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quote:The consular staffer told the investigator Mr Briggs had told her she had “piercing” eyes and had placed his arm around her and kissed her on the neck. quote:borderline incident The Australian government, ladies and gentlemen. Smegmatron fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Jan 2, 2016 |
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Jan 2, 2016 07:19
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 20:27 |
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If it didn't want it, it shouldn't have wagged its tail like that.
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Jan 2, 2016 09:14
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Australia Day is coming. Be prepared. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE-al0xSFJo
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Jan 11, 2016 10:10
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freebooter posted:Re: visa cancelling, it's political to me because they haven't actually committed any crime per se, and it reminds me of students protesting against universities allowing certain speakers; I'd rather see the shithead speaker show up and then have a protest. He's inciting violence, which is and always has been unlawful speech, even in the US.
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Jan 20, 2016 09:38
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Recoome posted:The thing which makes me uncomfortable is how vague it is. A well-handled HR department which uses organisation psychologists to assist in finding good person-job matches is where that kind of psych assessment is well-utilised. Conversely, when the job is extremely mentally taxing (i.e. military), then correctly utilised psych assessment again aids in ensuring people don't blow their brains out when they get access to a firearm/kill other people etc. So the thing a lot of people don't realise is that universities have been churning out teachers at an insane rate with mixed results in terms of quality. We have more than enough teachers in NSW, to the point that we're actually oversupplied until at least 2020. The two major problems are an under-representation of minorities in teaching roles and casualisation of the workforce which has run so rampant. The only teachers with permanent, ongoing employment are rusted on fossils, and the new teachers who're trying to come up can't get enough consistent work in one place that it's hindering their professional development. From that perspective, anything which hinders more people who JUST LOVE WORKING WITH CHILDREN from entering the sector is a very good thing. The department is very well aware of this too, and they're looking to turn off the tap so they can start to chip away at the ~9 year long waiting list for a permanent position. Pracs don't necessarily weed out the bad teachers because they're administered by full time teachers in schools, who're a mixed bag. Sometimes they have the opposite effect and very good teachers fail their prac because of a personality clash. There's no standardised system at all for assessing a teaching student's performance on practicum. It all falls to the whim of whichever exasperated boomer you get pinned to for a month. Most unis use the 7 point national teaching framework as a guideline for it, but in NSW at least, you pass your prac if you uni says you do, regardless of your actual performance. In the cast of a two year masters, someone from Usyd saw me teach for a grand total of 3 hours, and the discussions I had with them about those lessons totalled about 20 minutes. You already have to sit an interview with the Department of Education to work in a public school in NSW, so adding one more interview with BOSTES to make sure you're at least capable of holding a conversation isn't particularly onerous. There's potential for abuse and discrimination, but as long as it's transparent and there's a solid appeals system in place to ensure discrimination can be stamped out, I'm not opposed to it at all. Smegmatron fucked around with this message at 11:13 on Jan 23, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 11:05
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Recoome posted:And I think the quality thing can be addressed through raising the bar for academic achievement to increase quality, rather than the use of a personality test. The system already appears to not be working as well as it could, the introduction of personality testing would only add yet another layer of poo poo on top of a gigantic poo poo sandwich. Good learners don't necessarily make good teachers. Often the opposite, since people with stellar academic performance have absolutely no capacity for understanding how or why underachieving students can't be more like them. Academic aptitude really doesn't matter all that much in secondary beyond having a solid understanding of the subjects you're teaching. Primary school teachers don't need to know anything at all beyond how not to be an awful teacher because, be real, their main job is to keep a room full of toddlers alive for 6 hours a day until they're old enough to go to Big School. Personality actually does matter in teaching. A lot. As much as I loving loathe to raise it, Finland (seen as the gold standard for successful teacher education) requires people seeking entry into a teaching degree to explain why they want to be a teacher, and they do need a drat good reason. "Paid vacation and finishing at 3" is not a suitable answer. Finland is often used to justify any teaching policy, and the person using them as a justification always omits the fact that Finland is an incredible equitable country with a very low level of wealth disparity, which is why education works well there, but that's neither here nor there when it comes to selecting candidates. teacup posted:I started to think of a way in which they could not crush peoples dreams AFTER they have studied for four years to get a teaching degree when they really shouldn't have, like screened people before hand. Then I thought the Universities wouldn't do that because they'd want more money anyway so figured it would have to be a government takeover kind of deal. A few steps from there and I was dreaming of a fully socialised state of education where you wouldn't get bullshit like this happening and teachers who are really important to our communities not getting permanent jobs for 9 years etc. I don't do this because I work as a teacher in a modern western nation and I know the economy and powers that be both view me as a completely interchangeable and expendable part of a system which exists purely to inculturate new consumers and wage slaves. Also it's five or six years, and I'm entirely open to the idea of completely crushing people's dreams before they start a teaching degree. Some people just aren't meant to be in a classroom, and I don't think it's fair to ask a generation of students to carry the burden of someone's lovely teaching. Step one is not letting people commence a teaching degree before the year they turn 25 so they have some time to think about it and don't just do the high school -> uni -> high school revolving door, becoming a socially and culturally stunted adult. See again the Finland example. Watch a video of a Finnish high school teacher and let me know roughly when you fall asleep. They're the most boring, uninteresting lessons you'll ever see, and if you offered them to the NSW DET as evidence of your proficiency as a teacher, they'd laugh at you. Education works there because of Finnish society and culture, not because of any particular quirk of their teacher training programs or workplace conditions. Anglosphere politicians love to pick out the most onerous and politically expedient parts of their education system and impose them on us, like literacy assessments. At the same time, they love to ignore the more important parts like "literally no public money at all spent on private education" "schools which are properly funded, staffed, and equipped to handle all student needs," "ridiculously low levels of poverty due to an incredible welfare state," and "students with non-lovely home lives because their parents can get financial support when they need it, not after 6 months of unemployment and after jumping through hoops." Zenithe posted:I'm not sure this would be too beneficial unless it was finding suitability for particular roles. Most people who complete a teaching degree will be able to teach a regular no issues class without much trouble, but those are becoming increasingly rare. To teach more complicated groups though, such as those with learning difficulties, behavioural problems, large groups of ESL students etc are not things everyone will be good at. These classes literally do not exist in public education, and because the private sector can be more discriminatory and selective in their hiring, they're often taking the teachers most equipped to handle "bad" classes and paying them way more to look after a room of soulless, blindingly white children who couldn't even dream of rebellion. The last survey I read about in NSW said the major reasons new teachers bail on the profession are a lack of permanent employment and a lack of mentorship. Often when you do finally land a permanent job, the first thing the boomers in your staff room will do is make a shortlist of students they hate teaching and then write "YOUR TIMETABLE" across the top. It's a great way to make sure everyone involved has a bad day, but it's what happens when the only people in the profession who don't have to worry whether or not they'll have a job in six months are also the people who are trying to do as little as possible until pension day. Smegmatron fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Jan 24, 2016 |
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Jan 24, 2016 00:11
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open24hours posted:I'm sure there are some people who are unteachable, but isn't a teaching degree supposed to teach you how to teach? It'd be like telling people they're not cut out for physics or chemistry before they've even had a chance to engage with it. How exactly does a university teach a person to be patient and not yell at children who are doing their utmost to give you the shits? Do you think they do units like EDU5055 Rolling With The Punches When Kids Tell You Off? What do you teach a person who looks down on people who don't love a particular subject as much as they do? All they can do is explain to why their lovely personality is bad practice and then kick them out (  ) if/when they keep being a bad teacher on prac. For reference, here's what most teaching degrees cover:
Zenithe posted:Is this what you actually think or are you ironically insulting six years of education? Semi-ironically insulting six years of education based on being forced to work with groups of people who lose their loving minds upon being asked to explain fractions, and then look at me like I'm an alien when I suggest cutting an apple into pieces. The first 12-18 months of primary (again, NSW) are purely about survival and getting kids used to the idea of being away from home for a fully day. Ask a kindergarten specialist if you don't believe me. The rest of our primary curriculum is woefully inadequate and assumes that our kids are borderline incompetent, with incredibly low expectations of them. It is getting much better, but for a very long time though, the main focus of primary education has been behaviour and inculturation with learning beyond the absolute fundamentals of language and numbers coming second. As a rule, secondary teachers semi-seriously loathe primary teachers because we're sick of being handed year 7 classes full of kids who are way behind where they should be for their year level because their stage 3 teachers put them in the too hard basket and figure the secondary system will fix it. Smegmatron fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Jan 24, 2016 |
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Jan 24, 2016 00:44
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open24hours posted:If it is truly the case that modern Australian teaching degrees don't even attempt to teach people how to deal with difficult students then that's a much stronger case for reforming teacher education than it is for excluding people from it. Teacher degrees follow the AITSL standards for teaching because they're what are used to assess teachers throughout their career, and they're also how the unis gain accreditation as teacher training institutions. If they don't teach to these specific standards, their students won't be accredited as teachers. There's only one standard that applies to managing behaviour, and it's, well... not really. quote:Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments Note how the emphasis is entirely on safety, and not on actual good behaviour, except for that one sub-point. The idea of inclusion means a good teacher should be looking at how to make sure an ADD kid, for instance, is able to participate in a way which doesn't require the class to sit still for hours on end, which should have the follow-on effect of mitigating any obnoxious behaviour, but people are complex and there's never an easy solution. It's mainly special education units which cover this stuff, and it's usually pretty cursory because they have 18 months to cover seven of these incredibly vague standards or their graduates can't go on to be teachers. Zenithe posted:As a rule for who, because I've never come across that sentiment as a kind of cultural thing between primary and secondary teachers (my time is split across both). Individuals sure in both directions, but I've never seen it as an occupation wide grudge. I've had a weird couple of years in that I've worked at the extreme ends of the spectrum for what people would call a "good" or "bad" public school but not the middle. English teachers in particular are constantly griping about their stage 5 classes' literacy and the maths teachers I speak too are usually unimpressed with the literacy in their junior classes too. I'm an ESL teacher, so skimping on literacy is something that bugs me more than most because I know it isn't that difficult to teach to kids who already speak the language, so it becomes more a question of willingness rather than ability. Also lol at the idea that a recent graduate is around long enough to finish introducing themselves before their contract is over and they're begging for their job again. Smegmatron fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Jan 24, 2016 |
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Jan 24, 2016 01:17
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open24hours posted:You're making a good case for reform then. Maybe make it a four (five?) year degree? It's already six years if you do a B.Ed/B.Whatever combined or B.Whatever/M.Teach. I think you can wrap it all up in four and a half if you do a 3 year bachelors and a graduate diploma. Maybe they could reform it by making people wait until they finish their undergrad so they don't start a six year teaching degree when they're 18, and then sit down and have a chat with them before undertaking postgraduate study to make sure it's what they really want to do and that they're prepared for it. You know, like some sort of interview, perhaps. Smegmatron fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Jan 24, 2016 |
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Jan 24, 2016 01:25
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Graic Gabtar posted:At the risk of being indelicate, most of the issues you describe could pretty much be applied to any industry. Unless you are connected to the teaching game this may be regarded as a bit 'meh' to some people. Plenty of industries have stupid people doing stupid things, but if someone who sits at a desk all day half-asses their job for years on end, it hurts their employer and maybe some associated entities. If one teacher half-asses it for about a year, 30-150 kids get screwed out of a decent education not just for that year, but also for the following years because they've missed out on important foundational skills. If half a school is half-assing it for five years, you've basically screwed an entire cohort out of a chance at any sort of social mobility.
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Jan 24, 2016 08:08
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 20:27 |
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Milky Moor posted:
ACA is a sacred institution for white Australians, and not to be hosed with. Go to a local pub at 6:30 on a weeknight and see how many people are sitting there half cut shouting at it.
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Jan 25, 2016 23:18
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they pulled a hoax on a current affair and today tonight