficult it is to fit repair work into the world's incredibly busy schedule. And so Iran finds itself in a new epicentre in an emerging scenario that has all the finest overtones of fiction
Before this period of destruction ends we could quite possibly see the annihilation of the American east coast line when one of the point elements in the rumbling belt of tectonica referred to above, the island of Cumbra Vieja in the Canaries gets whacked in the last ringing resonance of those earlier blasts and falls back into the sea. In doing so it fulfills Earthwatch's most dire prediction for the planet, not to mention that of Mr Bill McGuire who predicts this disaster in his book Apocalypse. He believes it will happen in January 2011. The planet will survive this, although the global financial system all but collapses and the USA becomes increasingly moribund as it handles the catastrophe wrought upon it with little appearance of having learned anything at all from Katrina.
I speculate as part of my own hypothesis that the event occurs on the 23rd of December in 2012, which is a date apparently referred to by the ancient Mayans who predict that the date heralds the next great age of the human race.
It may be possible that a strategically placed nuclear device could be exploded under Cumbra Vieja to trigger off such an event, which could be hailed, in a new jihad reminiscent of the great sixth century expansion of a new 'enlightenment', as an 'Act of God'. It would certainly be a sensible move for a country with Iran's credentials as an Islamic State to deal its enemy a possibly mortal blow, to add misery to the possibility that the planet itself may have experienced a near mortal blow [from a human perspective] back in 1998 and we are experiencing the irrevocable aftermath.
And for this reason it would be sensible for Iran and the fundamentalist Jihadist clique to bully the world with their demonstrations of robotically controlled behaviour in support of their totalitarian ideology in order to get their nukes up and running. It's a great theme for a novel and it's on our doorstep.
So we have two threads running: the planet is in trouble and we need a diversion that can buy us time to figure out what to do. Overtly at least the Yanks have run out of ideas, leadership and courage and ultimately they are hanging in space by their own bootstraps in an amazing new experiment in economics-the binary rule. The Fed rules.
It is an incredible thought that the human race with all that it has achieved could well be on the way to a partial melt down that could obliterate a considerable part of the species and we are almost unaware of the danger.
Cheers it's all happening slowly really: have another gin.
I published this fictional hypothesis some years ago in a different Bloggosphere, under a general series of chapters regarding what I called 'the Azanian Konfederacy'. Since it hasn't been read by huge numbers of people [compared to the many billions of hits the Bloggosphere receives daily, I am presenting you with my fictional scenario instead of doing the Easter egg thing:
In 1998 we all read that India and Pakistan, between them, exploded six nuclear devices, over a period of some six months, as I understand it. Even if it was a year these explosions were inherently simultaneous in geological time.
Applying the principle of the double-tap body shot, to the planet, there is a possibility of a fatal dissonance and that we are truly in 'the last days'. To elaborate: We know that the shock effect of two bullets striking the human body in close succession over a tight piece of space, say about ten centimetres apart, could knock a large human down, where one or even two or three or even four or more may not. This is why military people are trained to use double-taps, repetitive double shot bursts, and why Heckler and Koch [for instance] make a three-burst firearm, the VP70 9mm Luger fitted with an eighteen shot magazine, as their weapon of choice.
We know the planet survived the double blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Well, maybe it didn't and we're only just starting to notice it. Then there were others Bikini Atoll and the whole fifties test series in the years leading up to the general treaty to abolish testing. Well maybe the planet survived. But what if the resonances of those explosions began to play a tune as they merged with the natural resonance's of the planet: from the fifties to 2006, may be long for us but for the world it's less time than it took to write this sentence.
Now we have six nukes in succession in 1998. That was new. That was three double taps, with maybe one, ever so slightly dissonant. Perhaps, rather like a nail being driven into a plank with successive blows with a hammer, a slightly disyncronous blow causes the nail to bend perhaps marginally perhaps badly.
Now it is still only six nuclear blasts; it's not going to have an impact like six meteors crashing into the planet. The overhead object that allegedly exploded over Jakarta and was reported briefly on page four in the Star newspaper [Jozi] a few days prior to the Big Tsunami [22 December I think]-a Christmas or two ago, didn't cause the planet to disintegrate, assuming it had anything other than co-incidence to do with the huge tidal wave that engulfed Banda Acre immediately afterwards.
A bunch could do. But could six nuclear devices of indeterminate strength? We don't know [well maybe more technically empowered bloggists than me, out there reading this would know?] But we do know inescapably that the global climate has suddenly become far less predictable than it had seemed to be only a generation ago and that perhaps the sudden global conversion by all the various spheres of society over this decade to the global warming theory of degeneration and decay is suspicious like a hand of Marabaraba, except as you know, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I trend to chaos theory. We fool ourselves most of the time and the rest of the time we have no idea what is going on. We're all still in Plato's cave staring at the shadows on the walls.
Maybe, during the two decades or more that people have been warning about the immanence of disaster from all the environmental damage wrought by our fossil fuel devouring industrial techno culture, this issue was compounding; and suddenly we are experiencing battering ram upon battering ram of 'weather phenomena': earthquakes tsunamis, hurricanes the like. We are assuming that all this is the outcome of What we've done to the planet and I'm by no means suggesting that it is not-it is pretty obvious from the growing body of verifiable data that radical change is occurring and that its speed of increase seems to be accelerating. The idea that this is exclusively a natural outcome of the past few centuries of industrialisation is seductive-easy to blame. On the other hand we have experienced a series of earthquakes in Afrika reported this past year: in central Afrika and in Mozambique-that is unusual. Further, on another other hand, maybe we have had an intervention. Not a divine intervention as some might choose to suggest: but a mistaken intervention in the form of three double tapping nukes. Mistakes happen all too frequently and this 6-nuke thing could have been a mistake.
So. So my fictional scenario went on as follows.
What if the battering ram of six astronomical explosions in quick succession mixed with a spice of dissonance from earlier slightly off key shots has dislodged the planet slightly-Do the people who explode these devices take the planet's vibration patterns into account when they go bang-or is it like it was then- all nationalistic fervour overriding scientific common sense.
What if the planet was knocked off key by a micron or two, the most marginal of wobbles, but it doesn't return to quite the same place on the rebound. And that initial micron gradually turns the spin onto a subtly different route; and naturally it cant stop and the movement has sent up ripples of change as the planet adjusts to the new momentum. The most marginal of movements but like the lash on the end of the whip those on the surface are closest to the end. We didn't have the competence to pick up the tsunami until it was done what are the probabilities we can even measure with consistent 24/12 accuracy a few microns here and thee in the planets axial direction. Fiction? Perhaps; but in a post Katrina world incompetence is an overriding probability.
It was notable that the 'Ringing' had shaken up the entire tectonic belt, east and west extending along the tectonic plate formation as far west as Algiers and Athens I believe and East to beyond Banda Acre in the south and Japan in the north and including a huge disaster in Kashmir. It shows no sign of letting up. The city of Bam in Iran disappeared a few years ago; another urban facility went this past month. Even New Orleans has disappeared and is barely making a comeback indicating just how difficult it is to fit repair work into the world's incredibly busy schedule. And so Iran finds itself in a new epicentre in an emerging scenario that has all the finest overtones of fiction
Before this period of destruction ends we could quite possibly see the annihilation of the American east coast line when one of the point elements in the rumbling belt of tectonica referred to above, the island of Cumbra Vieja in the Canaries gets whacked in the last ringing resonance of those earlier blasts and falls back into the sea. In doing so it fulfills Earthwatch's most dire prediction for the planet, not to mention that of Mr Bill McGuire who predicts this disaster in his book Apocalypse. He believes it will happen in January 2011. The planet will survive this, although the global financial system all but collapses and the USA becomes increasingly moribund as it handles the catastrophe wrought upon it with little appearance of having learned anything at all from Katrina.
I speculate as part of my own hypothesis that the event occurs on the 23rd of December in 2012, which is a date apparently referred to by the ancient Mayans who predict that the date heralds the next great age of the human race.
It may be possible that a strategically placed nuclear device could be exploded under Cumbra Vieja to trigger off such an event, which could be hailed, in a new jihad reminiscent of the great sixth century expansion of a new 'enlightenment', as an 'Act of God'. It would certainly be a sensible move for a country with Iran's credentials as an Islamic State to deal its enemy a possibly mortal blow, to add misery to the possibility that the planet itself may have experienced a near mortal blow [from a human perspective] back in 1998 and we are experiencing the irrevocable aftermath.
And for this reason it would be sensible for Iran and the fundamentalist Jihadist clique to bully the world with their demonstrations of robotically controlled behaviour in support of their totalitarian ideology in order to get their nukes up and running. It's a great theme for a novel and it's on our doorstep.
So we have two threads running: the planet is in trouble and we need a diversion that can buy us time to figure out what to do. Overtly at least the Yanks have run out of ideas, leadership and courage and ultimately they are hanging in space by their own bootstraps in an amazing new experiment in economics-the binary rule. The Fed rules.
It is an incredible thought that the human race with all that it has achieved could well be on the way to a partial melt down that could obliterate a considerable part of the species and we are almost unaware of the danger.
Cheers it's all happening slowly really: have another gin.
Wednesday, April 5, 2006
Mrs Metcalfe's story
According to one Professor Metcalfe, head of Education at Wits University in South Central Zone One, aka Jozi, formerly disadvantaged citizens are 'shunning' the teaching profession, with less than 20 percent of newly qualified 'teachers' being drawn from that population group.[Business Day 19/3/06] Whether this is true is unknown. When I showed this article to a room full of colleagues one said that he was frequently at the Linder [a theatre on the local education campus] and it was always full of formerly disadvantaged citizens. I don't know if that was a meaningful statement.
There are validating statements though from other interested bodies that point to the same situation of declining numbers of aspirant teachers from the newly advantaged class. Presumably being newly advantaged means that there are far more lucrative opportunities for the brightest and the best. But we have no real evidence and these people may be using an inadequate base from which to build their argument. For instance anyone wandering around the campus of the local teaching academy would not see many formerly advantaged persons but would certainly be inundated with those who are newly advantaged.
Be this as it may, Professor Metcalfe attempts to put a spin on this circumstance digging up many plausible reasons why dark humans are 'shunning' the profession but the fact remains that apparently in practical terms five people leave the business for every new recruit. Those who are graduating are inadequate [in numbers] to the task apparently. Inevitably we will have too few teachers to do the job of educating the young. According to the Professor the profession is seen as lacking opportunities. Gosh-I wonder why. And is it really a problem-I don't think so.
Perhaps it has something to do with the historical nature of the job. Perhaps it is because the Professor and the rest of the educational prattling class have forgotten that they have cancelled the word 'teacher' from the new lexicography of OBE and converted all such persons [myself included] into classroom administrators.
The new OBE system actually requires that children educate themselves [bizarre as this would seem]. That is why they have been renamed 'learners' in place of the old term 'pupils', and it is the function of the 'classroom manager' [formerly teacher] to construct and maintain and environment within which that learning can take place, and carry out a battery of assessments. The 'Teacher' has now become an 'Administrator'.
And in a world rapidly becoming bureaucratised into a state of inertia there are plenty of opportunities for administrators to progress to the highest levels of civil administration. So the failure to encourage the newly advantaged part of the population into entering this occupation is largely because the new education authorities have themselves apparently not 'bought into' their own system.
The word 'teacher' in South Africa is a filthy noun; unlike say, in China, where the word 'teacher' evokes reverence. In our country the word all too frequently evokes contempt or disdain-especially if you are a male. I have long since ceased telling people that I engage in that activity for instance, the look of contemptuous disdain that shutters across the eyes of a listener when I mention my occupation is horrible to imagine let alone experience and witness and I have experienced it often enough to know that it's a no no-one of those conversation killers. Just reflect for a moment on your own reaction as you read this last revelation.
So I prefer people to think that I'm unemployed which is technically true since I am officially a temporary part time employee of the institution where I have worked for all of this decade-except that a part- time job as a 'teacher' in today's environment is a full time job in any other.
I am a fifth generation 'teacher', we've been associated with Harrow, the Royal Air Force and other fine institutions over that time and I have the pleasure of having been associated with many institutions myself some fine, many thoroughly unpleasant and in a few cases downright dangerous. In one institution where I spent a short time as a temporary employee during the seventies-I have never had a full time occupation in the thirty-four years since I graduated-I was issued with a standard Uzi type sub machine with a thirty two round magazine and the locking mechanism set to three shot auto. Everyone else in the room had an AK47 and many were regularly stoked up on 'boom' [or dagga if you prefer]. I had an overhead projector and a screen and over three months of five hour a day classes I managed never to turn my back on a class. There is invariably some pissed off person in every class you ever work with and the guy in the next-door class took multiple rounds one day when the student's pay and rations arrived late: he was writing on the blackboard at the time. My contract was a three-month one, which I chose not to renew.
Where was it you ask-it doesn't matter: there are guys like me all over the planet teaching guys like those the rudiments of reality. That particular group were former guerrillas who had changed sides [well theoretically] Name a team of gunmen anywhere shooting for any side and they've got a few teachers there -in my case teaching the rudiments of administration. So once upon a time one of them was me.
When you play word association games with education survivors [in the sense that education is like rape, with the same intent to eviscerate, innocence] you soon tap into intense dislike of teachers in a disturbing, too many people, albeit it there are those whose experiences had not bred that hostility.
When you consider the awesome power that the 'teacher' held in past eras and still do in many places, power which has been frequently abused all to often especially during our more fascist dispossession era, it is small wonder that those myriad hordes of adults who have crashed through that rite of passage harbour mixed feelings.
So for this reason we invented a new educating system, schooling from a different perspective and within it we set out to liberate the child from the oppressive domination of the Parent/teacher and replace the relationship with that of one between adults [irrespective of chronological age].
This is not easy. Nonetheless it is an essential goal of the new education system because in assuming that children can effectively learn what they must know to progress through the system, the only way you can get people to teach themselves is by treating them as adults.
What is an adult in this sense? It is in that sense represented in transactional analysis by for instance someone like Dr Alvyn M Freed [ TA for Tots/ TA for Teens]. For those who don't know what this is it's a form of communication analysis that assumes each of us to be three people [actually five but lets not get too complicated]. 'Thinking me' the rational adult, 'Bossy me' the eternal parent in all humans, and 'Feelings me' the child in us all. The classroom manager's function is to engage the universal adult in all citizens.
In other words the new classroom manager is not a 'teacher' albeit there may be elements of old fashioned show and tell type 'teaching' in a day's events. This 'teaching' is increasingly frowned upon and regarded as undesirable. It is also impractical given the sheer volume of work a modern school going human must cope with.
When a child asks a question they should ideally be answered with a question that leads them to search out and discover for themselves the answer to their query. [I am not dealing here with whether this system 'works' or not. The jury is still out on this.] The manager's job is to check the output of the 'learner' and assess whether they have achieved the desired 'outcomes' [which is far too complicated a concept to deal with in this short space but is broadly what the learner should be able to do when they finish doing.]
The new classroom manger is thus an assessment administrator, and if the education authorities are serious about resolving this alleged crisis to which Professor Metcalfe [and others] keep alluding then they should be engaging the media and spending some money changing the name perception.
To keep harking back to this deemed obsolete name 'teacher' is a critical problem because it makes effective recruitment impossible especially with ambitious young black entrants because the word alienates huge numbers of people. So the Education establishment is, in effect, in denial.
Alternatively of course the media, and particularly headline writers are equally at fault because they [quite reasonably] resist the name change which is contemptuously dubbed 'political correctness', because they choose to be unaware [or are simply unaware] that by reverting constantly to the reinforcing stereotype 'teacher' they are increasingly out of touch with contemporary reality.
One must hope that the new recruits to 'teaching' aren't disappointed when they discover that their primary function nowadays is childminding and classroom mangement. It has always been these things of course; that's why I survived the three-month stint in teaching hell, by careful mangement of a volatile environment.
Having said all this, one must also add that the job has also become the country's lowest paid hard work masquerading as a respectable profession. I know that my own workload has trebled over the past few years even though I keep reducing the numbers of classes I teach. My colleagues report the same and discontent is high. I know no one who would encourage entry into this job even though it still remains a pleasant occupation in many ways compared to, say, working in a call centre-where conditions are roughly similar and the pay comparable.
I hit the big 60 this year and my temporary short-term part time contract expires. I have the gravest doubts that I'd like to renew it. This new classroom managers job in which I have now found myself job is an administrative job and like most 'teachers' I am not a natural administrator: the one occupation is dynamic the other is passive. Teachers are active and energetic creatures, classroom administrators are essentially observers and evaluators.
My main occupation these days is keeping track of information about the kids rather than doing what I used to have to do. It's not all bad but schools are not really designed to keep track of huge volumes of bureaucratic trivia and there are other opportunities in our evolving society that pay just as badly but demand far less commitment. It is ironically because our new society actively discriminates against me [and my kind] both because I am a white man and because I am 'old' that is likely to keep me employed for the time being as a 'classroom administrator' for the shortage of recruits means that one's employers are having huge difficulties finding a successor. My present place has been trying to replace me for years, but every one they have found has been terrifyingly ineffective, albeit far better than me at keeping records; but the kids simply had no idea what they were doing and those people did huge damage to those whom they were alleged to be managing. The idea that children learn by themselves is an illusion.
In the world of Tai Chi it is said that there are four kinds of learners:
· Those who learn quickly and forget slowly.
· Those who learn slowly and forget slowly.
· Those who learn quickly and forget quickly, and finally at the bottom of the heap
· Those who learn slowly and forget quickly.
My sense is that the new system encourages the last two on the list.
Ironically today this 'teaching' business represents one of the few 'industries' in the new reverse racist South Africa where formerly advantaged citizens can be gainfully employed [if that is the right word for a job that functions on the poverty line] -whereas in the past it was one of the few places a formerly downtrodden citizen could find reasonable work, which tells us that nothing much has changed. The job is so badly paid that I am surrounded by colleagues who retired officially years ago and are still coming to work every day because otherwise they'd starve and unlike me each one of them has been paying into the pension fund system for decades.
My sense of the future though is that this anxiety over the pending teaching crisis is a misplaced one based on failure of vision. Having constructed a new education system based on the notion that children teach themselves and we the administrators assess how effectively they have 'learned' their work the next logical step is to combine our new education concept with the evolving Call centre concept and I would envisage schools twenty years hence as places where kids check into their computer console each day- log onto their learning machine and work through their lessons using computerised information processing instruments and the Internet. Technically they wouldn't have top leave home although the 'school centre' would in all probability still function for social purposes-after all most meaningful learning in schools takes place outside the classroom.
They would have to complete their tasks and complete the assessments within certain designated time frames as do the new information technology workers in the new factory-type call-centres, which exercise control over their employees in ways the architects of the industrial revolution could only dream of. The highly trained child-minders over whom Professor Metcalfe and her ilk are presiding with more and more anxiety would effectively become as superfluous as we aging cadres of the former teaching profession find ourselves to be, with all our excessive and redundant knowledge.
Cheers
The Bloggist NiK.
There are validating statements though from other interested bodies that point to the same situation of declining numbers of aspirant teachers from the newly advantaged class. Presumably being newly advantaged means that there are far more lucrative opportunities for the brightest and the best. But we have no real evidence and these people may be using an inadequate base from which to build their argument. For instance anyone wandering around the campus of the local teaching academy would not see many formerly advantaged persons but would certainly be inundated with those who are newly advantaged.
Be this as it may, Professor Metcalfe attempts to put a spin on this circumstance digging up many plausible reasons why dark humans are 'shunning' the profession but the fact remains that apparently in practical terms five people leave the business for every new recruit. Those who are graduating are inadequate [in numbers] to the task apparently. Inevitably we will have too few teachers to do the job of educating the young. According to the Professor the profession is seen as lacking opportunities. Gosh-I wonder why. And is it really a problem-I don't think so.
Perhaps it has something to do with the historical nature of the job. Perhaps it is because the Professor and the rest of the educational prattling class have forgotten that they have cancelled the word 'teacher' from the new lexicography of OBE and converted all such persons [myself included] into classroom administrators.
The new OBE system actually requires that children educate themselves [bizarre as this would seem]. That is why they have been renamed 'learners' in place of the old term 'pupils', and it is the function of the 'classroom manager' [formerly teacher] to construct and maintain and environment within which that learning can take place, and carry out a battery of assessments. The 'Teacher' has now become an 'Administrator'.
And in a world rapidly becoming bureaucratised into a state of inertia there are plenty of opportunities for administrators to progress to the highest levels of civil administration. So the failure to encourage the newly advantaged part of the population into entering this occupation is largely because the new education authorities have themselves apparently not 'bought into' their own system.
The word 'teacher' in South Africa is a filthy noun; unlike say, in China, where the word 'teacher' evokes reverence. In our country the word all too frequently evokes contempt or disdain-especially if you are a male. I have long since ceased telling people that I engage in that activity for instance, the look of contemptuous disdain that shutters across the eyes of a listener when I mention my occupation is horrible to imagine let alone experience and witness and I have experienced it often enough to know that it's a no no-one of those conversation killers. Just reflect for a moment on your own reaction as you read this last revelation.
So I prefer people to think that I'm unemployed which is technically true since I am officially a temporary part time employee of the institution where I have worked for all of this decade-except that a part- time job as a 'teacher' in today's environment is a full time job in any other.
I am a fifth generation 'teacher', we've been associated with Harrow, the Royal Air Force and other fine institutions over that time and I have the pleasure of having been associated with many institutions myself some fine, many thoroughly unpleasant and in a few cases downright dangerous. In one institution where I spent a short time as a temporary employee during the seventies-I have never had a full time occupation in the thirty-four years since I graduated-I was issued with a standard Uzi type sub machine with a thirty two round magazine and the locking mechanism set to three shot auto. Everyone else in the room had an AK47 and many were regularly stoked up on 'boom' [or dagga if you prefer]. I had an overhead projector and a screen and over three months of five hour a day classes I managed never to turn my back on a class. There is invariably some pissed off person in every class you ever work with and the guy in the next-door class took multiple rounds one day when the student's pay and rations arrived late: he was writing on the blackboard at the time. My contract was a three-month one, which I chose not to renew.
Where was it you ask-it doesn't matter: there are guys like me all over the planet teaching guys like those the rudiments of reality. That particular group were former guerrillas who had changed sides [well theoretically] Name a team of gunmen anywhere shooting for any side and they've got a few teachers there -in my case teaching the rudiments of administration. So once upon a time one of them was me.
When you play word association games with education survivors [in the sense that education is like rape, with the same intent to eviscerate, innocence] you soon tap into intense dislike of teachers in a disturbing, too many people, albeit it there are those whose experiences had not bred that hostility.
When you consider the awesome power that the 'teacher' held in past eras and still do in many places, power which has been frequently abused all to often especially during our more fascist dispossession era, it is small wonder that those myriad hordes of adults who have crashed through that rite of passage harbour mixed feelings.
So for this reason we invented a new educating system, schooling from a different perspective and within it we set out to liberate the child from the oppressive domination of the Parent/teacher and replace the relationship with that of one between adults [irrespective of chronological age].
This is not easy. Nonetheless it is an essential goal of the new education system because in assuming that children can effectively learn what they must know to progress through the system, the only way you can get people to teach themselves is by treating them as adults.
What is an adult in this sense? It is in that sense represented in transactional analysis by for instance someone like Dr Alvyn M Freed [ TA for Tots/ TA for Teens]. For those who don't know what this is it's a form of communication analysis that assumes each of us to be three people [actually five but lets not get too complicated]. 'Thinking me' the rational adult, 'Bossy me' the eternal parent in all humans, and 'Feelings me' the child in us all. The classroom manager's function is to engage the universal adult in all citizens.
In other words the new classroom manager is not a 'teacher' albeit there may be elements of old fashioned show and tell type 'teaching' in a day's events. This 'teaching' is increasingly frowned upon and regarded as undesirable. It is also impractical given the sheer volume of work a modern school going human must cope with.
When a child asks a question they should ideally be answered with a question that leads them to search out and discover for themselves the answer to their query. [I am not dealing here with whether this system 'works' or not. The jury is still out on this.] The manager's job is to check the output of the 'learner' and assess whether they have achieved the desired 'outcomes' [which is far too complicated a concept to deal with in this short space but is broadly what the learner should be able to do when they finish doing.]
The new classroom manger is thus an assessment administrator, and if the education authorities are serious about resolving this alleged crisis to which Professor Metcalfe [and others] keep alluding then they should be engaging the media and spending some money changing the name perception.
To keep harking back to this deemed obsolete name 'teacher' is a critical problem because it makes effective recruitment impossible especially with ambitious young black entrants because the word alienates huge numbers of people. So the Education establishment is, in effect, in denial.
Alternatively of course the media, and particularly headline writers are equally at fault because they [quite reasonably] resist the name change which is contemptuously dubbed 'political correctness', because they choose to be unaware [or are simply unaware] that by reverting constantly to the reinforcing stereotype 'teacher' they are increasingly out of touch with contemporary reality.
One must hope that the new recruits to 'teaching' aren't disappointed when they discover that their primary function nowadays is childminding and classroom mangement. It has always been these things of course; that's why I survived the three-month stint in teaching hell, by careful mangement of a volatile environment.
Having said all this, one must also add that the job has also become the country's lowest paid hard work masquerading as a respectable profession. I know that my own workload has trebled over the past few years even though I keep reducing the numbers of classes I teach. My colleagues report the same and discontent is high. I know no one who would encourage entry into this job even though it still remains a pleasant occupation in many ways compared to, say, working in a call centre-where conditions are roughly similar and the pay comparable.
I hit the big 60 this year and my temporary short-term part time contract expires. I have the gravest doubts that I'd like to renew it. This new classroom managers job in which I have now found myself job is an administrative job and like most 'teachers' I am not a natural administrator: the one occupation is dynamic the other is passive. Teachers are active and energetic creatures, classroom administrators are essentially observers and evaluators.
My main occupation these days is keeping track of information about the kids rather than doing what I used to have to do. It's not all bad but schools are not really designed to keep track of huge volumes of bureaucratic trivia and there are other opportunities in our evolving society that pay just as badly but demand far less commitment. It is ironically because our new society actively discriminates against me [and my kind] both because I am a white man and because I am 'old' that is likely to keep me employed for the time being as a 'classroom administrator' for the shortage of recruits means that one's employers are having huge difficulties finding a successor. My present place has been trying to replace me for years, but every one they have found has been terrifyingly ineffective, albeit far better than me at keeping records; but the kids simply had no idea what they were doing and those people did huge damage to those whom they were alleged to be managing. The idea that children learn by themselves is an illusion.
In the world of Tai Chi it is said that there are four kinds of learners:
· Those who learn quickly and forget slowly.
· Those who learn slowly and forget slowly.
· Those who learn quickly and forget quickly, and finally at the bottom of the heap
· Those who learn slowly and forget quickly.
My sense is that the new system encourages the last two on the list.
Ironically today this 'teaching' business represents one of the few 'industries' in the new reverse racist South Africa where formerly advantaged citizens can be gainfully employed [if that is the right word for a job that functions on the poverty line] -whereas in the past it was one of the few places a formerly downtrodden citizen could find reasonable work, which tells us that nothing much has changed. The job is so badly paid that I am surrounded by colleagues who retired officially years ago and are still coming to work every day because otherwise they'd starve and unlike me each one of them has been paying into the pension fund system for decades.
My sense of the future though is that this anxiety over the pending teaching crisis is a misplaced one based on failure of vision. Having constructed a new education system based on the notion that children teach themselves and we the administrators assess how effectively they have 'learned' their work the next logical step is to combine our new education concept with the evolving Call centre concept and I would envisage schools twenty years hence as places where kids check into their computer console each day- log onto their learning machine and work through their lessons using computerised information processing instruments and the Internet. Technically they wouldn't have top leave home although the 'school centre' would in all probability still function for social purposes-after all most meaningful learning in schools takes place outside the classroom.
They would have to complete their tasks and complete the assessments within certain designated time frames as do the new information technology workers in the new factory-type call-centres, which exercise control over their employees in ways the architects of the industrial revolution could only dream of. The highly trained child-minders over whom Professor Metcalfe and her ilk are presiding with more and more anxiety would effectively become as superfluous as we aging cadres of the former teaching profession find ourselves to be, with all our excessive and redundant knowledge.
Cheers
The Bloggist NiK.
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