My kind of commandments
February 28, 2008 — sharonaRead these.
Then pass them on to other people, thus making the world a better place and probably saving many lives.
Read these.
Then pass them on to other people, thus making the world a better place and probably saving many lives.
Quentin Fottrell has today focused on similar issues to those raised by Martina Devlin a few weeks ago - the fact that attacking Hilary Clinton’s “femaleness” (because ‘femininity’ wouldn’t work in this context) is fine, and in fact good sport, but that any mention of Barack Obama’s race is absolutely off limits:
Critics shout “iron my shirt” at her and it’s a joke. If they hollered racially charged comments at Obama, there would be passionate editorials condemning them.It seems strange to me that this point hasn’t been made more vocally and more often, but I suppose that’s the whole point.
Having studied a few hundred years of US elections, it also makes me wonder how this election, and these candidates, will be viewed in years to come. Will questions of race or sex be mentioned? And will one or both of those issues become more or less relevant, depending on the outcome of this election?
Cliché of the week: Only Time Will Tell
I wouldn’t want to suggest that England, or ‘the English’ or ‘the English Government’ or ‘whatever’ have a painfully idiotic approach to language learning.
But if I did, for any reason, seem inclined towards suggesting that as fact, then there are two points I would certainly have to take note of, one of which emerged in the news today.
In 2004, the compulsory learning of a european language to GCSE level was dropped. By 2006, the number of students bothering to learn another language had dropped so sharply that teachers feared they might as well just give up and go home.
Now, in 2008, comes the news that in the GCSE french course (which, as per above, isn’t even compulsory), the oral examination is being dropped. Because it is too stressful for students, apparently.
Which raises a number of issues.
Firstly, how can you learn a language without speaking it?
I’ll admit that I speak from a perspective of lifelong bilingualism, but surely that makes me all the more qualified to suggest that you learn a language by speaking it (a fact that is particularly relevant given the way Gaeilge is “taught” in english language schools in this country, but that’s an argument for another day). Following on from that, if you teach a language by speaking it, then an oral examination isn’t a source of stress. It’s a cause for slight nervousness which ultimately takes about twenty minutes and then you realise that it was all blown a little bit out of proportion anyway.
But even if you believe that languages shouldn’t be taught by speaking it, or listening to it, or whatever. Even if you have convinced yourself that everyone on the earth should ultimately be forced to speak the same language (”obviously” english), the issue of protecting 15 year olds from a source of stress also has to be questioned.
If you sit a piano exam at 6/7/8, it’s scary. But then when you have to do a similar exam for your Junior Cert at 15, it’s not as big a deal. Been there, done that.
The same applies to oral examinations for, say, the leaving cert, or A levels, or in this case GCSEs.
If you’ve done it before, be it in another language (say Irish first, then French/German/Spanish/Polish), it’s no big deal.
Even if you’ve done it at another level (so, here, GCSE level), then facing into a similar scenario, be it in more detail, a few years later is much, much less intimidating.
Not to mention the fact that at some point, children, teenagers, young adults - they need to experience stress. Stress is a part of life that we all need to learn to deal with and to cope with, because it’s always going to lurk somewhere in the background. If every potential source of stress is merely eliminated until the day you go to get married/move house (or both, the double whammy of ultimate stress apparently), then how on earth can you be expected to cope?
One of the main advantages of multiple levels of examination throughout the school years is to teach young people basic skills for dealing with situations which will become increasingly inevitable as life goes on.
If a child skips the French oral GCSE, then skips languages altogether for A level, but goes to college and is told they have to take a language with their business course - then how will they cope with their university level language classes when everyone else got through that stress barrier ten years previous? How will they cope when asked to make a presentation to the european branch managers of their respective banks? How will they cope with a job interview even!?
While I fully accept the desire to protect young people from the evils of real life for as long as possible, relatively minor amounts of stress are in fact a healthy coping mechanism that is better learnt early and dealt with in relatively comfortable surroundings while you can maintain a support network that can be relied on throughout the experience - something that is almost never the case in later life scenarios mentioned above.
…
For the record, the exact same argument can be applied to potential changes to the Leaving Certificate. By all means, spread out the exams a bit, but don’t minimise the exams to the point where nothing is learnt from it in terms of life skills. Otherwise you will end up in a self-perpetuating cycle whereby the next step is to make first year exams in college easier and ultimately just give people [real] degrees for sending someone an email, as long as that didn’t cause them too much stress, or interfere with their social lives, or in any way dictate that proper grammar or spelling be utilised in said email.
Letter of the week/month, courtesy as always of the glorious Irish Times letters page which should probably be required reading:
Madam, - In last Saturday’s edition, Quentin Fottrell rightly insisted that the controversy surrounding Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s behaviour in Nepal can only be clouded by his being gay, and a well-known poet. Neither fact should be relevant to the discussion of the central ethical issues.
However, the esteemed poet Máire Mac an tSaoi and the eminent artist Pauline Bewick took the rather surprising step of phoning the Joe Duffy Show last week, motivated, it would appear, primarily by Ó Searcaigh’s poetic and personal standing (he is a member of Aosdána, for example), and their desire to come to the aid of a colleague and friend.
I was baffled by the moral ambiguity reflected in their contributions, though they were both clearly uncomfortable with some aspects of the information that has come into the public domain. That they should be upset by the actions of Neasa Ní Chianáin I can understand. Having discovered what was going on in Kathmandu it was, in my opinion, incumbent on her to report her concerns to the relevant authorities in Nepal and in Ireland, and she should be commended for doing so. But as she had begun the project as a friend of Ó Searcaigh, her position has indeed been weakened by the decision to complete the film and make commercial gain from it.
This, however, should be seen as a side issue. The object of concern must be the boys (as young as 16, and Ó Searcaigh himself refers to them as “boys”) who were initiated into sexual relations by a 52-year-old man; boys who were poor, but who had lived in a protective community where they were unlikely to have had any knowledge of the permissive sexual mores of the West.
This was a man who came bearing gifts: the promise of an education, a future, funded in part by contributions from the great and the good of the artistic establishment in Ireland.
Pauline Bewick referred to the Nepali boys as “adults”; I doubt if there are many Irish mothers who regard their 16-year-old offspring as “adults”: they are scarcely beyond childhood, and at a particularly vulnerable stage in their development. Both Bewick and Mac an tSaoi as mothers were, I imagine, in the happy position to know that their teenage children, comfortable in circumstances and well protected - like my own - were unlikely to be sexually seduced by powerful, wealthy, ageing men. I would have expected that as mothers, as well as artists, they would have been directed their compassion primarily towards those who lacked power in this situation, those who through poverty or ignorance would have been ill-prepared to resist advances.
Whether the person offering the prospect of a better future while taking sexual favours is a likeable poet or a grouchy office clerk is hardly material; there was something more than a little disquieting in the pleading by Ó Searcaigh’s artistic colleagues that he is a nice, gentle soul, a gifted intellectual, whom they personally know and like, and their failure to condemn, at the very least, the confusion between his benevolent activity and personal sexual gratification.
Many of us denounced the Catholic Church establishment for closing ranks in the face of the indefensible: the abuse of innocence. Let us be spared a similar reaction on the part of our intellectual and artistic élite. - Yours, etc,
Prof GERALDINE SHERIDAN, Coolbane, Castleconnell, Co Limerick.
Different kind of plastic, no boobs this time.
Please, please, please go read this wonderful blog post about Indiana Jones Lego.
If ever the employment of grown up kids (and bear in mind I mean that in the best possible sense) in the entertainment and/or journalism industry needed to be justified, then surely that does it.
Purest scientific research.. Indy stylee….
