I am getting used to the fact that I shall never be a billionaire. I am not happy about it. I've spent years in my attempt to be a millionaire and I'm sure I have earned more than that in my life. Nonetheless I do own a parcel of manuscriptus, a few elderly motoring vehicles, about 6500 increasingly useless books now that Google has made it into the American multiverse, but absolutely no millions.
I've also now discovered that to be a millionaire is no longer such a big deal.
A man I know told me the other day that he had to take one hundred and sixteen million dollars in cash with him on a journey to a place called Bulawayo-place of kings, I'm told-and that was just to pay for hotel accommodation, he had to take his own food and water as the hotels couldn't supply these things. I was stunned. I didn't think any information coming out of that benighted country could still move me but I was incontrovertibly stunned.
On the other hand another person I know works at a larney hotel in a place called Dubai -a place of Sheiks, I understand. The most expensive room in the place runs at twenty three thousand dollars a night. Food and drink is not supplied [water is available] although they are all available in exchange for additional money.
Notwithstanding the common word dollars, we understand that about one hundred thousand dollars from the place of kings would buy one dollar used in the place of sheiks so a room at the larney hotel could well require one to be a trillionaire whatever that is-
And here I am unable to accumulate a simple million.
Which brings me to the point of all this. We are coming up to interest rate debate time again and issues are being raised about inflation and inflationary trends. [ For offshore readers {OR}, inflation refers to the rate at which your assets lose value even while you believe them to be gaining value-I think]
The Americans [Firmians] with all their debt have almost no inflation-A millionaire there [and there are more than ten million apparently] is still worth something. Here -well, one reads of lotto winners blowing a million in an afternoon on a few rounds of drinks, and with pondoks in the townships selling these days for R200,000, a million wont buy much of a house anymore-And that's inflation, because the economy hasn't really grown to any great shakes-toddling more like it and you should be steaming to get that much inflation; and at the moment we are just beginning to get up a head of steam and now success anxiety is setting in again.
Our leaders tell us inflation is a tamed beast [assuming we continue to pretend that the 'core' inflation we stopped reporting some years ago has gone away when we know it hasn't.] Nonetheless even someone as relatively uncharitable as myself would grudgingly admit that it is much harder to use the 'buy now before prices rise' sales closer than it was only a few years ago, indicating far less infklation than we were used to.
Still, compared to Zimbabwe with its 1000 plus % inflation we are a trouble free zone and we should continue to bite the bullet for a while longer. We caught a wave at the right moment in the the great surf competition of existence, for a change, and our economy is generating interesting momentum and it would be good for us to run it hard and push the limits gently.
To begin raising interest rates, no matter how tempting the data seems will signal the onset of bad times just before an election.
Bad news before and election is not usually sensible, notwithstanding that it is most unlikely to have a negative impact on the ruling party's chances. They are having a wonderful time lately riding roughshod over the wishes of the undershod Povo in places with exotic names like Matatiele [sic], Khutsong and Soshenguve [sic] and other less pronounable no places.
It is almost inconceivable that this ruling party should suffer any form of setback at the polls, nonetheless the unexpected outcome of the Palestinian election should be a weakish indicator not to rock the boat too heavily before the schmucks go out to vote lest they see through the bullshit long enough to remember where they shouldn't put their crosses.
The inconvenience of having to bribe possibly thousand of itinerant politicians to cross the floor in September could well outweigh the spurious benefits gained from any rates hike.
There is though a disturbing indicator which merits thought before I conclude this anti-rates hike rant. [try saying that quickly]You'll know from previous blogs on this subject that my opinion is that the rates differential between us and 'them' should be narrowing, to reduce the volumes of hot money in our system. This is especially while we are basking in the multiplier effect of all that loot from Barclays ABSA [ and before the money stream inevitably starts to go negative.]
This large 'traditional' gap between our rates and those of our global associates: competitors, suppliers, and customers was important once; however its continuance is a drag on our own internal development and may be contributing to a process of de-industrialisation. It also indicates fear of something.
Now, with regard to that disturbing indicator. Last week Nova published a curious article with accompanying graph table from one of those plethoras of international ratings agencies that abound these days.
According to this Particular one we [SA] have one of the lowest rates of citizen involvement in 'own businesses' in the world. Some ninety four percent of SA's economically active population work for a wage of some sort and are hence not in charge of their own lives. Not only that but the percentage of the population opting for some entrepreneurial activity is declining. In other words we are inexorably moving towards ninety-seven, ninety-eight percent wage earners.
These two startling pieces of information simply seem to fly in the face of all this business like lickety split stuff that's been going on around us for a few years: more snazzy cars, malls opening almost weekly and everybody out there shopping till they drop. Surely all these people are making fat in their own businesses because salaries haven't exactly gone through the moon other than for the newly advantaged elites who've cornered a market through BEE ing well greased.
One is also aware that there has been a rise in the number of operating businesses regularly reported by the Statistician General [SG] which although some of the SG's numbers crunched out wrongly lately also does seem to accord with visible objective reality.
Then to add complexity to this information the Nova article went on to state that we have the world's near highest rate of new business failures.
And in addition the article suggested [fourthly] that an abnormally high percentage of new business start ups [ in SA compared to the world trend] were born more out of desperation, than through any true appraisal of a felt market need.
For instance you are retrenched because you are the wrong colour and start a business in desperation. You find that you cannot sell 'your product' to any other legally constituted business organisation because of their 'rules'. These are that your business be owned by a newly advantaged BEE utiful person. You can sell to individuals but you cannot ever grow. You crash out into bankruptcy, alcoholism and quite possibly an emerging 'poor light' person problem that will dwarf that of the nineteen thirties and form the basis for the criminal gangs of 2020.
Given the huge volumes of money allegedly floating about to fund new business ventures, plus the eyeball popping evidence of rising numbers of fat cats drawn from the newly advantaged sectors of the population and the fact that the economy is generally steaming ahead, and one is faced with an apparent paradox, viz a viz the Nova article. How can we have this business boom if fewer and fewer new businesses are coming into existence? Surely this rating agency has got it wrong? And having decided that I went back to sleep, and had a nightmare.
What if they are right-what if huge numbers of potential new business entrants are not starting their own ventures but are 'buying' into existing businesses as a consequence of State intervention in the form of BEE ownership 'scorecard' requirements. What if they are buying into formerly exclusivist privately held businesses in such vast numbers that the figure for business entrant activity has become distorted and appears nugatory..
Should this be so then by inference this huge business failure rate could well result [in all probability] from retrenched formerly advantaged males using up their severance pay to fund some pathetic take-away fast food business, for instance. This would facilitate a statistically distorted number of desperation start-ups. The article was silent on this.
So what does this mean and why should it affect the rates decision?
The upshot of this is that there may well be a large number of relatively inexperienced 'business owners' who have intentionally acquired key stakes in a larger and larger share of the market, and their decisions in response to a toughening market will inevitably be more anxiety driven than would normally be apparent in a business with a more sanguine management for its size.
That old thing about making hay while the sun shines was real. When markets turn down there are losers, and those who lose battle to get back into the game, especially in a game where what you are selling is colour and grease: just look at our soccer team who had to get as much money as possible up front believing they would never get another chance at heaven [in the form of money]and they were proved right when they crashed out of the Nation's Cup.
People who suddenly acquire wealth need time to adjust to owning wealth that is more than a just a pile of debt instruments, and a little pressure on the rates right now may inadvertently see a larger than anticipated 'margin' take to the hills, because, as our beloved deputy president tells, us a million may not be much anymore [okay 700,000] but when it's translated into mortgages it chews up a great deal of salary. This transforming base in the emerging pool must be nurtured for a while longer so that they can reduce debt through earnings before they have to reduce debt through firing people.
So NiK's opinion therefore is: drop the rates a quarter point, with the option for one last quarter point cut before the fallout arrives from the pending Iranian/Israeli/Palestinian collision that increasingly looms with grim foreboding. There may not be another opportunity for two or three years.
Dropping the rate will squeeze out some marginal hot money speculators, weaken the rand rate slightly and give our exporters some breathing space. The Chinese phenomenon looks likely to expand exponentially, like cyberspace, for a while to come yet, and it brings with it as much disinflationary [deflationary if you prefer] pricing pressure as oil paranoia brings on its price galloping opposite and if it doesn't perhaps we could use a little fiscal adjustment on import duties to bring prices down and scoop it back later through some other instrument.
The debt structure financing the above mentioned 'takeover' change of ownership will remain intact and serviceable for a while longer before the harsh onset of reality drives a potentially larger than anticipated number of businesses to the wall, leaving us more oligopolistically* dominated than we already are.
Loves ya all
[For OR. Oligopolies are markets which are dominated by a handful of players: e.g. Cell phone service providers [in SA] operate in a market 'owned' by only three players, Vodacom, MTN and Cell C. Oligopolies are first cousin to Monopolies and enjoy the same windfall profit characteristics with the frequent appearance of collusive pricing practices.]
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Saturday, January 21, 2006
No romantic teachers please
No romantic teachers please.
Schoolteachers who were no longer wanted are now wanted.
I'm staring at a headline in yesterday's Business Day newspaper [Jan 20, 2006] ---'Back-to-basics teachers wanted, not romantics' a report by one Sue Blaine. I puzzled through most of the article which seemed a generally pretty humdrum report on some education department recommendations that will apparently take the rest of the year to surface, and may never surface, and broadly deals with what could be called a maybe, maybe class of speculative news report of the type that normally merits no more than a second glance, simply because it isn't news, except of course for the teasing headline.
It takes the writer until the last column to sneak in the really radical part of this ministerial committee proposal. Apparently the ministerial educational committee proposes to 'Retrieve the word 'teaching',' Curious- I think.
For those readers who are confused here, the entire ethos of the new Outcomes Based Education system, to which South Africa has expensively moved recently, is concerned with virtually eradicating the role of the 'teacher' in it's historical sense.
The principle is to replace that word with a 'classroom manager' word/ phrase. This entity arranges the material that must be 'learned' by a learner and then assesses what has been 'learned'. As I observed in a previous blog [The bureaucratisation of childhood] the guiding inspiration behind the new education system [not to be confused with the content] is that the child educates itself under guidance and adroit leadership and in principle it is an outstanding concept. The traditional 'talk and chalk' teacher becomes both manager and child minder presiding over a series of 'experiences' from which young impressionable humans will derive all the knowledge accumulated by society over millennia.
In effect the current teaching cadre of 300,000 odd humans should have been terminated because their approach was declared obsolete. Instead they have effectively been mass re-employed, in a manner that is close to fraudulent, as information processing administrators. Notwithstanding this everyone [ie: newly re-titled teachers and society at large] thinks that they are still doing their original jobs. They should have been replaced with 300,000 completely newly trained classroom managers, although for obvious reasons that is not a particularly practical idea. Nonetheless that is how radically different OBE is to anything we have ever experienced.
The ultimate 'futuristic' vision of an OBE [Outcomes based education] system, mine certainly, is one where all so-called 'learners' are independently logged online into giant compendium sized interactive learning systems with virtual reality simulation devices encasing their heads. A 'classroom manager' wanders about the room checking that the kids don't litter, that they are not sneaking off into cyberspace for a little truancy on the 'net, and of course that the indicators reveal that the learner is progressing normally.
All assessment tasks would be completed graded and returned within moments of performance thus enhancing an accelerated learning curve reinforced with regular personalised revision. People would take their 'matric' whenever they were ready: some early, others, who played more, later. This system would produce progenies from every sector of our society. Presently there is a current disturbing trend towards greater and greater exclusion of those traditionally excluded.
OBE is an interesting experiment and for a limited number of outstanding children who are fortunate enough to have sophisticated resources access, and clever parents, it is a heaven sent dream that facilitates glory.
But for the rest: kids operating in an inherently unruly environment, and most classrooms are inherently unruly environments, this self-realisation is slow coming, and there are increasing reports that refer to an alarming rise in drop-out rates, kids reaching senior school who can't read and write, and a veritable tide of growing innumeracy that embarrassingly places us at the bottom of the international 'clever schoolkids' heap.
Therefore what was really fascinating about the Business Day article was their punch line references to the Ministerial committee report, quoting: 'Apartheid schooling and resistance against it, coupled with a [romantic] 'progressivist' [sic] theory [with its replacement of 'teaching' by 'facilitation'] have served to undermine the key role of teaching in schooling and education.'
Sue Blaine finished her report by quoting this remarkable statement, also from the ministerial committee report: 'Some of the key problems in SA's State funded education system-.are caused by the move away from the practice of 'teaching'.' Wow talk about understatement-. The entire problem more likely apart from the most obvious reasons. The opportunity cost of embarking on this incomprehensible [for many] OBE system is the thousands of schools not built, upgraded and renovated, the thousands of teachers who have simply given up and opted out, free education opportunities. This OBE operating 'system' could turn out to be one of history's most sympathetic cons. What should have been a sensible and simple idea to be grafted into what we had and then tweaked has become a gobbling bureaucratic nightmare that is swallowing all the money that should be on the front line, not to mention swallowing childhood for millions. It is rather like George Bush sending his troops into Iraq with inadequate armour and minimal back up because the general staff wanted to create a different way to win wars by avoiding fighting.
This alleged position shift by the ministerial committee is a remarkable one and one must wonder what has prompted this sudden about face, although the thought that the entire system is collapsing into a sea of mediocrity does come to mind. Nonetheless we are faced with incongruency.
Only months ago the National Curriculum Statement [NCS] for grades 10--12 was published, and was promoted vigorously by the minister, with regular advertisement in many varied media. Already a hundred thousand or so 10th grade kids are about to experience the end of childhood as the new system kicks itself into life.
The following statement appears on page five [of the NCS] outlining the 'kind of teacher that is envisaged' for the new system: 'mediators of learning, interpreters and designers of learning programmes and materials, leaders, administrators and managers, scholars, researchers and lifelong learners, community members, citizens and pastors [whatever they are] assessors and subject specialists.'
Nowhere in this statement is there any space for the old fashioned 'tell 'em tell 'em and tell 'em again' stuff that used to be called teaching, and which has been actively discouraged for years now. [Presumably this is what the ministerial committee intends by 'teaching' in place of 'facilitation'.] Interestingly the word facilitation does not appear in the NCS either.
Rather the emphasis is on the penultimate of the qualities outlined above, namely 'assessment'.
Point 2.1 of the recently published 'Subject Assessment Guidelines' states: 'Assessment should be part of every lesson-and teachers should plan assessment activities to complement learning activities' No mention of any teaching in that statement, in fact 'the informal daily assessment and the formal 'Programme of Assessment' should be used to monitor learner progress throughout the school year.'
A technical note.
Bear in mind here that most school 'lessons' are approximately thirty-five minutes long and most classes contain upwards of forty energetic, robust and boisterous young humans. The newly dubbed 'learning outcomes mediator' [former 'teacher'] probably runs an average stable of about two hundred children to comply with a 'full timetable'' requirement.
Multiply this 200 by about 19 [for a language teacher] formal assessments per learner. Presume that each takes only twelve minutes to assess [they actually take longer I'm told but we assume a simplified assessment to cope with time constraints] and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the former 'teacher's' homework amounts to: 200X19X12 = 45,600 minutes of additional 'assessment' workload. Alternatively 760 hours of non-classroom formal assessment work. Another way is to say, more than one entire month working full time 24 hours a day, or if we talk in terms of a statutory 40 hour week, then 19 additional weeks a year compared to the 'old days' to assess only.
We are obviously going to need much longer years to get all this done, or we will burn out 'class room' managers faster than we are.
For instance, I recently spoke to a science teacher who said she took early retirement, rather than face another such year. At that stage it was only the Matric classes that were subject to this new bureaucratic regime. So far this is only about the formal assessment: there is also continuous assessment. Incidently for this huge additional burden she was taking home five grand a month after deductions and found that kids she had taught recently would do a six month bookkeeping course after school and then earn more than she did.
Continuous assessment is intended to be carried out on a minute-by-minute basis every lesson. This means that 'teaching' has had to be eliminated because it is too time consuming [and it is] and it must be supplanted by some form of guided instruction model that the kids follow - The ministerial; committee can't have it both ways - the classroom time is finite. If eighty percent of a classroom 'learning outcomes mediator's' time is devoted to assessment and twenty percent to maintaining some semblance of classroom discipline then truly there is no time at all to 'teach' in the old fashioned sense, assuming that what the ministerial committee means by 'teaching' is what I understand by teaching.
For instance to follow a typical new age classroom experience for young tenth graders: 'OK here are five pages of brilliantly constructed text outlining the essential elements of a macroeconomic system and the role of micro- economics within that system. When you've finished reading it, answer the questions about Cuba and the lost city of Atlantis and don't forget to demonstrate an ability to co-operate with the other five learners in your group-you have ten minutes to arrive at a definitive analysis of Marxian dialectic materialism and after that I must assess whether your contribution has helped save the people of South east Asia from a terrible tsunami or whether your compulsive need to appropriate your classmate's MP3 player, so you could listen to Shakira on the earphones, has forever ruined your chances of being anything other than unemployed in our job shedding economy.'
The Process
Each grade ten 'learner' will complete a total of 87 formal assessment tasks [across their total subject range] being their requirements for the year and then progress to complete another 87 formal assessment tasks in grade eleven and then because grade twelve is a tough year they will only have to complete 81 tasks. [Ref: National curriculum statement subject assessment guidelines.] Oh of course then they write the matric exam, which counts 75 % of the final matric mark-all that effort for twenty five percent of the final mark! If 'teachers' weren't generally such a charming collection of well-meaning schmucks who are so completely fucked over by their various sweetheart unions they should be taking the State to the CCMA for abusive working conditions
There is no reference in any of these documents to 'teaching'. In fact given that the child has to produce some completed task of momentous importance almost every third school day there is simply no time for teaching in any sense never mind the old fashioned system. Obviously this is why they are now called 'learners'. They are in effect becoming abused learners, and I predict a class action suit by disgruntled citizens about three decades from now, against the State for stealing childhood.
As a result of the bizarre assessment demands being made on the euphemistically so-called 'teacher' the numbers of such humans is declining rapidly, as anyone who can ducks from the job to take up more lucrative and less time consuming occupations. Those who pontificate on matters educational have to resort to the traditional scoundrels assertion that 'dedicated teachers' will put up with any old crap because they are dedicated-bullshit. They are leaving and not many are joining. Anecdotal observation has it that only twelve new maths 'teachers' graduated last year countrywide, but of course this may only be a malicious rumour. There was also a brief report, immediately canned, on SAFM last week to the effect that private schools are now encountering recruitment difficulties.
This week the radio has been broadcasting plaintive advertisements offering prospective teachers free tertiary education in an attempt to ensnare foolish young acolytes into a trade that like the clergy has become less and less attractive in a fast-moving materialist world.
Who really wants to work their sanity to the bone controlling unruly classes in order to assess their ability to learn almost nothing at all for an immense output of energy-They all end up writing the same kind of Matric and the results are no great shakes. Mr Perlman on SAFM ran a debate this week on misleading advertising and no mention was made of the fact that this advertisement for teachers is so misleading as to be actionable. I think I am going to send this blog to the advertising standards authority and demand that all advertisements for 'teachers' carry a compulsory health warning like tobacco does. This job will be injurious to your health and your long-term financial well-being. Rather go study to be an accountant or a lawyer.
Frankly the authorities appear at odds with themselves, assuming Sue Blaine's article has any veracity. This is not in itself unusual. What is strange is that they do no seem to understand that the die has been cast-you can't have both. Attempting to develop any real understanding of any complex subject with a mixed class of random 16 year olds can take weeks of patient effort. This idea that 'learning' can be acquired through some osmotic process involving sophisticated self help coupled to the rod of continuous assessment is fallacious notwithstanding that it does work brilliantly for some, a small elite, of motivated, clever kids. Now it seems as though some courageous ministerial advisers are sticking their necks out to say so.
This message had better be heard loud and clear in time for some adjustment to be made to the present unworkable system which holds that the outcome is of greater importance than the process, if anyone remembers for long enough what the outcome was supposed to be, apart from not being able to read, write and do arithmetic...
It is instructive that the home of this absurdity, Britain, is itself trying to come to terms with the catastrophic outcomes of three decades of this appalling system, which have left the country intellectually under resourced and unable to compete effectively with the millions of Chinese kids who don't have the disadvantage of overcoming outcomes and are successfully 'taught' in the old fashioned way. Specifically it has left the working class kid at the same old disadvantage that they always suffered.
The hard bottom line on the education system is that only 17% of those who wrote matric in 2005 qualified to attend a university or other tertiary institution. As a hardened cynic I would suggest that was about ten percent more than a modern country needs to make things 'happen', given the rate at which formerly complex work is being either dumbed down or factored out of existence, except that I would be wrong we need many more than that. There is also the separate issue that the matric results are themselves a dubious statistic, manipulating statistical data to present a more politically desirable result, and the real 'pass rate' level is lower still. This is evidenced by the vast drop out rate from tertiary institutions, not all of which is attributable to poverty and in inability to pay varsity fees because the fee money has been gobbled up by all this changing bureaucracy.
I also suspect that a critical evaluation would reveal that very few of those 17% who do make the cut emanate from township or poor rural schools, and there is no indication after ten years that this new OBE system is impacting at all on this trend, if anything it is exacerbating the trend because fewer and fewer kids can cope with the vast plethora of assessment material they are required to produce with minimal knowledge.
This hardly seems in keeping with the purpose of a 'people's government' and perhaps some people on the ministerial committee are feeling the onset of panic.
This government has just produced its own, second 'lost generation', and judging by the rising tide of furore on the streets the kids are going back to basics themselves, many back on the barricades in a disturbing number of places.
So could someone please tell me again: why we are spending billions turning a sow's ear into a dog's breakfast?
Loves ya all
NiK
Schoolteachers who were no longer wanted are now wanted.
I'm staring at a headline in yesterday's Business Day newspaper [Jan 20, 2006] ---'Back-to-basics teachers wanted, not romantics' a report by one Sue Blaine. I puzzled through most of the article which seemed a generally pretty humdrum report on some education department recommendations that will apparently take the rest of the year to surface, and may never surface, and broadly deals with what could be called a maybe, maybe class of speculative news report of the type that normally merits no more than a second glance, simply because it isn't news, except of course for the teasing headline.
It takes the writer until the last column to sneak in the really radical part of this ministerial committee proposal. Apparently the ministerial educational committee proposes to 'Retrieve the word 'teaching',' Curious- I think.
For those readers who are confused here, the entire ethos of the new Outcomes Based Education system, to which South Africa has expensively moved recently, is concerned with virtually eradicating the role of the 'teacher' in it's historical sense.
The principle is to replace that word with a 'classroom manager' word/ phrase. This entity arranges the material that must be 'learned' by a learner and then assesses what has been 'learned'. As I observed in a previous blog [The bureaucratisation of childhood] the guiding inspiration behind the new education system [not to be confused with the content] is that the child educates itself under guidance and adroit leadership and in principle it is an outstanding concept. The traditional 'talk and chalk' teacher becomes both manager and child minder presiding over a series of 'experiences' from which young impressionable humans will derive all the knowledge accumulated by society over millennia.
In effect the current teaching cadre of 300,000 odd humans should have been terminated because their approach was declared obsolete. Instead they have effectively been mass re-employed, in a manner that is close to fraudulent, as information processing administrators. Notwithstanding this everyone [ie: newly re-titled teachers and society at large] thinks that they are still doing their original jobs. They should have been replaced with 300,000 completely newly trained classroom managers, although for obvious reasons that is not a particularly practical idea. Nonetheless that is how radically different OBE is to anything we have ever experienced.
The ultimate 'futuristic' vision of an OBE [Outcomes based education] system, mine certainly, is one where all so-called 'learners' are independently logged online into giant compendium sized interactive learning systems with virtual reality simulation devices encasing their heads. A 'classroom manager' wanders about the room checking that the kids don't litter, that they are not sneaking off into cyberspace for a little truancy on the 'net, and of course that the indicators reveal that the learner is progressing normally.
All assessment tasks would be completed graded and returned within moments of performance thus enhancing an accelerated learning curve reinforced with regular personalised revision. People would take their 'matric' whenever they were ready: some early, others, who played more, later. This system would produce progenies from every sector of our society. Presently there is a current disturbing trend towards greater and greater exclusion of those traditionally excluded.
OBE is an interesting experiment and for a limited number of outstanding children who are fortunate enough to have sophisticated resources access, and clever parents, it is a heaven sent dream that facilitates glory.
But for the rest: kids operating in an inherently unruly environment, and most classrooms are inherently unruly environments, this self-realisation is slow coming, and there are increasing reports that refer to an alarming rise in drop-out rates, kids reaching senior school who can't read and write, and a veritable tide of growing innumeracy that embarrassingly places us at the bottom of the international 'clever schoolkids' heap.
Therefore what was really fascinating about the Business Day article was their punch line references to the Ministerial committee report, quoting: 'Apartheid schooling and resistance against it, coupled with a [romantic] 'progressivist' [sic] theory [with its replacement of 'teaching' by 'facilitation'] have served to undermine the key role of teaching in schooling and education.'
Sue Blaine finished her report by quoting this remarkable statement, also from the ministerial committee report: 'Some of the key problems in SA's State funded education system-.are caused by the move away from the practice of 'teaching'.' Wow talk about understatement-. The entire problem more likely apart from the most obvious reasons. The opportunity cost of embarking on this incomprehensible [for many] OBE system is the thousands of schools not built, upgraded and renovated, the thousands of teachers who have simply given up and opted out, free education opportunities. This OBE operating 'system' could turn out to be one of history's most sympathetic cons. What should have been a sensible and simple idea to be grafted into what we had and then tweaked has become a gobbling bureaucratic nightmare that is swallowing all the money that should be on the front line, not to mention swallowing childhood for millions. It is rather like George Bush sending his troops into Iraq with inadequate armour and minimal back up because the general staff wanted to create a different way to win wars by avoiding fighting.
This alleged position shift by the ministerial committee is a remarkable one and one must wonder what has prompted this sudden about face, although the thought that the entire system is collapsing into a sea of mediocrity does come to mind. Nonetheless we are faced with incongruency.
Only months ago the National Curriculum Statement [NCS] for grades 10--12 was published, and was promoted vigorously by the minister, with regular advertisement in many varied media. Already a hundred thousand or so 10th grade kids are about to experience the end of childhood as the new system kicks itself into life.
The following statement appears on page five [of the NCS] outlining the 'kind of teacher that is envisaged' for the new system: 'mediators of learning, interpreters and designers of learning programmes and materials, leaders, administrators and managers, scholars, researchers and lifelong learners, community members, citizens and pastors [whatever they are] assessors and subject specialists.'
Nowhere in this statement is there any space for the old fashioned 'tell 'em tell 'em and tell 'em again' stuff that used to be called teaching, and which has been actively discouraged for years now. [Presumably this is what the ministerial committee intends by 'teaching' in place of 'facilitation'.] Interestingly the word facilitation does not appear in the NCS either.
Rather the emphasis is on the penultimate of the qualities outlined above, namely 'assessment'.
Point 2.1 of the recently published 'Subject Assessment Guidelines' states: 'Assessment should be part of every lesson-and teachers should plan assessment activities to complement learning activities' No mention of any teaching in that statement, in fact 'the informal daily assessment and the formal 'Programme of Assessment' should be used to monitor learner progress throughout the school year.'
A technical note.
Bear in mind here that most school 'lessons' are approximately thirty-five minutes long and most classes contain upwards of forty energetic, robust and boisterous young humans. The newly dubbed 'learning outcomes mediator' [former 'teacher'] probably runs an average stable of about two hundred children to comply with a 'full timetable'' requirement.
Multiply this 200 by about 19 [for a language teacher] formal assessments per learner. Presume that each takes only twelve minutes to assess [they actually take longer I'm told but we assume a simplified assessment to cope with time constraints] and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the former 'teacher's' homework amounts to: 200X19X12 = 45,600 minutes of additional 'assessment' workload. Alternatively 760 hours of non-classroom formal assessment work. Another way is to say, more than one entire month working full time 24 hours a day, or if we talk in terms of a statutory 40 hour week, then 19 additional weeks a year compared to the 'old days' to assess only.
We are obviously going to need much longer years to get all this done, or we will burn out 'class room' managers faster than we are.
For instance, I recently spoke to a science teacher who said she took early retirement, rather than face another such year. At that stage it was only the Matric classes that were subject to this new bureaucratic regime. So far this is only about the formal assessment: there is also continuous assessment. Incidently for this huge additional burden she was taking home five grand a month after deductions and found that kids she had taught recently would do a six month bookkeeping course after school and then earn more than she did.
Continuous assessment is intended to be carried out on a minute-by-minute basis every lesson. This means that 'teaching' has had to be eliminated because it is too time consuming [and it is] and it must be supplanted by some form of guided instruction model that the kids follow - The ministerial; committee can't have it both ways - the classroom time is finite. If eighty percent of a classroom 'learning outcomes mediator's' time is devoted to assessment and twenty percent to maintaining some semblance of classroom discipline then truly there is no time at all to 'teach' in the old fashioned sense, assuming that what the ministerial committee means by 'teaching' is what I understand by teaching.
For instance to follow a typical new age classroom experience for young tenth graders: 'OK here are five pages of brilliantly constructed text outlining the essential elements of a macroeconomic system and the role of micro- economics within that system. When you've finished reading it, answer the questions about Cuba and the lost city of Atlantis and don't forget to demonstrate an ability to co-operate with the other five learners in your group-you have ten minutes to arrive at a definitive analysis of Marxian dialectic materialism and after that I must assess whether your contribution has helped save the people of South east Asia from a terrible tsunami or whether your compulsive need to appropriate your classmate's MP3 player, so you could listen to Shakira on the earphones, has forever ruined your chances of being anything other than unemployed in our job shedding economy.'
The Process
Each grade ten 'learner' will complete a total of 87 formal assessment tasks [across their total subject range] being their requirements for the year and then progress to complete another 87 formal assessment tasks in grade eleven and then because grade twelve is a tough year they will only have to complete 81 tasks. [Ref: National curriculum statement subject assessment guidelines.] Oh of course then they write the matric exam, which counts 75 % of the final matric mark-all that effort for twenty five percent of the final mark! If 'teachers' weren't generally such a charming collection of well-meaning schmucks who are so completely fucked over by their various sweetheart unions they should be taking the State to the CCMA for abusive working conditions
There is no reference in any of these documents to 'teaching'. In fact given that the child has to produce some completed task of momentous importance almost every third school day there is simply no time for teaching in any sense never mind the old fashioned system. Obviously this is why they are now called 'learners'. They are in effect becoming abused learners, and I predict a class action suit by disgruntled citizens about three decades from now, against the State for stealing childhood.
As a result of the bizarre assessment demands being made on the euphemistically so-called 'teacher' the numbers of such humans is declining rapidly, as anyone who can ducks from the job to take up more lucrative and less time consuming occupations. Those who pontificate on matters educational have to resort to the traditional scoundrels assertion that 'dedicated teachers' will put up with any old crap because they are dedicated-bullshit. They are leaving and not many are joining. Anecdotal observation has it that only twelve new maths 'teachers' graduated last year countrywide, but of course this may only be a malicious rumour. There was also a brief report, immediately canned, on SAFM last week to the effect that private schools are now encountering recruitment difficulties.
This week the radio has been broadcasting plaintive advertisements offering prospective teachers free tertiary education in an attempt to ensnare foolish young acolytes into a trade that like the clergy has become less and less attractive in a fast-moving materialist world.
Who really wants to work their sanity to the bone controlling unruly classes in order to assess their ability to learn almost nothing at all for an immense output of energy-They all end up writing the same kind of Matric and the results are no great shakes. Mr Perlman on SAFM ran a debate this week on misleading advertising and no mention was made of the fact that this advertisement for teachers is so misleading as to be actionable. I think I am going to send this blog to the advertising standards authority and demand that all advertisements for 'teachers' carry a compulsory health warning like tobacco does. This job will be injurious to your health and your long-term financial well-being. Rather go study to be an accountant or a lawyer.
Frankly the authorities appear at odds with themselves, assuming Sue Blaine's article has any veracity. This is not in itself unusual. What is strange is that they do no seem to understand that the die has been cast-you can't have both. Attempting to develop any real understanding of any complex subject with a mixed class of random 16 year olds can take weeks of patient effort. This idea that 'learning' can be acquired through some osmotic process involving sophisticated self help coupled to the rod of continuous assessment is fallacious notwithstanding that it does work brilliantly for some, a small elite, of motivated, clever kids. Now it seems as though some courageous ministerial advisers are sticking their necks out to say so.
This message had better be heard loud and clear in time for some adjustment to be made to the present unworkable system which holds that the outcome is of greater importance than the process, if anyone remembers for long enough what the outcome was supposed to be, apart from not being able to read, write and do arithmetic...
It is instructive that the home of this absurdity, Britain, is itself trying to come to terms with the catastrophic outcomes of three decades of this appalling system, which have left the country intellectually under resourced and unable to compete effectively with the millions of Chinese kids who don't have the disadvantage of overcoming outcomes and are successfully 'taught' in the old fashioned way. Specifically it has left the working class kid at the same old disadvantage that they always suffered.
The hard bottom line on the education system is that only 17% of those who wrote matric in 2005 qualified to attend a university or other tertiary institution. As a hardened cynic I would suggest that was about ten percent more than a modern country needs to make things 'happen', given the rate at which formerly complex work is being either dumbed down or factored out of existence, except that I would be wrong we need many more than that. There is also the separate issue that the matric results are themselves a dubious statistic, manipulating statistical data to present a more politically desirable result, and the real 'pass rate' level is lower still. This is evidenced by the vast drop out rate from tertiary institutions, not all of which is attributable to poverty and in inability to pay varsity fees because the fee money has been gobbled up by all this changing bureaucracy.
I also suspect that a critical evaluation would reveal that very few of those 17% who do make the cut emanate from township or poor rural schools, and there is no indication after ten years that this new OBE system is impacting at all on this trend, if anything it is exacerbating the trend because fewer and fewer kids can cope with the vast plethora of assessment material they are required to produce with minimal knowledge.
This hardly seems in keeping with the purpose of a 'people's government' and perhaps some people on the ministerial committee are feeling the onset of panic.
This government has just produced its own, second 'lost generation', and judging by the rising tide of furore on the streets the kids are going back to basics themselves, many back on the barricades in a disturbing number of places.
So could someone please tell me again: why we are spending billions turning a sow's ear into a dog's breakfast?
Loves ya all
NiK
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
David couldn't make it so we're dating Goliath instead
David couldn't make it so we're dating Goliath
I love this time of the cycle. The politicians are suddenly more in our face than the guys who turn every road traffic intersection into a shopping experience and it's the old 'polish up the promises' thing again.
There is something of a frenzied air about the current propaganda wave in favour of the democratic process at work...working at demonstrating that the democratic process works. In other words. ' look how good Nanny is being, we're arranging elections and telling you about them,' Now in return we must all go and vote in a few months and right now no one seems too interested. Most of us are still figuring out how to get enough cash to get through January. March is -when?' These are the early sabre rattling moments before the real dirt begins to fly.
Everyone wants to keep their jobs. They are hard to get. They should know; last time 'they' 'promised' to 'create jobs': every second signpost proclaimed this immanent act of incarnacy [assuming there could be such a word]. The poor buggers are still desperately trying to get pregnant.
This task turned out tougher than everyone believed and the jury is still out on whether we can make it work, although getting richer helps. In the beginning the revolution seemed to be doing no more than turning a modest luxury cruiser, around in a narrow canal. The canal has widened a little but the boat has gradually swollen to something larger than the queen Mary.
So what's the problem? Why do we have to be persuaded in this vigorous way to do something that we should be happy to do?
One hears gloom talk on the increasingly strident Perlman and Bikita [sic] Am live on SAFM show. They 'promote the local government elections' each morning. And this week they have told us in a voice that reeked of doom that only 41% of young people will vote [!]: oh me oh my what are we coming to! The adults didn't fare much better-best prognosis currently is 42 % [which one might add is high for local government elections but then we are still in our infancy and people aren't supposed to be this cynical yet.
Those are the 42 % of people who will mostly vote for the government since most of everybody else have no idea who anybody is anyway [including me] and basically are dubious that any of them can actually rectify anything at all, for instance, the current declining state of the electricity infrastructure in our beloved south central megacity, the infamous Josi and its 'omgewings'.
All our electrics are deeply into a terminal curve: like all machinery, humans, and regulatory systems that are left unattended for too long. It's old, poorly maintained and subject to continual jolts and 'shakeages' caused by product theft which appears to take place on a scale both in volumes and over time that makes the recent looting of Baghdad look penny ante.
The provincial government is going to [correctly] invest a vast sum into the construction of a people friendly government precinct in the downtown part of Josi. It is rumoured that a fake competition was organised to decide what it would look like and there seemed to be some mutters about some crappy old buildings that represented a link to the exploitative past and which should for some arcane reason be restored. Of course it was only a rumour. The job didn't need to go to tender because it didn't exist.
Be that as it may, this process [of infrastructural decay] should be leading the government to construct an energy friendly civic region as part of its basic plan-.There are scenarios that put the downtown region in the strike zone and others that see it as a symbol of disintegrating structures under popular pressure. They talk of spending twenty billion on the precinct and everyone knows you can hardly get an obsolete technology train for twenty billion; you'd need about that again to rewire and re-plumb the city.
So appropriate planning presumes that the place may well need to be able to generate its own year round energy supply to stay afloat as the city declines around it. Political correctness presumes that such thinking is gloomy and boring and should be avoided. Avoiding doing anything at all is usually the best way to deal with the never present future, and one I prefer so I look forward to visiting the civic centre by candle light for my hundredth birthday, in fulfilment of a utopian dream.
So who is going to promise that the electricity will remain on and be able to deliver -we know that none can do it. Like the elusive 'jobs' that no one has yet been able to 'create' each political entity will 'promise' us that they can do it better than the other guys, and they will be well paid to have fun watching other people do their work.
So what do we schmuck voters on the foddering turf know? What cards do we have?
· Apart from some new crowd down in Kwaznat who haven't been around before, all the rest are both practised failures and relatively successful in varying degrees. Democracy requires that everyone should have an equal opportunity to steal from the common pot-but don't get caught. Even if you are caught delay s and suspensions means you can loudly proclaim that no one has ever been convicted of corruption in your party so you alone are clean.
· The promises are well intentioned but inherently meaningless and we all know it. Nonetheless for many people maybe even as many as 42% life is good enough to justify voting for the guys 'who gave it all'. There is no durable evidence anyone else can do a better job simply because no other group other than the ruling party has the depth of talent and skills to make this vast increasingly cumbersome homunculus of a country function effectively- And the ruling party's talent base is less than skin deep [no pun intended unless through some deeply sublimated rage]
· That's cool. If all the 58% of allegedly pissed off people went and voted they could vote for 'other parties' and the government would lose a whole load of seats and they would become angry and nasty-You can hear every day now how angry they are that there is any opposition at all-sooner of later there will be the usual anti-colonialist paranoia's that so frequently punctuates the rhetoric of our neighbour [He, who sends his soldiers down here to rob our casinos and our shopping malls], and so that's a good reason to leave things as they are because the alternatives look worse [at present]. The whole political agenda more closely resembles a flock of overvalued SUV's dug inextricably in a rising tide of gooey poo than the sleek airbrushed winners who have brought us from the horror of the old apartheid sanctions degenerating environment to this brash bunfight.
· Then of course there's this whole carefully airbrushed and ignored little hiccup over the-Sssh speaka no evil -
'floor crossing leg-..' 'Agh-told you -sh.'
Of course we are maybe the masses but we are none of us so stupid that we can't tell when we've been lied to even if it does take a while. Thus we know regrettably, that no matter who wins the election in September all the guys will cross over to the ruling party, comes the window period in September. Hey personally I think three times a schmuck is enough. That is- that three times now the guys I voted for changed parties so that's it for me. You wanna avoid disappointment vote for the winners they are the only ones who'll stay in place.
The more they bluster and deny the more they give themselves away and if they say nothing we still get them because only those who are guilty, we say, would keep silent. So even if the government lost the election they would get everyone back through the rising checkbook: Anybody who doesn't play ball will be a racist recidivist pig and will be outlawed from the game in the masterly fashion we have all been witness to since the Revolution. We have to go to this place we are heading for; we can't jump off the train while it's moving- well we can but it hurts when you skin your hands.
Possibly 58% of the voters have realised that their votes are inherently meaningless: simply part of an elaborate charade and that nothing that they do will make any significant improvement on what we have all achieved, simply because the systems all seemed to have passed the point of diminishing marginal returns.
For the moment though the present 'good' life is still on an optimising curve. Therefore most people are not really all that pissed off with the state of things. More cars are being sold now in a month than we used to sell in a year-you'd have to be a bigger schmuck not to know that we have never had it this good, ever. So there's crime and dirt and things don't work. These are also indicators of rapid and accelerating exponential population expansion in all the core population centres. We are all being served gloriously by the grand auld principle of 'to the victor the spoils. People are pouring into the country from all the loser hovels outside to get a slice of the good life.
There has never been a time in this country's history when things have been this good and the longer they last, the more chance that the thing will stick, that this social experiment will succeed in becoming the habit that follows an affirmed state of mind, and the place will be really cooking with oil. There is a radical improvement for many. There may of course come an inevitable reckoning as nature in the form of that evil bitch, 'the market', comes biting back at our areseholes, shouting that we became top heavy with preferment-oh no not that old bitch the market-avaunt-
But that will be when the world cup has come and gone and the Gautrain is who knows where and we start wondering again where it's all going. 'Maar soos hulle sÄ›, mÅre is nog n dag.' [Tomorrow is another day: the future is an illusion.]
So you wanna play charades or
Would you
Prefer to head
for the bar before the music stops
and the
commercial
goes on a slomo fade?
.
Loves you all
Practise cheerfulness or be dammed.
Nik
I love this time of the cycle. The politicians are suddenly more in our face than the guys who turn every road traffic intersection into a shopping experience and it's the old 'polish up the promises' thing again.
There is something of a frenzied air about the current propaganda wave in favour of the democratic process at work...working at demonstrating that the democratic process works. In other words. ' look how good Nanny is being, we're arranging elections and telling you about them,' Now in return we must all go and vote in a few months and right now no one seems too interested. Most of us are still figuring out how to get enough cash to get through January. March is -when?' These are the early sabre rattling moments before the real dirt begins to fly.
Everyone wants to keep their jobs. They are hard to get. They should know; last time 'they' 'promised' to 'create jobs': every second signpost proclaimed this immanent act of incarnacy [assuming there could be such a word]. The poor buggers are still desperately trying to get pregnant.
This task turned out tougher than everyone believed and the jury is still out on whether we can make it work, although getting richer helps. In the beginning the revolution seemed to be doing no more than turning a modest luxury cruiser, around in a narrow canal. The canal has widened a little but the boat has gradually swollen to something larger than the queen Mary.
So what's the problem? Why do we have to be persuaded in this vigorous way to do something that we should be happy to do?
One hears gloom talk on the increasingly strident Perlman and Bikita [sic] Am live on SAFM show. They 'promote the local government elections' each morning. And this week they have told us in a voice that reeked of doom that only 41% of young people will vote [!]: oh me oh my what are we coming to! The adults didn't fare much better-best prognosis currently is 42 % [which one might add is high for local government elections but then we are still in our infancy and people aren't supposed to be this cynical yet.
Those are the 42 % of people who will mostly vote for the government since most of everybody else have no idea who anybody is anyway [including me] and basically are dubious that any of them can actually rectify anything at all, for instance, the current declining state of the electricity infrastructure in our beloved south central megacity, the infamous Josi and its 'omgewings'.
All our electrics are deeply into a terminal curve: like all machinery, humans, and regulatory systems that are left unattended for too long. It's old, poorly maintained and subject to continual jolts and 'shakeages' caused by product theft which appears to take place on a scale both in volumes and over time that makes the recent looting of Baghdad look penny ante.
The provincial government is going to [correctly] invest a vast sum into the construction of a people friendly government precinct in the downtown part of Josi. It is rumoured that a fake competition was organised to decide what it would look like and there seemed to be some mutters about some crappy old buildings that represented a link to the exploitative past and which should for some arcane reason be restored. Of course it was only a rumour. The job didn't need to go to tender because it didn't exist.
Be that as it may, this process [of infrastructural decay] should be leading the government to construct an energy friendly civic region as part of its basic plan-.There are scenarios that put the downtown region in the strike zone and others that see it as a symbol of disintegrating structures under popular pressure. They talk of spending twenty billion on the precinct and everyone knows you can hardly get an obsolete technology train for twenty billion; you'd need about that again to rewire and re-plumb the city.
So appropriate planning presumes that the place may well need to be able to generate its own year round energy supply to stay afloat as the city declines around it. Political correctness presumes that such thinking is gloomy and boring and should be avoided. Avoiding doing anything at all is usually the best way to deal with the never present future, and one I prefer so I look forward to visiting the civic centre by candle light for my hundredth birthday, in fulfilment of a utopian dream.
So who is going to promise that the electricity will remain on and be able to deliver -we know that none can do it. Like the elusive 'jobs' that no one has yet been able to 'create' each political entity will 'promise' us that they can do it better than the other guys, and they will be well paid to have fun watching other people do their work.
So what do we schmuck voters on the foddering turf know? What cards do we have?
· Apart from some new crowd down in Kwaznat who haven't been around before, all the rest are both practised failures and relatively successful in varying degrees. Democracy requires that everyone should have an equal opportunity to steal from the common pot-but don't get caught. Even if you are caught delay s and suspensions means you can loudly proclaim that no one has ever been convicted of corruption in your party so you alone are clean.
· The promises are well intentioned but inherently meaningless and we all know it. Nonetheless for many people maybe even as many as 42% life is good enough to justify voting for the guys 'who gave it all'. There is no durable evidence anyone else can do a better job simply because no other group other than the ruling party has the depth of talent and skills to make this vast increasingly cumbersome homunculus of a country function effectively- And the ruling party's talent base is less than skin deep [no pun intended unless through some deeply sublimated rage]
· That's cool. If all the 58% of allegedly pissed off people went and voted they could vote for 'other parties' and the government would lose a whole load of seats and they would become angry and nasty-You can hear every day now how angry they are that there is any opposition at all-sooner of later there will be the usual anti-colonialist paranoia's that so frequently punctuates the rhetoric of our neighbour [He, who sends his soldiers down here to rob our casinos and our shopping malls], and so that's a good reason to leave things as they are because the alternatives look worse [at present]. The whole political agenda more closely resembles a flock of overvalued SUV's dug inextricably in a rising tide of gooey poo than the sleek airbrushed winners who have brought us from the horror of the old apartheid sanctions degenerating environment to this brash bunfight.
· Then of course there's this whole carefully airbrushed and ignored little hiccup over the-Sssh speaka no evil -
'floor crossing leg-..' 'Agh-told you -sh.'
Of course we are maybe the masses but we are none of us so stupid that we can't tell when we've been lied to even if it does take a while. Thus we know regrettably, that no matter who wins the election in September all the guys will cross over to the ruling party, comes the window period in September. Hey personally I think three times a schmuck is enough. That is- that three times now the guys I voted for changed parties so that's it for me. You wanna avoid disappointment vote for the winners they are the only ones who'll stay in place.
The more they bluster and deny the more they give themselves away and if they say nothing we still get them because only those who are guilty, we say, would keep silent. So even if the government lost the election they would get everyone back through the rising checkbook: Anybody who doesn't play ball will be a racist recidivist pig and will be outlawed from the game in the masterly fashion we have all been witness to since the Revolution. We have to go to this place we are heading for; we can't jump off the train while it's moving- well we can but it hurts when you skin your hands.
Possibly 58% of the voters have realised that their votes are inherently meaningless: simply part of an elaborate charade and that nothing that they do will make any significant improvement on what we have all achieved, simply because the systems all seemed to have passed the point of diminishing marginal returns.
For the moment though the present 'good' life is still on an optimising curve. Therefore most people are not really all that pissed off with the state of things. More cars are being sold now in a month than we used to sell in a year-you'd have to be a bigger schmuck not to know that we have never had it this good, ever. So there's crime and dirt and things don't work. These are also indicators of rapid and accelerating exponential population expansion in all the core population centres. We are all being served gloriously by the grand auld principle of 'to the victor the spoils. People are pouring into the country from all the loser hovels outside to get a slice of the good life.
There has never been a time in this country's history when things have been this good and the longer they last, the more chance that the thing will stick, that this social experiment will succeed in becoming the habit that follows an affirmed state of mind, and the place will be really cooking with oil. There is a radical improvement for many. There may of course come an inevitable reckoning as nature in the form of that evil bitch, 'the market', comes biting back at our areseholes, shouting that we became top heavy with preferment-oh no not that old bitch the market-avaunt-
But that will be when the world cup has come and gone and the Gautrain is who knows where and we start wondering again where it's all going. 'Maar soos hulle sÄ›, mÅre is nog n dag.' [Tomorrow is another day: the future is an illusion.]
So you wanna play charades or
Would you
Prefer to head
for the bar before the music stops
and the
commercial
goes on a slomo fade?
.
Loves you all
Practise cheerfulness or be dammed.
Nik
Monday, January 2, 2006
Resolving to resolve
Resolving to resolve
Over the next week or so the mass media will be full of the now fashionable annual theme of the failed 'News Year's' resolution idea. A decade or so ago this was never considered to be so unfashionable an idea but gradually as the idea of acceptable failure has entered mainstream thinking it has become almost de rigueur to agonise over this now quaint idea that on the first of January one attempts vainly to transform one's usual pathetic life and emerge chrysalis like into a new sunlight as an freshly achieving person.
Equally there are people who actually believe that the world becomes a different place on the 1st of January and of course there is the horror opf knowing that by January the 31st it has all been and gone and it's head down and go for home Jerome.
Thus we now have the resolution not to give up the smoking thing for instance, or, of not to stop hitting on one's fellows for nutritional sexual gratification, or not to remain in the same boring dead end job, because our experience has demonstrated that once we resume our usual routines in the freshly paced frenzy of day to day living that we shall forget our resolve, so why bother.
Usually, in my view, the writers of 'failure' determined articles have failed to live up to his or her own resolve often enough in the past to relish the idea of popularising failure and the writer's editor is happy to accommodate 'resolve failure'; because without such failure the magazine/ newspaper/ radio programme et al would lose its appeal. After all the whole idea of being part of the mass is to remain predictable and therefore part of the market; and the idea of 'market failure' is currently a fashionable one. One could say therefore that the sub-texts are suspect.
However the cool thing about the Bloggist's world is that this idea of Failure resolve is irrelevant. By the nature of things our Blog world is one of individual commitment, performance and achievement in this, the great citizen's fight back against editorial gatekeeper controlled voicelessness. This applies irrespective of what it is we are all writing about.
For this particular Bloggist the week between Christmas and New Year is a time of renewal, for assessing the impact of goals set for the preceding year and renewing the commitment to building oneself into a more effective human. Of course it's also a time for boozing and gorging gluttonously, gourmandishly on heaps of lubricious foods and hanging out in the Jacuzzi.
The upside of aging is that I have also come to accept that you win some and you lose some; and that achieving transformation in one's own life is a continuous process that begins with birth and ends with death. New Years day is for me a moment for re-affirming my own sense of purpose, without which, in my view, life is inherently pointless: irrespective of all the marketing hype to the contrary..
So for this bloggist a big part of achieving one's goals in the New Year is summed up in the phrase 'Resolving to resolve'. Perhaps the best way to think of this is like the piece of string you may tie about your finger to remember that you have to remember something. Of course, remembering what it is we have to remember is critical to 'resolution' success. In the other words the only way to live a purpose driven life is to keep track of and remember the purpose through all the digressions and relapses and general ups and downs of everyday life, because as the late John Lennon famously observed life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.
That is the real difficulty, I've found, when we reach January 31st. Then is when the reality of the goal we set in the heady holiday mod of Jan 1 has degenerated glutinously into a treacle tar of anxiety. BY March 312 it is history and we're the rats in the pack.
Then in addition to remembering to remember, there is a truth, in my view, that there are resolutions that work and there are those that don't; and the difference between the two seems always dependent on the words we used to describe what we were going to do as our purpose.
They [our resolves] are also subject to the rule of 'moreless' so our goal should be 'lessmore'.
Fourthly humans are 'hard wired' against negativity. Negativity is not the same as as creative appraisal to which it is related but which nonetheless is not the goal.
The resolution that I eventually came to grips with and effectively implemented after decades of rationalised procrastination on the 11th of September 1995 at O7.30 hours, was simply: Write 100 words every day.
I regularly said that I would stop smoking and failed as regularly not realising that I had framed my actions as a ngative action linked to a future intention. The future is an illusion and so was my resolve.
I stopped smoking by accident when the opportunity inadvertently arose as a side effect of taking a nine millimetre bullet through the liver one particularly bad day here in Jozi. The slug hit me from behind and as it exited via my liver red the shock wave blew out the lower lobe on the right lung. During weeks in intensive care sucking oxygen through a mask I implemented a decades old and regularly failed anti-smoking resolution by deciding: to smoke zero cigarettes daily for life.
In two thousand-the Millennium Gap year when we didn't know if we were in one century or the next I made a resolution: to write a poem every day. I never imposed any judgements on my daily poems and the only rule I made was that were I to write more than one in any day that did not absolve me from writing one the next day.
It took about six weeks to write anything for which I have any regard, in retrospect, and I ended the year with 826 poems [most of which were incoherent garbage]. It wasn't part of my goal to judge what I wrote; that can always come later like last year when an opportunity arose to compile an anthology now published on my personal website.
So I discovered and affirmed that small, easily manageable targets practiced daily build up over inevitable time to considerable output.
Over the Christmas Period my aging mother chanced upon a printed copy of the collection [called Rehearsing Nietzsche] and randomly opened it with Murphy like accuracy to the one poem in the collection with which she could identify [since it was a conversation with her that had prompted the poem] At first she was enchanted and then later with the rage of age and militant motherhood she became angry and domineering and wanted words changed which I naturally declined to do. To paraphrase some prison graffiti: if you are doing this to please your mother you are fucked.
One of last year's favourite moments was finding an old book in a storeroom in which I had written my 'Ten Resolves and purposes for 1982' and although there is no indication that I had ever seen the book again since the day I wrote the stuff down I realised with joy that I had achieved nine of them. That indicated that once a goal is written down it becomes more powerful.
As to this year? I shall continue with the resolves from last year with some additions. Each of ten resolves will be defined positively in terms of a small daily contribution to the end of the year account each resolve involving no more than 7 words, preferably fewer, and based on present time.
So my approach now will be to write the ten short seven word max sentences that will help me to become a more effective person over the next twelve months and to remember to remember, I shall sprinkle them randomly through my diary. Should I be ahead on points when I encounter them through the course of 2006 then I shall have something to be cheerful about, and should I be behind then I shall be cheered at the thought that I would now have an opportunity to move ahead and retake control of my life.
Practise cheerfulness daily in 2006
Keep on Blogging
Love you all
NiK
Over the next week or so the mass media will be full of the now fashionable annual theme of the failed 'News Year's' resolution idea. A decade or so ago this was never considered to be so unfashionable an idea but gradually as the idea of acceptable failure has entered mainstream thinking it has become almost de rigueur to agonise over this now quaint idea that on the first of January one attempts vainly to transform one's usual pathetic life and emerge chrysalis like into a new sunlight as an freshly achieving person.
Equally there are people who actually believe that the world becomes a different place on the 1st of January and of course there is the horror opf knowing that by January the 31st it has all been and gone and it's head down and go for home Jerome.
Thus we now have the resolution not to give up the smoking thing for instance, or, of not to stop hitting on one's fellows for nutritional sexual gratification, or not to remain in the same boring dead end job, because our experience has demonstrated that once we resume our usual routines in the freshly paced frenzy of day to day living that we shall forget our resolve, so why bother.
Usually, in my view, the writers of 'failure' determined articles have failed to live up to his or her own resolve often enough in the past to relish the idea of popularising failure and the writer's editor is happy to accommodate 'resolve failure'; because without such failure the magazine/ newspaper/ radio programme et al would lose its appeal. After all the whole idea of being part of the mass is to remain predictable and therefore part of the market; and the idea of 'market failure' is currently a fashionable one. One could say therefore that the sub-texts are suspect.
However the cool thing about the Bloggist's world is that this idea of Failure resolve is irrelevant. By the nature of things our Blog world is one of individual commitment, performance and achievement in this, the great citizen's fight back against editorial gatekeeper controlled voicelessness. This applies irrespective of what it is we are all writing about.
For this particular Bloggist the week between Christmas and New Year is a time of renewal, for assessing the impact of goals set for the preceding year and renewing the commitment to building oneself into a more effective human. Of course it's also a time for boozing and gorging gluttonously, gourmandishly on heaps of lubricious foods and hanging out in the Jacuzzi.
The upside of aging is that I have also come to accept that you win some and you lose some; and that achieving transformation in one's own life is a continuous process that begins with birth and ends with death. New Years day is for me a moment for re-affirming my own sense of purpose, without which, in my view, life is inherently pointless: irrespective of all the marketing hype to the contrary..
So for this bloggist a big part of achieving one's goals in the New Year is summed up in the phrase 'Resolving to resolve'. Perhaps the best way to think of this is like the piece of string you may tie about your finger to remember that you have to remember something. Of course, remembering what it is we have to remember is critical to 'resolution' success. In the other words the only way to live a purpose driven life is to keep track of and remember the purpose through all the digressions and relapses and general ups and downs of everyday life, because as the late John Lennon famously observed life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.
That is the real difficulty, I've found, when we reach January 31st. Then is when the reality of the goal we set in the heady holiday mod of Jan 1 has degenerated glutinously into a treacle tar of anxiety. BY March 312 it is history and we're the rats in the pack.
Then in addition to remembering to remember, there is a truth, in my view, that there are resolutions that work and there are those that don't; and the difference between the two seems always dependent on the words we used to describe what we were going to do as our purpose.
They [our resolves] are also subject to the rule of 'moreless' so our goal should be 'lessmore'.
Fourthly humans are 'hard wired' against negativity. Negativity is not the same as as creative appraisal to which it is related but which nonetheless is not the goal.
The resolution that I eventually came to grips with and effectively implemented after decades of rationalised procrastination on the 11th of September 1995 at O7.30 hours, was simply: Write 100 words every day.
I regularly said that I would stop smoking and failed as regularly not realising that I had framed my actions as a ngative action linked to a future intention. The future is an illusion and so was my resolve.
I stopped smoking by accident when the opportunity inadvertently arose as a side effect of taking a nine millimetre bullet through the liver one particularly bad day here in Jozi. The slug hit me from behind and as it exited via my liver red the shock wave blew out the lower lobe on the right lung. During weeks in intensive care sucking oxygen through a mask I implemented a decades old and regularly failed anti-smoking resolution by deciding: to smoke zero cigarettes daily for life.
In two thousand-the Millennium Gap year when we didn't know if we were in one century or the next I made a resolution: to write a poem every day. I never imposed any judgements on my daily poems and the only rule I made was that were I to write more than one in any day that did not absolve me from writing one the next day.
It took about six weeks to write anything for which I have any regard, in retrospect, and I ended the year with 826 poems [most of which were incoherent garbage]. It wasn't part of my goal to judge what I wrote; that can always come later like last year when an opportunity arose to compile an anthology now published on my personal website.
So I discovered and affirmed that small, easily manageable targets practiced daily build up over inevitable time to considerable output.
Over the Christmas Period my aging mother chanced upon a printed copy of the collection [called Rehearsing Nietzsche] and randomly opened it with Murphy like accuracy to the one poem in the collection with which she could identify [since it was a conversation with her that had prompted the poem] At first she was enchanted and then later with the rage of age and militant motherhood she became angry and domineering and wanted words changed which I naturally declined to do. To paraphrase some prison graffiti: if you are doing this to please your mother you are fucked.
One of last year's favourite moments was finding an old book in a storeroom in which I had written my 'Ten Resolves and purposes for 1982' and although there is no indication that I had ever seen the book again since the day I wrote the stuff down I realised with joy that I had achieved nine of them. That indicated that once a goal is written down it becomes more powerful.
As to this year? I shall continue with the resolves from last year with some additions. Each of ten resolves will be defined positively in terms of a small daily contribution to the end of the year account each resolve involving no more than 7 words, preferably fewer, and based on present time.
So my approach now will be to write the ten short seven word max sentences that will help me to become a more effective person over the next twelve months and to remember to remember, I shall sprinkle them randomly through my diary. Should I be ahead on points when I encounter them through the course of 2006 then I shall have something to be cheerful about, and should I be behind then I shall be cheered at the thought that I would now have an opportunity to move ahead and retake control of my life.
Practise cheerfulness daily in 2006
Keep on Blogging
Love you all
NiK
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