“We lose too many balls!” said Stevie G.
I’m not sure we lose enough balls actually. I think there should be a gentle and obviously not literal castration taking place now. Then again, is there such a thing as a gentle castration? Sounds even more painful!
Well, the oldest teenager has vanished upstairs in disgust as though his parents are personally responsible for the fact that Steven Gerrard has lost his pace, desire and ability. He has stropped in synch with Shrek who somehow thinks the fans are to blame for the fact that he cannot control the ball. I mean, for goodness sake Wayne. You looked as though you expected people to feed the ball to your feet and keep allowing you to take a free kick until you scored.
I don’t know whether it is just me but I don’t think it is. There seems to be a general lack of passion around. The flags are up but they are not swooping in the summer breeze. The boyz are down the pub, sipping their beer but it appears to be more to do with ritual than desire.
There’s no “tingle”.
And tingle is so important. You need tingle in life. It is the physical feeling of the spiritual essence.
I cannot really remember the last World Cup. I remember 1974 distinctly with Johannes Cruijff and Franz Beckenbauer being the battling captains; both of whom oozed flair and passion with every graceful movement on the pitch. They had intelligence and it showed in their football. They didn’t ever just kick a ball, and unlike Rooney, they never expected the game to revolve around them as though they had god given right to dominate the proceedings.
The referee that day was Jack Taylor. That is probably why I remember the match. My dad and grandfather, who wasn’t a huge football fan, were so delighted to have their ‘friend’ refereeing a World Cup Final, he being a Wolverhampton butcher by trade.
What did Bill Shankly say? “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I can assure you it is much more important than that” or words to that effect.
Shanks, me old mate, you were wrong. Of course, you knew that but since you spoke those infamous words people have taken them literally.
Football is not that important and yet there are people today who will be waking up with sore heads and heavy hearts, not because of an over indulgent night of alcohol but because of the humiliation and despondency of raised expectations being yet again thwarted by a group of men who cannot gel together as a team.
Once England loses to Slovenia on Wednesday afternoon, there will be the usual post mortems. The manager will be too foreign, the fans will be too hopeful, the goalkeepers will be too old or too young, the players will be too overpaid. There will be all sorts of excuses; some of which are justified and some of which are xenophobic nonsense. What very well may be true is the fact that the passion is simply not there.
They talk about it. John Terry, being interviewed by James Cordon, in a testosterone fuelled love-in, talked passionately about how he feels when he puts on the England shirt and strides out in front of a large crowd all vying for a victory. But do you know something Johnny boy, I didn’t feel your passion last night darling. Your head was low and I’m not sure you have recovered from the loss of pride in having the captaincy removed.
On that note, of course, whether you like the man or not, he’s more of a natural leader/captain than Stevie G. Both are not even half the players that they used to be but I do think I would rather see Terry wearing the leader’s armband.
Here’s a little known fact. Did you know that England have never won the World Cup under a Tory government? The writing was on the wall when the coalition smooched together in the garden of Number 10.
Our World Cup was effectively over then.
Obviously that is a stupid statement considering there has only been one successful England team when Harold Wilson had just crept into power but referring back to Terry, the chances of England winning the World Cup were further limited by the turmoil of the changes in captaincy. Wayne Bridge didn’t help matters with his petulant rattle throwing behaviour over JT’s sexual behaviour with his ex-partner.
Let us get this straight once and for all. John Terry had sex with Wayne Bridge’s EX girlfriend. Did you all get that? She was his EX. Their relationship was a Polygon – dead parrot and all that. It had ceased to exist. Wayne was a free agent and so was Vanessa. They could choose who they had sexual relationships with and Mr. T made himself available.
Now it may have been uncomfortable for Wayne to accept that his old friend was sleeping with his ex-partner but let’s face facts, it’s hardly the first time this has ever happened to anyone in life. It is also hardly the first time it has happened in a work situation either.
If people had just stopped for a minute to consider the consequences of their behaviour, and admittedly JT should be included in that, then there could have been a more considered approach to the whole affair.
Cappello could have said to the great British press, “Look Guys, I know like Salome, you want the proverbial head of John the Captain, but you know, I’m not sure I should be sacking a bloke for one indiscretion between the sheets. The pretty French girl was not involved with anyone else at the time and that should be the end of the matter”.
Bridge should have had more emotional intelligence and looked at the situation with a view to how his peevishness would affect the rest of the team. Terry should probably have kept his dick in his trousers knowing that the press were almost bound to find out about this. The rest of the team could have been more forthcoming in their protestations about such a sacking.
In all of these “what if’s” or “should have’s” there lies a few too many truths about the glorious game that people are still choosing to ignore.
There is selfishness and greed that goes way beyond the astronomical amounts of money that these people are paid. The personal financial gain for footballers makes them feel invincible. It suggests to them that they are infallible and the world owes them more than the £100K per week that they receive. It invokes immature and selfish behaviour, the very opposite of team togetherness, commitment to one another and altruism.
The power of a footballer in a position such as Terry also makes them feel infallible. We have created icons of these men for the mere ability of being able to play with their balls, and they are not even as good as their aforementioned predecessors who never seemed to trip up over their idolisation, or maybe it was more suppressed by the media. I don’t think so though.
Terry thought that he could get away with his horniness. He thought he was so important that he could make himself and the situation invisible. These people are not gods and yet the public continue to expect godlike behaviour from them. In return these boys begin to think that they can do anything, to the extent that they feel they can play football together without the work, the intelligence, the togetherness. England does not have a god-given right to win the World Cup, however much one would hope for such a victory.
No, the simple fact is that there are some serious flaws in the English game at present. Cliché alert! There is no “I” in team and yet there are probably at least nine of them, or that is what I saw in the game tonight. Wayne Rooney was the biggest “I” on the pitch. Me, me, me, me, me. It is all about me. It is my chance to shine, it is my right to be the hero.
There is too much expectation.
False hope is as bad as no hope at all.
There appears to be no desire. IF JT is right and every person on that pitch feels the pride and passion that he alleges to, then why can we not see it in every second of the game. Why do people give up in the box when the personal glory is not going to come their way? Why do they resort to petty cheating when the supposed flair that they have has been left behind in Birmingham, Manchester or the capital city? Gareth Barry went down on one occasion with his eyes and head directly transfixed on the referee. The blatancy of his dive and demands was sickening.
And whether you can cope with this or not, the financial situation and the huge earnings are taking their toll on the game, and I suspect it is not just England. Look at France, Spain, Italy, Germany. They are all suffering from this lack of cohesion between the alleged greats of the footballing world. Even the revered Messi may not have been the best player on the pitch for Argentina the other day.
I suspect that it is no coincidence that these teams are struggling to find consistency against nations that still seem to have some passion and are less well-paid than their European counterparts.
The big boys may well lose out because they have lost their sense of wonderment at the game.
Shankly was right. To some, it is a matter of life and death but what is increasingly happening is that football is becoming separated from life and death. The rules of both apply to football and footballers as much as it does to the rest of us. No-one can live effectively in life or can cope with death without the foresight to think intelligently, to respect people and their individual rights, to empathise and to collaborate, to feel passion and understand the nature of wellbeing.
Nobody can live successfully without these things, and they cost nothing monetarily.
It’s time to wake up boys otherwise the prophecies of doom are going to be trailing along with you all the way back to the airport and across the continents once more. Premature ejection is imminent.
Of course, there is always 2014.
Saturday, 19 June 2010
Monday, 31 May 2010
More on Laws
NB. This should have been posted on Sunday morning but there was no internet access to be found!
Our Prime Minister speaks.
“You are a good and honourable man. I am sure that throughout you have been motivated by wanting to protect your privacy rather than anything else. I hope that in time you will be able to serve again as I think it absolutely clear that you have a huge amount to offer our country.”
And the man in question had stated, “My only motivation throughout has not been to maximise profit but to simply protect our privacy and my wish not to reveal my sexuality”.
“Good and honourable man”!
Good and honourable men do not defraud the taxpayer from copious amounts of money, David(s). Good and honourable men do not try and pass such actions off in the manner that Mr. Laws has done so. Good and honourable men, when they have been found to be dishonourable, stick their hands in the air and say, “It’s a fair cop Mister”.
On Radio Four yesterday morning they were actually debating whether David Laws should resign or not. It was actually debated and discussed with a considered view that there was an option.
Why? The man took £40,000 of public money to pay his lover for sharing his home with him. The man broke the parliamentary legislation and guidelines on this. His credibility was shattered. You cannot possibly have a man in the position of tightening purse strings when he has pocketed such vast sums of public money. Whatever his reasons, he would have lost all ounce of respect by carrying on and pretending he could simply draw a line under the whole proceedings.
He pocketed £40,000 or if he didn’t pocket, the man closest to him did so.
I didn’t think we’d get a scandal quite this early. It’s a little pathetic not to get to the end of the first month of government without some major crisis. I almost feel sorry for Cameron who must be sitting there thinking that the world seriously does not want him to be Prime Minister. Firstly, the electorate don’t actually give him the absolute mandate to govern. Then he has to negotiate and contrive a coalition with people that he has probably seen as pinkie lefties for most of his parliamentary career and now he has to contend with the stupidity of the ever so sensible and trusted Mr. Laws.
Of course, Cameron could argue that Laws is not one of his. He is on the other side of the coalition. He can, to some extent, wipe his hands and saw, “Phew, I’ll leave that one to Nicholas”. But he can’t do that. He made the ultimate choice to have Laws in a highly prolific role.
Anyway, at least my gaydar is still in working order, not that it was a particularly difficult spot, and it was an open secret in Westminster that Laws was gay. That being the case, then why on earth did the man think that he could use the excuse of trying to shield the press and everyone else from his sexuality as a reason as to why he defrauded public funds in this way?
I always try to see a different perspective and how ever many ways I go around this case, I am flummoxed and left with the sad and disappointing conclusion that Mr. Laws thought he could get away with it. No doubt at one point, there was a decision to claim for rent as a mask on his sexuality.
Just for a minute, let’s just imagine the situation.
This man has moved into the home of another prominent albeit unelected Liberal Democrat. They find some common interests, values etcetera and soon they become sexually attracted to one another. In fairness, they do not want to go back to the Commons committee for expenses just yet in case their relationship is a mere flash in the pan. However, after two years of being together you would think that might constitute a settling in period.
By 2006 when the rules were “clarified” about paying rent etc to spouses, there must have been a conversation in the household and they must have made the decision to continue to keep quiet. Neither of these men was apparently “out” with their families and our gutter press could easily have got hold of information about them.
But then I would suggest that the conversation would probably have turned to probability and risk assessment. David Laws was a member of the Liberal Democrats; a party that was highly unlikely to ever be at the forefront of British politics. However brilliant this young man might be, he was never likely to hold office in government and I would suggest that it was this that drove these two men to continue with their charade whilst pocketing a tidy sum in the process.
So, at what stage did this good and honourable man find his conscience? Was it in 2006 when the Commons claims procedures were changed? Clearly not. Was it during the expenses scandal when journalists were shifting around and coming up with manna from heaven as far as disgracing dodgy MPs? No, apparently Mr. Laws did not squeak at this time either, other than to criticise those who were claiming astronomical amounts of money for feeding the family bunny rabbit. Was it during the election debate where any politically astute person could see that there was a high possibility that the Lib Dems may hold the balance of power in a hung parliament? No, this intellectually brilliant bloke still kept schtum. Perhaps it was during the discussions with little Willie and his brigade from the Blue side when Laws began to realise that power was coming his way? No, still there was silence.
And so it went on, and the trench was dug deep.
Laws, quite frankly, must have known he was well and truly fucked at this stage but once you are that far into a lie it becomes a reality by default. It is that person’s reality at least.
Enough said. Why did he not go to the chief whip or the party leader and have a quiet word about his expenses, explaining the situation, stating that he needed to claim to hide his sexuality? At this point, something could have been suggested rather than the fraudulent behaviour that ensued. He was in the Liberal Democratic Party for heaven’s sake, a party that has – guess what – liberal tendencies when it comes to sexuality. Whilst we are on that subject, David Laws is a pink Tory (in more ways than one). It appears that the only reason he joined the Liberals rather than the Tories was his abhorrence for Clause 28. Didn’t somebody twig then or did they not twig when they looked at his voting pattern on homosexual law?
As I said, enough said. Contempt breeds contempt. Greed breeds greed. Money breeds money from whatever source you can grab. This is a dog eat dog world where those that have will probably always have and those that haven’t just sit in stunned shock at the stupidity of some people.
And all of this before you get onto the subject of how pathetic we are as a society that it requires someone in high office to hide their sexuality. Our societal dishonesty about sex is appalling, be it homosexual or heterosexual.
We can’t cope with sex. We don’t like to talk about it openly and we probably think about it more frequently than we dare to admit.
This is 2010. If a man cannot stand up in public and admit that he is gay, then it is a sorry indictment on us all. On the positive side though, it could be a gross misjudgement from the man himself. There is a possibility that people are just not bothered by his sexuality.
Whatever the pros and cons, the ins and outs, the for’s and against’s, David Laws must be sitting there wondering why he got the call so wrong. Stupid, naive, power-driven, ineptitude.
When will these politicians learn that they are not invincible?
Our Prime Minister speaks.
“You are a good and honourable man. I am sure that throughout you have been motivated by wanting to protect your privacy rather than anything else. I hope that in time you will be able to serve again as I think it absolutely clear that you have a huge amount to offer our country.”
And the man in question had stated, “My only motivation throughout has not been to maximise profit but to simply protect our privacy and my wish not to reveal my sexuality”.
“Good and honourable man”!
Good and honourable men do not defraud the taxpayer from copious amounts of money, David(s). Good and honourable men do not try and pass such actions off in the manner that Mr. Laws has done so. Good and honourable men, when they have been found to be dishonourable, stick their hands in the air and say, “It’s a fair cop Mister”.
On Radio Four yesterday morning they were actually debating whether David Laws should resign or not. It was actually debated and discussed with a considered view that there was an option.
Why? The man took £40,000 of public money to pay his lover for sharing his home with him. The man broke the parliamentary legislation and guidelines on this. His credibility was shattered. You cannot possibly have a man in the position of tightening purse strings when he has pocketed such vast sums of public money. Whatever his reasons, he would have lost all ounce of respect by carrying on and pretending he could simply draw a line under the whole proceedings.
He pocketed £40,000 or if he didn’t pocket, the man closest to him did so.
I didn’t think we’d get a scandal quite this early. It’s a little pathetic not to get to the end of the first month of government without some major crisis. I almost feel sorry for Cameron who must be sitting there thinking that the world seriously does not want him to be Prime Minister. Firstly, the electorate don’t actually give him the absolute mandate to govern. Then he has to negotiate and contrive a coalition with people that he has probably seen as pinkie lefties for most of his parliamentary career and now he has to contend with the stupidity of the ever so sensible and trusted Mr. Laws.
Of course, Cameron could argue that Laws is not one of his. He is on the other side of the coalition. He can, to some extent, wipe his hands and saw, “Phew, I’ll leave that one to Nicholas”. But he can’t do that. He made the ultimate choice to have Laws in a highly prolific role.
Anyway, at least my gaydar is still in working order, not that it was a particularly difficult spot, and it was an open secret in Westminster that Laws was gay. That being the case, then why on earth did the man think that he could use the excuse of trying to shield the press and everyone else from his sexuality as a reason as to why he defrauded public funds in this way?
I always try to see a different perspective and how ever many ways I go around this case, I am flummoxed and left with the sad and disappointing conclusion that Mr. Laws thought he could get away with it. No doubt at one point, there was a decision to claim for rent as a mask on his sexuality.
Just for a minute, let’s just imagine the situation.
This man has moved into the home of another prominent albeit unelected Liberal Democrat. They find some common interests, values etcetera and soon they become sexually attracted to one another. In fairness, they do not want to go back to the Commons committee for expenses just yet in case their relationship is a mere flash in the pan. However, after two years of being together you would think that might constitute a settling in period.
By 2006 when the rules were “clarified” about paying rent etc to spouses, there must have been a conversation in the household and they must have made the decision to continue to keep quiet. Neither of these men was apparently “out” with their families and our gutter press could easily have got hold of information about them.
But then I would suggest that the conversation would probably have turned to probability and risk assessment. David Laws was a member of the Liberal Democrats; a party that was highly unlikely to ever be at the forefront of British politics. However brilliant this young man might be, he was never likely to hold office in government and I would suggest that it was this that drove these two men to continue with their charade whilst pocketing a tidy sum in the process.
So, at what stage did this good and honourable man find his conscience? Was it in 2006 when the Commons claims procedures were changed? Clearly not. Was it during the expenses scandal when journalists were shifting around and coming up with manna from heaven as far as disgracing dodgy MPs? No, apparently Mr. Laws did not squeak at this time either, other than to criticise those who were claiming astronomical amounts of money for feeding the family bunny rabbit. Was it during the election debate where any politically astute person could see that there was a high possibility that the Lib Dems may hold the balance of power in a hung parliament? No, this intellectually brilliant bloke still kept schtum. Perhaps it was during the discussions with little Willie and his brigade from the Blue side when Laws began to realise that power was coming his way? No, still there was silence.
And so it went on, and the trench was dug deep.
Laws, quite frankly, must have known he was well and truly fucked at this stage but once you are that far into a lie it becomes a reality by default. It is that person’s reality at least.
Enough said. Why did he not go to the chief whip or the party leader and have a quiet word about his expenses, explaining the situation, stating that he needed to claim to hide his sexuality? At this point, something could have been suggested rather than the fraudulent behaviour that ensued. He was in the Liberal Democratic Party for heaven’s sake, a party that has – guess what – liberal tendencies when it comes to sexuality. Whilst we are on that subject, David Laws is a pink Tory (in more ways than one). It appears that the only reason he joined the Liberals rather than the Tories was his abhorrence for Clause 28. Didn’t somebody twig then or did they not twig when they looked at his voting pattern on homosexual law?
As I said, enough said. Contempt breeds contempt. Greed breeds greed. Money breeds money from whatever source you can grab. This is a dog eat dog world where those that have will probably always have and those that haven’t just sit in stunned shock at the stupidity of some people.
And all of this before you get onto the subject of how pathetic we are as a society that it requires someone in high office to hide their sexuality. Our societal dishonesty about sex is appalling, be it homosexual or heterosexual.
We can’t cope with sex. We don’t like to talk about it openly and we probably think about it more frequently than we dare to admit.
This is 2010. If a man cannot stand up in public and admit that he is gay, then it is a sorry indictment on us all. On the positive side though, it could be a gross misjudgement from the man himself. There is a possibility that people are just not bothered by his sexuality.
Whatever the pros and cons, the ins and outs, the for’s and against’s, David Laws must be sitting there wondering why he got the call so wrong. Stupid, naive, power-driven, ineptitude.
When will these politicians learn that they are not invincible?
Friday, 14 May 2010
Time On Your Hands
Time On Your Hands
If only!
Did you know there are optimum times for us to be working and thinking cognitively? Most people have a very short window, usually a couple or three hours. If you are lucky you have two of these windows. It is at this time that you apparently do your best work. Those who have ever participated in time and motion studies may have even been told what their windows are.
Employers look at these times and consider them to be optimum times when the person should be giving their best for the service or the company. If you have an optimum cognitive time of between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. then you should probably not have a lunch break until the Archers has finished on Radio 4, so employers would say.
Me, I would say this is the very best time to be creative; to think, to read, to write, to wander around and take a good look at the spectacular world in which you live.
In a recent “Observer” questionnaire a range of politicians had to answer a range of questions so that we, the great British public, could learn a little more about them as though this might influence the way that we voted. One of the questions was “What super power would you choose?” There were the fairly usual choices of invisibility, time travel and flying but one consistent response echoed over and over again, and that was the ability to be in two places at the same time.
It would definitely be the one that I would choose. Life would be far less complicated if this was possible. Like Faustus, I would happily trade a few years of my life for this fulfilment but sadly, it is never going to happen.
Time is so precious and we spend so much time misusing it, wasting it, not prioritising the things and the people that are most important to us right now. Time does not stand still no matter how much we would like to pretend it does and the grains of sand run too rapidly for those of us with so many aspects of our lives still waiting to be lived.
Some people have weird misconceptions about the best way to spend time, thinking that the world is going to wait for them as they preoccupy themselves with the mundane, the peripheral, the unimportant. I remember the wonderful Dennis Potter stating that he would happily bump off a certain male newspaper tycoon on receipt of the news that he had terminal cancer. He felt that this would have been a good use of his time to some extent but then he said, “I’ve got too much writing to do and I haven’t got the energy”.
He knew his priorities, for sure and was an exceptional writer to boot.
He went on, during that incredible interview with Melvyn Bragg to talk about the importance of living in the now, with the wisdom of one who has a termination hovering over him, though I suspect he would probably have said the same thing irrespective of this cancer.
“And we forget or tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense; it is is, and it is now only. I mean, as much as we would like to call back yesterday and indeed yearn to, and ache to sometimes, we can't................ no matter how predictable it is, there's the element of the unpredictable, of the you don't know. The only thing you know for sure is the present tense, and that nowness becomes so vivid that, almost in a perverse sort of way, I'm almost serene. You know, I can celebrate life.”
He continued.
“Below my window in Ross, when I'm working in Ross, for example, there at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It's a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it's white, and looking at it, instead of saying "Oh that's nice blossom" ... last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter.”
And here is the most beautiful statement from this speech.
“But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know.”
He continued once more.
“There's no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance ... not that I'm interested in reassuring people - bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.”
Dennis Potter is so right. We should all listen to him now and realise the essence and the sense of those words.
I remember watching the interview when it was broadcast some fifteen years ago. Time flies, see!
I remember being deeply moved by the whole experience and I remember sitting there, not weeping howls of anguish but realising that my face was awash with spent tears that had flowed empathetically throughout the interview.
I suspect that Potter would not have asked for the super power of time travel. He seemed to suggest that whilst it is also a magical thought to be able to disappear back in time, there is little purpose other than living in the moment and that living in the present doesn’t mean that there is predictability. Far from it! There is a life about it. A living. A being. I like that.
I’m not sure that he would have chosen to have the power of being in two places at once either. I think he had a healthy respect for time and the nature of time as it stands, in reality.
Potter also highlighted another really vital issue about time; about the lack of it in his case. He mentioned that the blossom looked whiter and frothier than it once did. He mentioned that the trivial suddenly gained importance and the differentiation between what was trivial and what was significant was indefinable.
These are important messages about time. These are important messages about redefining what is important.
For the terminally ill, when time is disappearing, you look more closely. You see the absolute significance in things. You haven’t got time to be choosy. An instinctual urgency kicks in.
How sad that we only tend to see the blossom when we fear we will see it no longer.
I think the key message from all of this is that Dennis Potter was saying you cannot explain this to someone who has not experienced this and maybe we should all try and experience “newness” before we are terminally ill, before we are on our last legs. What he is saying is that we should be experiencing this now! I wonder if he realised how zen-like he was sounding.
We, as a race, are possibly the only ones who know that there is an end in sight. We, as a race, are possibly the only ones who have sufficient cognitive and emotional intelligence to be able to rationalise this and do something about it, and yet we spend our lives concentrating on the unnecessary, concentrating on the things that are not vital instead of concentrating on the things that are going to give us ultimate happiness, serenity and spiritual wellbeing.
We need to look up instead of at ground level. We need to take the time to walk and talk and enjoy.
We need to make time for the most important people and the most important aspects of life. Yes, we have to have certain things in place in order to survive but being the best teacher or the most accurate accountant or the most tidy housewife or the most dedicated follower of whatever is ultimately not the most important thing to be.
We should be listening to music, sharing our thoughts on what we hear. We should be looking at the ever changing world, of the growing greenness as the summer shimmers in. We should be reading and writing just as Dennis Potter did. We cannot all be as brilliant as him but we can try. We should be meditating and eradicating every thought from our mind and just enjoy searching, realising and enjoying the essentials of life. We should be considerate to others without swallowing ourselves into the bargain. We should smell the roses and embrace the sunlight.
But we don’t, do we?
For those who think that they have not got enough time on their hands, then think again. Is it really a lack of time or a lack of prioritisation?
I’m thinking now of all of those ex-MPs and indeed ex-PMs who have more time on their hands than they had thought they would have had or more time than they hoped they would have.
If I was them, I’d be relishing this moment for the serenity and hopefulness that it offered.
If I was advising these people, I would implore them to stop, take stock of the time on their hands and get out into the streets to see the remnants of the spring flowers. I would ask them to sit for a while and recognise the utter value of stillness and silence. Without this, they are never going to reformulate their ideas. Without this, they will never hear the words of truth spoken to them.
Here’s the truth. Today, I read the transcript for the interview between Melvyn Bragg and Dennis Potter for the first time since I watched the programme all those years ago.
The message and the thoughts resonated immediately yet I had heard them exactly and poignantly spoken over a decade and a half ago. I’d sat and listened intently to that interview, to the point of a cascade of tears and yet I did nothing with the words that this man spoke. I got involved with his ideas but I didn’t engage them. I didn’t act upon them. I hurried along with my life without really looking at the blossom in full, without really living in the present tense either.
We may have a rough idea of life expectation but we don’t really know how much time we have left; apocryphal buses are but a mere street away. But we do have time on our hands if we can only remember to use it wisely.
As Dennis Potter says, I can write this and the reader may take it on board but to really understand what this nowness is about, you have to live it.
And I am only just beginning.
If only!
Did you know there are optimum times for us to be working and thinking cognitively? Most people have a very short window, usually a couple or three hours. If you are lucky you have two of these windows. It is at this time that you apparently do your best work. Those who have ever participated in time and motion studies may have even been told what their windows are.
Employers look at these times and consider them to be optimum times when the person should be giving their best for the service or the company. If you have an optimum cognitive time of between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. then you should probably not have a lunch break until the Archers has finished on Radio 4, so employers would say.
Me, I would say this is the very best time to be creative; to think, to read, to write, to wander around and take a good look at the spectacular world in which you live.
In a recent “Observer” questionnaire a range of politicians had to answer a range of questions so that we, the great British public, could learn a little more about them as though this might influence the way that we voted. One of the questions was “What super power would you choose?” There were the fairly usual choices of invisibility, time travel and flying but one consistent response echoed over and over again, and that was the ability to be in two places at the same time.
It would definitely be the one that I would choose. Life would be far less complicated if this was possible. Like Faustus, I would happily trade a few years of my life for this fulfilment but sadly, it is never going to happen.
Time is so precious and we spend so much time misusing it, wasting it, not prioritising the things and the people that are most important to us right now. Time does not stand still no matter how much we would like to pretend it does and the grains of sand run too rapidly for those of us with so many aspects of our lives still waiting to be lived.
Some people have weird misconceptions about the best way to spend time, thinking that the world is going to wait for them as they preoccupy themselves with the mundane, the peripheral, the unimportant. I remember the wonderful Dennis Potter stating that he would happily bump off a certain male newspaper tycoon on receipt of the news that he had terminal cancer. He felt that this would have been a good use of his time to some extent but then he said, “I’ve got too much writing to do and I haven’t got the energy”.
He knew his priorities, for sure and was an exceptional writer to boot.
He went on, during that incredible interview with Melvyn Bragg to talk about the importance of living in the now, with the wisdom of one who has a termination hovering over him, though I suspect he would probably have said the same thing irrespective of this cancer.
“And we forget or tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense; it is is, and it is now only. I mean, as much as we would like to call back yesterday and indeed yearn to, and ache to sometimes, we can't................ no matter how predictable it is, there's the element of the unpredictable, of the you don't know. The only thing you know for sure is the present tense, and that nowness becomes so vivid that, almost in a perverse sort of way, I'm almost serene. You know, I can celebrate life.”
He continued.
“Below my window in Ross, when I'm working in Ross, for example, there at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It's a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it's white, and looking at it, instead of saying "Oh that's nice blossom" ... last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter.”
And here is the most beautiful statement from this speech.
“But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know.”
He continued once more.
“There's no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance ... not that I'm interested in reassuring people - bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.”
Dennis Potter is so right. We should all listen to him now and realise the essence and the sense of those words.
I remember watching the interview when it was broadcast some fifteen years ago. Time flies, see!
I remember being deeply moved by the whole experience and I remember sitting there, not weeping howls of anguish but realising that my face was awash with spent tears that had flowed empathetically throughout the interview.
I suspect that Potter would not have asked for the super power of time travel. He seemed to suggest that whilst it is also a magical thought to be able to disappear back in time, there is little purpose other than living in the moment and that living in the present doesn’t mean that there is predictability. Far from it! There is a life about it. A living. A being. I like that.
I’m not sure that he would have chosen to have the power of being in two places at once either. I think he had a healthy respect for time and the nature of time as it stands, in reality.
Potter also highlighted another really vital issue about time; about the lack of it in his case. He mentioned that the blossom looked whiter and frothier than it once did. He mentioned that the trivial suddenly gained importance and the differentiation between what was trivial and what was significant was indefinable.
These are important messages about time. These are important messages about redefining what is important.
For the terminally ill, when time is disappearing, you look more closely. You see the absolute significance in things. You haven’t got time to be choosy. An instinctual urgency kicks in.
How sad that we only tend to see the blossom when we fear we will see it no longer.
I think the key message from all of this is that Dennis Potter was saying you cannot explain this to someone who has not experienced this and maybe we should all try and experience “newness” before we are terminally ill, before we are on our last legs. What he is saying is that we should be experiencing this now! I wonder if he realised how zen-like he was sounding.
We, as a race, are possibly the only ones who know that there is an end in sight. We, as a race, are possibly the only ones who have sufficient cognitive and emotional intelligence to be able to rationalise this and do something about it, and yet we spend our lives concentrating on the unnecessary, concentrating on the things that are not vital instead of concentrating on the things that are going to give us ultimate happiness, serenity and spiritual wellbeing.
We need to look up instead of at ground level. We need to take the time to walk and talk and enjoy.
We need to make time for the most important people and the most important aspects of life. Yes, we have to have certain things in place in order to survive but being the best teacher or the most accurate accountant or the most tidy housewife or the most dedicated follower of whatever is ultimately not the most important thing to be.
We should be listening to music, sharing our thoughts on what we hear. We should be looking at the ever changing world, of the growing greenness as the summer shimmers in. We should be reading and writing just as Dennis Potter did. We cannot all be as brilliant as him but we can try. We should be meditating and eradicating every thought from our mind and just enjoy searching, realising and enjoying the essentials of life. We should be considerate to others without swallowing ourselves into the bargain. We should smell the roses and embrace the sunlight.
But we don’t, do we?
For those who think that they have not got enough time on their hands, then think again. Is it really a lack of time or a lack of prioritisation?
I’m thinking now of all of those ex-MPs and indeed ex-PMs who have more time on their hands than they had thought they would have had or more time than they hoped they would have.
If I was them, I’d be relishing this moment for the serenity and hopefulness that it offered.
If I was advising these people, I would implore them to stop, take stock of the time on their hands and get out into the streets to see the remnants of the spring flowers. I would ask them to sit for a while and recognise the utter value of stillness and silence. Without this, they are never going to reformulate their ideas. Without this, they will never hear the words of truth spoken to them.
Here’s the truth. Today, I read the transcript for the interview between Melvyn Bragg and Dennis Potter for the first time since I watched the programme all those years ago.
The message and the thoughts resonated immediately yet I had heard them exactly and poignantly spoken over a decade and a half ago. I’d sat and listened intently to that interview, to the point of a cascade of tears and yet I did nothing with the words that this man spoke. I got involved with his ideas but I didn’t engage them. I didn’t act upon them. I hurried along with my life without really looking at the blossom in full, without really living in the present tense either.
We may have a rough idea of life expectation but we don’t really know how much time we have left; apocryphal buses are but a mere street away. But we do have time on our hands if we can only remember to use it wisely.
As Dennis Potter says, I can write this and the reader may take it on board but to really understand what this nowness is about, you have to live it.
And I am only just beginning.
Sunday, 9 May 2010
Electoral Reform
I’m foncused! I’m not sure what I want any more.
The country seems all topsy turvy at the moment which, in a way, is rather stimulating and exciting but at the same time it is unsettling, unnerving and full of trepidation.
My ideal politics and my perfect socially just scenarios were not available in this election. There was no manifesto that matched with my expectations for society but then again, there probably hasn’t been for many a year. There always has to be a compromise. There always has to be a ‘near match’. That is what the electorate have to do when they go into the polling booth and place their ‘x’ in the appropriate or inappropriate box. They tend to vote for the party that most closely matches their views, or sadly, matches the views that have been dripped into them by the Murdoch and Barclay papers.
There are very few people in this world who agree totally with every piece of legislation and every suggestion from the party that they vote for. In 1997, there were fundamental sections within the Labour Party proposals that I totally disagreed with but on the whole, the manifesto (which I did actually read) was in line with what I wanted. And of course, like many people, I had this overwhelming feeling of hope. I, like many people, thought that the first term of a Labour government would tread wearily but once a second mandate had been achieved, they would drive full throttle into the sort of social change that was expected of a Labour government.
There’s little point in reiterating the disappointment that has since ensued. People with far greater writing ability than me have commented over the last decade on this. It is a fact of history and it is time to move on.
What we have now is an absolute that our electoral system is laughable.
We have a situation, once more, where the majority of the population has voted against the party with the greatest amount of Commons seats, and that is without the additional 30, 40 or 50% of people who did not vote in their constituency. That, in itself, is not new. Even in 1997, when Labour won 43% of the popular vote, 31% voted Tory and 17% voted Liberal – and let us not forget this!
We have the paradox of a Liberal Democrat party who have fared far worse than some had predicted yet have more power in their hands for doing so.
It is time for Nick Clegg to make some fundamental decisions and stick to his principles on the reforms to the system that is so vitally required.
There is a hypocrisy from Labour that I find quite abhorrent. Whilst they were commanding huge majorities in the House of Commons, like the Tories before them, they did not want to meddle with this so-called democracy by offering proportional representation or even the watered down version of single transferable vote. It did not suit their needs. It would not keep them in power and they would have to consider the needs of the smaller parties with their views and their requirements.
To start banging on about PR now is painfully opportunist when they have had thirteen years in power to make the sort of amendments that the electorate seem to be demanding.
However, as I said before, that is history and whilst I would be the first to advocate the study of the subject (though not in the way that Michael Gove is suggesting), we have to move on. We can use the information from history to inform us of why there is a moral duty for all parties to look at the bleeding statistics and see how very wrong the first past the post system is.
We can look at the present to see how very wrong the system is. The current situation is hardly an advert for FPTP and strong government.
Whilst it is demonstrating something entirely different, it is an interesting analogy to look at the two electoral maps that the BBC used the other night. The first map showed an almost entirety of blue in England if you looked at geographical distribution. When it was transformed into the hexagonal evenness of equal size per constituency, it showed completely different colour coverage.
This would be even more colourful under PR. People need to look at the stark picture in front of them.
One of the key aspects of democracy for me is that an election should not be about a single issue. Another paradox from this election!
This time it really is about one issue. We need change. We need reform. In order to deal with the other important issues, this is the single issue that has to be altered. If real democracy is going to be the winner, there has to be a system for proper debate about the economy, about education, about society – big or small. The problem with strong government as advocates of FPTP continually bang on about is that on some occasions the largest party are invincible, which means that they can almost work in an autocracy. That’s what happened with Thatcher and that is what happened with Blair. Whatever the other side was opposing, there was an utter futility in even opening your mouth. Laws were going to be passed irrespective of proper debate. Maybe that is why Tony felt he had the right to drag us into an illegal war with all the hundreds and thousands of fatalities therewith.
That sort of absolutism cannot be good for the country; it cannot be good for debate and cannot be good for democracy.
I am now, having been a Labour party follower all of my life, thinking that I don’t want to “belong” any longer. I no longer “belong” anywhere other than holding a fundamental belief in the need for a more equal society. I want to get the Tories, Labour (notice I have deliberately dropped the Nu throughout this blog, pressing the point of hope!), the Liberals and anyone else who wants to join to debate around a table to talk about the issue, without the need for whips or media telling them what to think. Oh and it would be rather good to get some specialists there too. This is what a democracy should look like.
Take education for instance. There is sadly whole party consensus on testing, though I think branches of each party could have their supporters for progressive education. Only the Green Party had a statement in their manifesto about scrapping the tests. However, Scotland and Wales have opted for a more progressive form of assessment. Therefore, the round table should include all parties, experts from a range of educational establishments and not just the Institute of Education with additional educationalists from our Celtic siblings who can come and explain how and why it works. The same could be done for health, crime, the works.
An all party discussion on economics would mean that there would be strength in numbers, excuse the pun. Consensus or certainly majority could be agreed and with expert consultation, action could take place with all knowing they had had their say. Simple really.
Liberty, equality and fraternity are the new black; no need for red or blue or yellow or rainbows.
Politics is no different from anything else in society. Times are a-changing. The expected way of things is not now appropriate. Anachronistic systems are meaningless. Change is coming. 2012.
So where are we now on this cold Sunday morning at the start of May?
Essentially, we are reliant on a group of men leading a singular man on making a decision about how far he can be placated.
Maybe Clegg should do what the rest of us do each time we enter into the ballot booth. We consider, we think, we rationalise and hopefully, we go and vote for the party that we instinctually believe will bring the majority of what we believe in to fruition, even if there are slight compromises along the way. We can argue against those cases later but we cannot argue if we are not given the proper mandate or systems to enable us to do so.
I, like many, am now putting my faith in the resilience and determination of one man to stand resolutely for what he believes in. Any form of compromise on this vital issue will be nothing less than fatal.
If he chooses to compromise on Cameron’s promise for a referendum, he would be behaving hopelessly naively. Unless he gets a written contract from Cameron stating an absolute guarantee that there would not be another general election before electoral reform, referendum and implementation, he should not make any compromises at all. If he wants a further reminder, he should pick up the Observer today and see what William Hague has in line for foreign policy on Europe. It is an alien planet journey away from what the majority of Liberal Democrats and the hidden socialists believe is best for this country. If he still is unsure of whether he wants to get into bed with Cameron and crew, maybe he should really look at the mansion tax and why he wanted it there in the first place. The Tories will always want to protect the wealth of the few. That is a fact and it is a realm away from the type of democratic justice and equality that the Liberal Party has always stood for.
If he wants further support, he should look back in history to the Whigs and their commitment to the poor and impoverished of the land, and they were somewhat more purple than orange in those days. They were the elite with a conscience.
And if he is still undecided, he should just have a little chat with Michael Gove and George Osborne to see what he has in common with them other than a privileged and, in my opinion, deeply flawed education.
There are commentators throughout the land, professional and bloggers, who are making their comments. I profess to no great insight or thoughts. I may even be borrowing the thoughts of other unbeknown but I do feel that there is a real sense of hope. If Clegg is stupid enough to play along with the ambitions of NewCons, then I will be disappointed but will hold high hopes for an election in 2012 at the latest, when the Tory government has come forward in its true colours and pissed the nation off once more.
As for the Labour party – well, we shall see. Getting it back to the views of the mass of support within would be a good start. Maybe as disaffected followers, we should join the party to guide and direct the type of change that we want. But then again, maybe the time for party allegiance is over. Maybe, this is the time to consider themes and issues before towing a party line.
Gordon has to go. We do not want the Tories throwing the comment about an unelected Prime Minister once more, so this has got to be carefully managed.
If Clegg decides he cannot work with Cameron, then he should walk towards Millbank and have a chat with people there but one condition is going have to be the carefully placed comment from Clegg that he could not work with Gordon Brown. There has to be an immediate change or a promise of change from within Labour.
My suggestion has been echoed by many that Gordon should stay in charge for the next four to six months, remembering that much of this will be summer recess.
He should offer a summer referendum on PR with the view to their being a new election either in the autumn if that is feasible or early in 2011. In the meantime, he should remain where he is until a new leader of the party is elected democratically through conference. At that point, he should pack his bags and go, hopefully having done something successful and therefore prevented him from permanently carrying the label of the most useless Prime Minister ever, which is a little unfair when you consider all the Tory nightmares we have had over the years.
It makes you think also about fixed terms and the time between electing an American President and his (or her eventually) inauguration. Nobody questions the time between November and January as far as the markets are concerned. Perhaps we should be doing the same. We wouldn’t be in the position of trying to rush agreement through to satisfy the markets if there was a predetermined process whereby the departing PM remained in Downing Street for a month regardless of whether he lost the election or not. Perhaps this is not ideal but it is worth consideration.
So the foncused remains confused but probably not as much as she thought.
There’s still ideals, there’s still vision, there’s still values that hold as true today as they did last week. There is still a need for hope and a determination for change.
I, like others, sit and wait.
The country seems all topsy turvy at the moment which, in a way, is rather stimulating and exciting but at the same time it is unsettling, unnerving and full of trepidation.
My ideal politics and my perfect socially just scenarios were not available in this election. There was no manifesto that matched with my expectations for society but then again, there probably hasn’t been for many a year. There always has to be a compromise. There always has to be a ‘near match’. That is what the electorate have to do when they go into the polling booth and place their ‘x’ in the appropriate or inappropriate box. They tend to vote for the party that most closely matches their views, or sadly, matches the views that have been dripped into them by the Murdoch and Barclay papers.
There are very few people in this world who agree totally with every piece of legislation and every suggestion from the party that they vote for. In 1997, there were fundamental sections within the Labour Party proposals that I totally disagreed with but on the whole, the manifesto (which I did actually read) was in line with what I wanted. And of course, like many people, I had this overwhelming feeling of hope. I, like many people, thought that the first term of a Labour government would tread wearily but once a second mandate had been achieved, they would drive full throttle into the sort of social change that was expected of a Labour government.
There’s little point in reiterating the disappointment that has since ensued. People with far greater writing ability than me have commented over the last decade on this. It is a fact of history and it is time to move on.
What we have now is an absolute that our electoral system is laughable.
We have a situation, once more, where the majority of the population has voted against the party with the greatest amount of Commons seats, and that is without the additional 30, 40 or 50% of people who did not vote in their constituency. That, in itself, is not new. Even in 1997, when Labour won 43% of the popular vote, 31% voted Tory and 17% voted Liberal – and let us not forget this!
We have the paradox of a Liberal Democrat party who have fared far worse than some had predicted yet have more power in their hands for doing so.
It is time for Nick Clegg to make some fundamental decisions and stick to his principles on the reforms to the system that is so vitally required.
There is a hypocrisy from Labour that I find quite abhorrent. Whilst they were commanding huge majorities in the House of Commons, like the Tories before them, they did not want to meddle with this so-called democracy by offering proportional representation or even the watered down version of single transferable vote. It did not suit their needs. It would not keep them in power and they would have to consider the needs of the smaller parties with their views and their requirements.
To start banging on about PR now is painfully opportunist when they have had thirteen years in power to make the sort of amendments that the electorate seem to be demanding.
However, as I said before, that is history and whilst I would be the first to advocate the study of the subject (though not in the way that Michael Gove is suggesting), we have to move on. We can use the information from history to inform us of why there is a moral duty for all parties to look at the bleeding statistics and see how very wrong the first past the post system is.
We can look at the present to see how very wrong the system is. The current situation is hardly an advert for FPTP and strong government.
Whilst it is demonstrating something entirely different, it is an interesting analogy to look at the two electoral maps that the BBC used the other night. The first map showed an almost entirety of blue in England if you looked at geographical distribution. When it was transformed into the hexagonal evenness of equal size per constituency, it showed completely different colour coverage.
This would be even more colourful under PR. People need to look at the stark picture in front of them.
One of the key aspects of democracy for me is that an election should not be about a single issue. Another paradox from this election!
This time it really is about one issue. We need change. We need reform. In order to deal with the other important issues, this is the single issue that has to be altered. If real democracy is going to be the winner, there has to be a system for proper debate about the economy, about education, about society – big or small. The problem with strong government as advocates of FPTP continually bang on about is that on some occasions the largest party are invincible, which means that they can almost work in an autocracy. That’s what happened with Thatcher and that is what happened with Blair. Whatever the other side was opposing, there was an utter futility in even opening your mouth. Laws were going to be passed irrespective of proper debate. Maybe that is why Tony felt he had the right to drag us into an illegal war with all the hundreds and thousands of fatalities therewith.
That sort of absolutism cannot be good for the country; it cannot be good for debate and cannot be good for democracy.
I am now, having been a Labour party follower all of my life, thinking that I don’t want to “belong” any longer. I no longer “belong” anywhere other than holding a fundamental belief in the need for a more equal society. I want to get the Tories, Labour (notice I have deliberately dropped the Nu throughout this blog, pressing the point of hope!), the Liberals and anyone else who wants to join to debate around a table to talk about the issue, without the need for whips or media telling them what to think. Oh and it would be rather good to get some specialists there too. This is what a democracy should look like.
Take education for instance. There is sadly whole party consensus on testing, though I think branches of each party could have their supporters for progressive education. Only the Green Party had a statement in their manifesto about scrapping the tests. However, Scotland and Wales have opted for a more progressive form of assessment. Therefore, the round table should include all parties, experts from a range of educational establishments and not just the Institute of Education with additional educationalists from our Celtic siblings who can come and explain how and why it works. The same could be done for health, crime, the works.
An all party discussion on economics would mean that there would be strength in numbers, excuse the pun. Consensus or certainly majority could be agreed and with expert consultation, action could take place with all knowing they had had their say. Simple really.
Liberty, equality and fraternity are the new black; no need for red or blue or yellow or rainbows.
Politics is no different from anything else in society. Times are a-changing. The expected way of things is not now appropriate. Anachronistic systems are meaningless. Change is coming. 2012.
So where are we now on this cold Sunday morning at the start of May?
Essentially, we are reliant on a group of men leading a singular man on making a decision about how far he can be placated.
Maybe Clegg should do what the rest of us do each time we enter into the ballot booth. We consider, we think, we rationalise and hopefully, we go and vote for the party that we instinctually believe will bring the majority of what we believe in to fruition, even if there are slight compromises along the way. We can argue against those cases later but we cannot argue if we are not given the proper mandate or systems to enable us to do so.
I, like many, am now putting my faith in the resilience and determination of one man to stand resolutely for what he believes in. Any form of compromise on this vital issue will be nothing less than fatal.
If he chooses to compromise on Cameron’s promise for a referendum, he would be behaving hopelessly naively. Unless he gets a written contract from Cameron stating an absolute guarantee that there would not be another general election before electoral reform, referendum and implementation, he should not make any compromises at all. If he wants a further reminder, he should pick up the Observer today and see what William Hague has in line for foreign policy on Europe. It is an alien planet journey away from what the majority of Liberal Democrats and the hidden socialists believe is best for this country. If he still is unsure of whether he wants to get into bed with Cameron and crew, maybe he should really look at the mansion tax and why he wanted it there in the first place. The Tories will always want to protect the wealth of the few. That is a fact and it is a realm away from the type of democratic justice and equality that the Liberal Party has always stood for.
If he wants further support, he should look back in history to the Whigs and their commitment to the poor and impoverished of the land, and they were somewhat more purple than orange in those days. They were the elite with a conscience.
And if he is still undecided, he should just have a little chat with Michael Gove and George Osborne to see what he has in common with them other than a privileged and, in my opinion, deeply flawed education.
There are commentators throughout the land, professional and bloggers, who are making their comments. I profess to no great insight or thoughts. I may even be borrowing the thoughts of other unbeknown but I do feel that there is a real sense of hope. If Clegg is stupid enough to play along with the ambitions of NewCons, then I will be disappointed but will hold high hopes for an election in 2012 at the latest, when the Tory government has come forward in its true colours and pissed the nation off once more.
As for the Labour party – well, we shall see. Getting it back to the views of the mass of support within would be a good start. Maybe as disaffected followers, we should join the party to guide and direct the type of change that we want. But then again, maybe the time for party allegiance is over. Maybe, this is the time to consider themes and issues before towing a party line.
Gordon has to go. We do not want the Tories throwing the comment about an unelected Prime Minister once more, so this has got to be carefully managed.
If Clegg decides he cannot work with Cameron, then he should walk towards Millbank and have a chat with people there but one condition is going have to be the carefully placed comment from Clegg that he could not work with Gordon Brown. There has to be an immediate change or a promise of change from within Labour.
My suggestion has been echoed by many that Gordon should stay in charge for the next four to six months, remembering that much of this will be summer recess.
He should offer a summer referendum on PR with the view to their being a new election either in the autumn if that is feasible or early in 2011. In the meantime, he should remain where he is until a new leader of the party is elected democratically through conference. At that point, he should pack his bags and go, hopefully having done something successful and therefore prevented him from permanently carrying the label of the most useless Prime Minister ever, which is a little unfair when you consider all the Tory nightmares we have had over the years.
It makes you think also about fixed terms and the time between electing an American President and his (or her eventually) inauguration. Nobody questions the time between November and January as far as the markets are concerned. Perhaps we should be doing the same. We wouldn’t be in the position of trying to rush agreement through to satisfy the markets if there was a predetermined process whereby the departing PM remained in Downing Street for a month regardless of whether he lost the election or not. Perhaps this is not ideal but it is worth consideration.
So the foncused remains confused but probably not as much as she thought.
There’s still ideals, there’s still vision, there’s still values that hold as true today as they did last week. There is still a need for hope and a determination for change.
I, like others, sit and wait.
Saturday, 1 May 2010
Animals and Emotions
Animals seem to be all over the news this week, and I am not talking the Chameleon and his two running mates. I wonder what animal you would put for each of the main leaders. Gordy the Gorilla? Rather unfair perhaps. Clegg is rather giraffe-like perhaps. I’ll have to think about that.
There was a strange but interesting article in the Guardian this week about whether our nearest relations in the animal kingdom were capable of having certain emotions. Of course, the article went on to mention three things, some of which were not emotions. They were probably feelings but that distinction is for another time.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/29/grieving-chimps-need-more-research
Apparently these chimps have been all over the newspapers this week and the footage been one of the top hits on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL86Ap9zSmM
It showed a troop of chimpanzees looking over and caring for one of their own who was dying. The video provides images of two females sitting next to the dying chimp, stroking her and covering her with straw. Later a larger male comes into the enclosure and makes what scientists have interpreted as a crude attempt to resuscitate the dead female. According to the news clip, the animals who had watched this death were completely subdued and appeared to be grieving for weeks after. The entire troop seemed to be affected by the witnessing of this death.
The notion is that this proves that chimpanzees are far more like us than we imagined and that animals are capable of “human emotions”.
One scientist, Stuart Semple, suggested that this might be a classic case of anthropomorphism, whereby we place human actions, thoughts and emotions on animals that are possibly not capable of such things. We interpret their actions according to the way we would behave or feel. However, Semple went on to say that animals may very well be capable of emotions such as sadness and feelings of grief and it is not a question of whether this issue exists but how we establish precisely what this means; for the animals and indeed for humans and their actions.
Another scientist, Professor Marian Dawkins, suggested that in the absence of confirmed knowledge we should take the stance of assuming that animals do have emotions and treat them accordingly without going to the other extreme of treating them as humans and the high level expectation that goes with that.
Of course, animal rights activists would take this information to further their cause in protecting animals from the sort of abuse that scientific researchers place upon them, but that, once more, is a discussion for another time.
As for us humans treating animals as humans, well, anyone who has owned a dog has been guilty of that to some degree. “He’s a dog!” is a frequent cry that people in my family have when it is suggested that the poor little might should come and say “hello” to us (on the telephone!).
However, I am intrigued by emotions and whether we as humans have a monopoly on being the only species capable of such high level working.
As a teenager, our family had the most stupid, arrogant and stroppy dog that was ever placed on this earth. She adored each and every one of us but detested anyone else who came into the house. New friends had to go through her acceptance regime that usually took about twenty minutes on the first visit and then a further four or five visits before she finally accepted that this was a human being to be trusted.
I can distinctly remember one day when I was devastated about something, I returned home demonstrating a certain amount of anguish. Obviously it wasn’t a life-shattering issue because I cannot remember exactly what I was so upset about. On seeing me arrive and march upstairs, throwing myself into bed, the dear dog followed, clambered up into the bed and nestled her head up against mine. Normally, if invited onto the bed, she would selfishly burrow all the way down and place herself at your feet. Not this time. She knew I needed some contact and she lay with me, unobtrusively.
How did she know I needed that? How come she responded against her instinctual behaviour? I hadn’t been over demonstrative about my grief. At the point of being greeted by the dog, I was not crying but she knew there was something that was wrong, and she acted accordingly.
This week, I was talking to a friend who said that his dog was exactly the same. She responded to his anger by cowering, which is probably an instinctive thing to do as he hurtled things across the room but he also said that his dog seemed to know exactly what was needed when he was at his lowest. She knew not to bounce around in expectation of attention. Time and time again she demonstrates a sort of intuition, if that is not too strong an anthropomorphist statement.
Do dogs feel grief? Do they understand death?
It is said that a dog is eternally grateful to see their owner on their return because every time they are out of sight for a prolonged period they assume that the owner has died. Once more, this statement suggests that we are placing human thoughts on our animals but this shouldn’t be dismissed altogether.
Two instances spring to mind.
I was asked by my parents, in conjunction with my brother, to dog sit whilst they took their first transatlantic holiday. Easy, we thought. She may have been a stroppy so and so but she loved us as much as she loved her masters. Only that wasn’t the case. It is an apocryphal story that has been heard all too frequently but the dog stopped eating. This was unheard of. As well as been the stroppiest dog on earth, she was also the greediest. Her natural instinct to gobble finally returned three days later just when we were on the verge of taking her to the vet.
The same hound was incandescent with anguish when my grandfather died. For at least two weeks after his death, she hurried into his house and searched the entire place for him. Devastated that she could not find him, she curled herself up under the kitchen table and resolutely stayed there until we left. It was pitiful to watch and furthered our own grief.
I’m not suggesting that this is absolute evidence that animals have feelings but it certainly suggests that it is feasible. What it does not do, however, is suggest that animals have the core set of emotions that we have. They demonstrate a response to what we might seem to be an emotion but that is quite different to having the emotion itself. They demonstrate feelings and perhaps a certain level of empathy. Whether that empathy is an intuitive thing or something that is an instinctual response is something that probably needs some study.
The chimpanzees were in the news because of their response to death.
The day after I had read this article, I listened to the radio and on “The Reunion” there was a group of people who had been part of the Dunblane massacre in 1996.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007x9vc
I listened to a short amount of this programme on my way to work and finished listening to it this morning.
As I arrived at work yesterday, I listened to the teacher who was the first person to be shot by Thomas Hamilton, the former scout leader who carried out this atrocity.
It was a normal spring day. Excited five and six year olds were gathered in the school hall waiting for their lesson. Anyone who has worked in a school will know this scene all too well. Getting young children ready for PE is not something that they put on the teacher training course. It can be a source of great antagonism and frustration as well as source of merriment and hysteria.
The wonderful thing about children that is often fatally lost in adults is the joy of the simplest of things. They get changed for PE on a weekly basis yet still get excited about this very simple and straight forward act.
I could envisage these children jumping around and collecting together to protect themselves from the cold as they awaited instruction from their teacher to find a space to do their warm up activities.
Only they never got the chance. This man charged through the glass doors and opened fire; first on the teachers and then one by one he shot the children, killing sixteen of them, physically injuring many more, emotionally injuring an entire community, murdering hope.
I switched off the car engine and started to get out of the car, only I couldn’t. The macabre in me wanted to listen to this poor woman explaining what happened. The thought of those children falling down one by one was horrifying enough but the statement that really wrenched at my heart was when she said, “At first, the children just thought it was some sort of game”.
The fun and enjoyment of their weekly PE lesson always excited them, even if it was the same mundane lesson. Just doing something different, away from the classroom was enough to set them into excited anticipation. When Hamilton came in, they thought that he had been invited in to get them moving around, and they responded. On his first shot, they ran giggling. On the second and third, they continued to dash around until finally a collective horror enveloped them. Huddling together, they watched as first their teachers and then their friends were massacred.
It defies comprehension. Maybe it exacerbates comprehension for those who have been in charge of such lessons in such places. I know that yesterday whilst I was listening, I had a freshness of grief, remembering that day fourteen years ago.
Sophie Jane Lockwood North was one of the young victims. Her father was on the radio yesterday. On hearing what had happened, he came to the school and waited for an eternity to see whether his child was one of the victims. Two hours passed before he was told the devastating news. Two hours.
How did he survive those two hours? How has he survived the ensuing years?
His wife had died from cancer two years before Sophie. How much can one person cope with grief?
We all have to confront death eventually. It’s not a pleasant thought. It is an integral fear for many. Faiths across the world prepare human beings for this without ever getting to the crux of the issue that life ceases to exist. Hope in afterlife is there as an appeasement, a placation of the instinctive fear of dying.
My own baptism of death occurred when I was seven. The telephone went and I answered it. My cousin always joked and asked how I was but she just asked for my mum immediately. My mother took the cradle and listened and then, unusually, she cried.
My dear uncle had died and I can remember crying and asking that one word, “why?”
Like others, since then I have lost grandparents, friends, relatives, my father, and it never really gets any easier though bizarrely, I fear death less as I get older, which always seems rather odd to me considering the proximity to the inevitable is greater. It ought to be the other way around.
I also fear death less because I have actually witnessed two people leaving life. That, in a very odd way, actually helps.
My grandmother was ready to die. She lay in the hospital bed and gradually stopped breathing. It was simple, calm, undemonstrative and peaceful. We all sat there together looking at this woman who had given us life and watched her go.
By the time my Dad drew his final breath, it was almost a relief. The weeks before had been the most difficult of our lives. Once more, we collected around his bed. We said nothing; just waited until he was ready. The silence was just there. It doesn’t and didn’t need description. He breathed and we waited for an extraordinary amount of time, thinking it was his last only to hear another one after that, waiting once more for minutes for another quiet breath to pass. And so on and so on until there was the collective understanding that he had gone.
As humans, and according to the research by scientists as animals, we all deal with death in different ways. We all grieve in different ways despite their being a progressional diktat of how we are expected to behave.
We all have to experience death and in many ways we hope to. If you don’t have to deal with bereavement, it probably means that you die young, and despite Daltry’s and Townshend’s protestations to the contrary most people don’t really want to die before they get old.
But my incidents of death are fairly commonplace. The deaths are part of life. Although I have had instances of some horrific deaths, including a murder, which I never thought I would experience, the deaths I have had to deal with have been the sort of deaths that most of us will have to experience.
Death is life changing. My 34 year old friend who died had a significant impact on the friends who were with him and near him as he prematurely left us. The murder of my 22 year old child who I had nurtured and loved as a boy when I was a young teacher left me emotionally scarred. It was as near a trauma as I had experienced at that time, and I still feel that grief whenever I contemplate what happened to him.
The death of my father changed my life. Completely.
But however dreadful that loss was and continues to be, it wasn’t accompanied by the trauma of something like Dunblane or Columbine, Hillsborough or Hungerford. How do people cope with that? How do people live day in day out with the loss of a child? I don’t know and I don’t want to know. The fear of that sort of death is a constant.
With death having a certain prominence in life, therefore, why do we hide away from it? Why do we shield our children when we know that at some point they are going to have to confront this? Why, when we can see and experience evidence of animals feeling some sort of grief do we not accept that this is something that we can possibly learn from? Why do we shy away from the acceptance of the vital and significant emotions that we all have to contend with and embrace?
When I read the article about the chimpanzees, I was interested because I am intrigued as to how our emotions work. I am intrigued as to whether we are the only species capable of expressing ourselves emotionally, which we are apparently not. Knowing that animals have the capacity to feel is significant but in some ways it is more interesting that we are prepared to study animal behaviour without fully realising the potential of our own emotional being. Furthermore, we are prepared to ignore the information and understanding that we already have about emotions and feelings, and brush it aside as either insignificant or something that we cannot deal with.
Certainly with children, our ability to research, discuss, think about emotions is not quantifiable and is therefore deemed to be less significant than other aspects of learning. And yet, as is the case with death and bereavement, we are all going to have to cope with this at some point in our lives.
If teaching is about preparing our young people for the future, then surely we should have emotional learning at the forefront of their learning? However difficult it may be, we have to talk to children about the feelings associated with grief and loss and bereavement and separation. These are feelings that our children experience without any hope of being able to express their concerns. These are feelings that our children may not have experienced but are frightened to ask about because they have intuited that it is a taboo subject.
It isn’t that they can’t deal with the issue of death; it is that we as adults cannot cope with it. Is that really fair on our children?
If anything should be learned from the chimpanzees this week, it is that there is a possibility that their reaction to the impending death was an instinctual behaviour and that this in turn resorts to a natural grieving process. We look on in some sort of admiration at this behaviour and then do not enable or assimilate to a similar instinctual and emotive response in humans.
Death and grief is difficult but it will never get any easier if we ignore this essential part of our life and think carefully about how we deal with a range of emotions and how this is merely one aspect of our all round intelligent approach to life.
There was a strange but interesting article in the Guardian this week about whether our nearest relations in the animal kingdom were capable of having certain emotions. Of course, the article went on to mention three things, some of which were not emotions. They were probably feelings but that distinction is for another time.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/29/grieving-chimps-need-more-research
Apparently these chimps have been all over the newspapers this week and the footage been one of the top hits on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL86Ap9zSmM
It showed a troop of chimpanzees looking over and caring for one of their own who was dying. The video provides images of two females sitting next to the dying chimp, stroking her and covering her with straw. Later a larger male comes into the enclosure and makes what scientists have interpreted as a crude attempt to resuscitate the dead female. According to the news clip, the animals who had watched this death were completely subdued and appeared to be grieving for weeks after. The entire troop seemed to be affected by the witnessing of this death.
The notion is that this proves that chimpanzees are far more like us than we imagined and that animals are capable of “human emotions”.
One scientist, Stuart Semple, suggested that this might be a classic case of anthropomorphism, whereby we place human actions, thoughts and emotions on animals that are possibly not capable of such things. We interpret their actions according to the way we would behave or feel. However, Semple went on to say that animals may very well be capable of emotions such as sadness and feelings of grief and it is not a question of whether this issue exists but how we establish precisely what this means; for the animals and indeed for humans and their actions.
Another scientist, Professor Marian Dawkins, suggested that in the absence of confirmed knowledge we should take the stance of assuming that animals do have emotions and treat them accordingly without going to the other extreme of treating them as humans and the high level expectation that goes with that.
Of course, animal rights activists would take this information to further their cause in protecting animals from the sort of abuse that scientific researchers place upon them, but that, once more, is a discussion for another time.
As for us humans treating animals as humans, well, anyone who has owned a dog has been guilty of that to some degree. “He’s a dog!” is a frequent cry that people in my family have when it is suggested that the poor little might should come and say “hello” to us (on the telephone!).
However, I am intrigued by emotions and whether we as humans have a monopoly on being the only species capable of such high level working.
As a teenager, our family had the most stupid, arrogant and stroppy dog that was ever placed on this earth. She adored each and every one of us but detested anyone else who came into the house. New friends had to go through her acceptance regime that usually took about twenty minutes on the first visit and then a further four or five visits before she finally accepted that this was a human being to be trusted.
I can distinctly remember one day when I was devastated about something, I returned home demonstrating a certain amount of anguish. Obviously it wasn’t a life-shattering issue because I cannot remember exactly what I was so upset about. On seeing me arrive and march upstairs, throwing myself into bed, the dear dog followed, clambered up into the bed and nestled her head up against mine. Normally, if invited onto the bed, she would selfishly burrow all the way down and place herself at your feet. Not this time. She knew I needed some contact and she lay with me, unobtrusively.
How did she know I needed that? How come she responded against her instinctual behaviour? I hadn’t been over demonstrative about my grief. At the point of being greeted by the dog, I was not crying but she knew there was something that was wrong, and she acted accordingly.
This week, I was talking to a friend who said that his dog was exactly the same. She responded to his anger by cowering, which is probably an instinctive thing to do as he hurtled things across the room but he also said that his dog seemed to know exactly what was needed when he was at his lowest. She knew not to bounce around in expectation of attention. Time and time again she demonstrates a sort of intuition, if that is not too strong an anthropomorphist statement.
Do dogs feel grief? Do they understand death?
It is said that a dog is eternally grateful to see their owner on their return because every time they are out of sight for a prolonged period they assume that the owner has died. Once more, this statement suggests that we are placing human thoughts on our animals but this shouldn’t be dismissed altogether.
Two instances spring to mind.
I was asked by my parents, in conjunction with my brother, to dog sit whilst they took their first transatlantic holiday. Easy, we thought. She may have been a stroppy so and so but she loved us as much as she loved her masters. Only that wasn’t the case. It is an apocryphal story that has been heard all too frequently but the dog stopped eating. This was unheard of. As well as been the stroppiest dog on earth, she was also the greediest. Her natural instinct to gobble finally returned three days later just when we were on the verge of taking her to the vet.
The same hound was incandescent with anguish when my grandfather died. For at least two weeks after his death, she hurried into his house and searched the entire place for him. Devastated that she could not find him, she curled herself up under the kitchen table and resolutely stayed there until we left. It was pitiful to watch and furthered our own grief.
I’m not suggesting that this is absolute evidence that animals have feelings but it certainly suggests that it is feasible. What it does not do, however, is suggest that animals have the core set of emotions that we have. They demonstrate a response to what we might seem to be an emotion but that is quite different to having the emotion itself. They demonstrate feelings and perhaps a certain level of empathy. Whether that empathy is an intuitive thing or something that is an instinctual response is something that probably needs some study.
The chimpanzees were in the news because of their response to death.
The day after I had read this article, I listened to the radio and on “The Reunion” there was a group of people who had been part of the Dunblane massacre in 1996.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007x9vc
I listened to a short amount of this programme on my way to work and finished listening to it this morning.
As I arrived at work yesterday, I listened to the teacher who was the first person to be shot by Thomas Hamilton, the former scout leader who carried out this atrocity.
It was a normal spring day. Excited five and six year olds were gathered in the school hall waiting for their lesson. Anyone who has worked in a school will know this scene all too well. Getting young children ready for PE is not something that they put on the teacher training course. It can be a source of great antagonism and frustration as well as source of merriment and hysteria.
The wonderful thing about children that is often fatally lost in adults is the joy of the simplest of things. They get changed for PE on a weekly basis yet still get excited about this very simple and straight forward act.
I could envisage these children jumping around and collecting together to protect themselves from the cold as they awaited instruction from their teacher to find a space to do their warm up activities.
Only they never got the chance. This man charged through the glass doors and opened fire; first on the teachers and then one by one he shot the children, killing sixteen of them, physically injuring many more, emotionally injuring an entire community, murdering hope.
I switched off the car engine and started to get out of the car, only I couldn’t. The macabre in me wanted to listen to this poor woman explaining what happened. The thought of those children falling down one by one was horrifying enough but the statement that really wrenched at my heart was when she said, “At first, the children just thought it was some sort of game”.
The fun and enjoyment of their weekly PE lesson always excited them, even if it was the same mundane lesson. Just doing something different, away from the classroom was enough to set them into excited anticipation. When Hamilton came in, they thought that he had been invited in to get them moving around, and they responded. On his first shot, they ran giggling. On the second and third, they continued to dash around until finally a collective horror enveloped them. Huddling together, they watched as first their teachers and then their friends were massacred.
It defies comprehension. Maybe it exacerbates comprehension for those who have been in charge of such lessons in such places. I know that yesterday whilst I was listening, I had a freshness of grief, remembering that day fourteen years ago.
Sophie Jane Lockwood North was one of the young victims. Her father was on the radio yesterday. On hearing what had happened, he came to the school and waited for an eternity to see whether his child was one of the victims. Two hours passed before he was told the devastating news. Two hours.
How did he survive those two hours? How has he survived the ensuing years?
His wife had died from cancer two years before Sophie. How much can one person cope with grief?
We all have to confront death eventually. It’s not a pleasant thought. It is an integral fear for many. Faiths across the world prepare human beings for this without ever getting to the crux of the issue that life ceases to exist. Hope in afterlife is there as an appeasement, a placation of the instinctive fear of dying.
My own baptism of death occurred when I was seven. The telephone went and I answered it. My cousin always joked and asked how I was but she just asked for my mum immediately. My mother took the cradle and listened and then, unusually, she cried.
My dear uncle had died and I can remember crying and asking that one word, “why?”
Like others, since then I have lost grandparents, friends, relatives, my father, and it never really gets any easier though bizarrely, I fear death less as I get older, which always seems rather odd to me considering the proximity to the inevitable is greater. It ought to be the other way around.
I also fear death less because I have actually witnessed two people leaving life. That, in a very odd way, actually helps.
My grandmother was ready to die. She lay in the hospital bed and gradually stopped breathing. It was simple, calm, undemonstrative and peaceful. We all sat there together looking at this woman who had given us life and watched her go.
By the time my Dad drew his final breath, it was almost a relief. The weeks before had been the most difficult of our lives. Once more, we collected around his bed. We said nothing; just waited until he was ready. The silence was just there. It doesn’t and didn’t need description. He breathed and we waited for an extraordinary amount of time, thinking it was his last only to hear another one after that, waiting once more for minutes for another quiet breath to pass. And so on and so on until there was the collective understanding that he had gone.
As humans, and according to the research by scientists as animals, we all deal with death in different ways. We all grieve in different ways despite their being a progressional diktat of how we are expected to behave.
We all have to experience death and in many ways we hope to. If you don’t have to deal with bereavement, it probably means that you die young, and despite Daltry’s and Townshend’s protestations to the contrary most people don’t really want to die before they get old.
But my incidents of death are fairly commonplace. The deaths are part of life. Although I have had instances of some horrific deaths, including a murder, which I never thought I would experience, the deaths I have had to deal with have been the sort of deaths that most of us will have to experience.
Death is life changing. My 34 year old friend who died had a significant impact on the friends who were with him and near him as he prematurely left us. The murder of my 22 year old child who I had nurtured and loved as a boy when I was a young teacher left me emotionally scarred. It was as near a trauma as I had experienced at that time, and I still feel that grief whenever I contemplate what happened to him.
The death of my father changed my life. Completely.
But however dreadful that loss was and continues to be, it wasn’t accompanied by the trauma of something like Dunblane or Columbine, Hillsborough or Hungerford. How do people cope with that? How do people live day in day out with the loss of a child? I don’t know and I don’t want to know. The fear of that sort of death is a constant.
With death having a certain prominence in life, therefore, why do we hide away from it? Why do we shield our children when we know that at some point they are going to have to confront this? Why, when we can see and experience evidence of animals feeling some sort of grief do we not accept that this is something that we can possibly learn from? Why do we shy away from the acceptance of the vital and significant emotions that we all have to contend with and embrace?
When I read the article about the chimpanzees, I was interested because I am intrigued as to how our emotions work. I am intrigued as to whether we are the only species capable of expressing ourselves emotionally, which we are apparently not. Knowing that animals have the capacity to feel is significant but in some ways it is more interesting that we are prepared to study animal behaviour without fully realising the potential of our own emotional being. Furthermore, we are prepared to ignore the information and understanding that we already have about emotions and feelings, and brush it aside as either insignificant or something that we cannot deal with.
Certainly with children, our ability to research, discuss, think about emotions is not quantifiable and is therefore deemed to be less significant than other aspects of learning. And yet, as is the case with death and bereavement, we are all going to have to cope with this at some point in our lives.
If teaching is about preparing our young people for the future, then surely we should have emotional learning at the forefront of their learning? However difficult it may be, we have to talk to children about the feelings associated with grief and loss and bereavement and separation. These are feelings that our children experience without any hope of being able to express their concerns. These are feelings that our children may not have experienced but are frightened to ask about because they have intuited that it is a taboo subject.
It isn’t that they can’t deal with the issue of death; it is that we as adults cannot cope with it. Is that really fair on our children?
If anything should be learned from the chimpanzees this week, it is that there is a possibility that their reaction to the impending death was an instinctual behaviour and that this in turn resorts to a natural grieving process. We look on in some sort of admiration at this behaviour and then do not enable or assimilate to a similar instinctual and emotive response in humans.
Death and grief is difficult but it will never get any easier if we ignore this essential part of our life and think carefully about how we deal with a range of emotions and how this is merely one aspect of our all round intelligent approach to life.
Saturday, 24 April 2010
The Shoesmith Decision
Sharon Shoesmith lost her unfair dismissal case yesterday. Despite the “lost” reports and the seventeen amendments to the final Ofsted Report, it was deemed that the judge could not make a ruling in favour of the woman. The decision to sack her was not something that the courts could overturn.
Am I surprised? Not in the slightest.
As soon as they announced the fact that the decision was going to be announced prior to the election, it seemed to me that there was only going to be one outcome. Whilst those of us who work in the public sector are banned from breathing during a time of election, in case it influences a single person’s vote, I hardly felt that a positive decision for Ms. Shoesmith was going to take place this side of May 6th.
Think about the potential impact of such criticism on New Labour, Ballsup, Ofsted and their whole approach to education and social care inspections. Surely, a positive decision for Ms. Shoesmith would have brought all of this deeply into question at a time when partisan declarations in public is not allowed?
One could argue that a negative result for Ms. Shoesmith has done exactly the same – i.e. no criticism against the government condones their alleged actions and we can all move on and continue in the same manner.
Obviously, I am not suggesting that Judge Foskett was influenced in his decision. That would be unthinkable and make a mockery of the neutrality of the governors of the land.
But before Ballsup gets that smirk-like, vindicated look all over his Cheshire Cat face, let us remind ourselves that the judge had some serious reservations about what happened.
Whilst he upheld the decision to sack Shoesmith, he did so with some reservations.
Here is a quote from the Guardian today.
Was Shoesmith made a scapegoat for the Baby Peter tragedy? Some might think so, some may not, was the gist of Foskett's commentary. Was the Ofsted report "beefed up", as Shoesmith's lawyers alleged? Foskett declared it to be outside his remit.
Foskett did feel compelled to comment on aspects of this extraordinary story. He was appalled by some parts of the media's reporting of the case. He was dismayed by Balls's behaviour at the infamous press conference where he put pressure on Haringey to sack its director of children's services without compensation, and troubled by evidence that Ofsted head Christine Gilbert briefed nastily against Shoesmith just hours before Balls dismissed her. "I cannot think that any party will truly look back at how matters were handled in this case with complete satisfaction," the judge concluded.
I’m not sure whether he used the word “appalled” in relation to the media but it would have been a good one to use. Trial by media is a very, very dangerous thing. Shoesmith had to go because someone had to pay a price for this tragic child’s death and she was at the top of the firing line. However, the fact that the media lambasted this woman without knowing anything about her record or even her responsibility reiterates the concern that media bods essentially influence outcomes without there being consideration and time for the full facts to be taken into weighty consideration.
In saying this, I have to say that I am a fully signed up member of the right to the freedom of speech. I am just a little concerned about how the media can have such influence. Had she been in a criminal court, there would have been rules to prevent such commentary before a decision had been made.
Judge Foskett was “dismayed” by Balls’s behaviour.
I’ve been dismayed by Balls’s behaviour for quite a long time thank you very much.
He was reactionary in the extreme during the quoted press conference. As Minister for the Department of Children, Schools and Families, he may have the power to remove any Director of Children’s Services or certainly put pressure on those in charge but there are ways and means of doing this. Ballsup took the decision to make such a suggestion in a very public arena. He was responding to the media, to the Daily Mail and Sun readers. He wanted to show that he was the great man of action rather than doing the dignified and politic thing of going to Haringey to have meetings with the Chief Executive to discuss such issues without the glare of publicity that he so clearly craves.
The fact that he can put such pressure on individual authorities is in itself a concern.
He can pressurise people to sack a Director of Children’s Services (DCS). A DCS can put pressure on governing bodies to sack a head teacher. A head teacher can put pressure on individuals to lose their jobs etcetera, etcetera. This is all well and good where there are stringent and fair capability procedures but less positive when it is a whim, when it is reactive, when it set against unrealistic or inappropriate measures, when it is personal, when it is for ulterior motives.
That is when it becomes dangerous, immoral and open to the most unruly abuse.
If I were Ballsup today, I would be in apoplexy. Maybe that is because I still manage to have some sort of conscience. From what I have read and heard about the judge’s comments, I certainly wouldn’t be smug about the decision. Anyone with half a brain can see that, despite the decision, Mr. Ballsup does not come out of this with much grace or exoneration. He has been criticised, severely. I somehow doubt that he will see it in that light, and there are probably a multitude of spin doctors on the case as I write.
And what of Ofsted? Where does this decision leave that organisation?
The good judge was concerned about the changes to the report and the fact that so many emails went walkabout.
Is he really that naive? Foskett said he was “troubled” by the evidence that Christine Gilbert had had her bout of influence. How did the good judge think this had come about? Did he think that Ms. Gilbert had done this on a whim in response to the media? Did she have a quiet word with Mr. Balls? Did she have a conversation over dinner with her husband who just happened to mention NuLabour’s thinking on what should be done? Was she acting in this way because she knew that the system of which she was head was massively flawed in that they had recently given Haringey a clean bill of health, albeit without spectacular endorsement, and she was essentially covering her own back? Did she think that perhaps the inspection regime was not really getting to the nitty gritty of local authority happenings and there might be the possibility that local authorities could somehow veil the truth of their real practice?
It could be one, many or all of these reasons. To comment specifically on Ofsted, according to Judge Foskett, out of his domain, but he felt a need to comment nonetheless. That, in itself, is quite telling. Those who are prepared to read between the lines should look at his statements very carefully.
“You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment” is a phrase, or near as damn it, that was used most successfully in Michael Dobb’s “House of Cards”. It was a phrase of irony, chosen for a reason.
Perhaps the judge, through this non-comment is trying to direct people to have a serious look at whether a)Ofsted really is independent (ha ha) and b) whether the inspection regime is actually doing the job it allegedly sets out to do.
I am a little dismayed that Foskett felt that the decision on whether the report was “beefed up” was “out of his domain”. Surely, if there were changes to that report, this had a serious impact on the accountability as to whether Shoesmith retained her job or not.
I am not suggesting that she should have retained her job. As I have said previously, someone had to be held accountable but if she lost her job because of the report, if the report was the only form of accountability then of course it must have an influence and be in the judges domain, or am I being naive?
Let us be very clear about this. The report was changed. There was no mention of the ability of the leader in the initial report. By the time the final version came out, there was a statement at the very top of the recommendations. What more evidence is required?
The judge went on to say that "the prospect of summary dismissal with no compensation and a good deal of public opprobrium is hardly likely to be an inducement for someone thinking of taking the job or, perhaps, in some circumstances, continuing in it."
Well, quite frankly, who in their right minds would take such a job in the first instance?
The current structure of Children’s Services is like a double whammy. If you’re not kicked for your attainment in schools, then you might be kicked for the social care offered (or not) to the young people in your charge. There are so many ways that you are culpable, according to this decision; an accountability that was always there, and Shoesmith, like her counterparts knew this.
There are some DCSs who are probably paid more than the Prime Minister and certainly more than his ministers and MPs to do this job. With such high public sector pay there has to be that ultimate accountability. But really, is it appropriate to put an educationalist in charge of social care and visa versa? Ensure that there is some joined up thinking and collaboration. Ensure that those who are actually in contact with children, i.e. in schools and other settings, don’t have to contact 73 different people, organisations and departments to get the much needed support for these poor kids and their families but complete joined up departments may not be the answer.
I haven’t seen a single comment about this in the election. Let us see what the reports of the Shoesmith outcome brings.
On that note, I return to the Guardian for my closing statement, taken from the gloriously amusing Malcolm Tucker commentary; not about this case of course, but it could apply.
I have a quotation to help you, from my soon to be released Little Book of Getting Your Shit Back Together After You've Broken Some Skinny Fuck's Nose for Bringing You News You Didn't Need to Hear Right Now: "It's not the despair that will kill you, it's the hope."
It’s not the despair that will leave us bereft, it is the hope. I’m pretty sure Sharon Shoesmith’s hope has vanished today. Not only that, it shows once more that the system is far greater than the individual.
Are there really no other cases of unfair dismissal or provocation to leaving a job than Shoesmith’s? Of course there are other cases but when you have given your life to education or social care, when you have committed yourself to the good of others sometimes at the expense of yourself and those nearest to you, there’s probably a sad dose of reality that the system is too damn big to take on.
It doesn’t mean that there is not injustice out there. It doesn’t mean that these people have lost the fight but perhaps they are realistic enough to know that the hope of vindication might be a hope too far and maybe the outcome of this case has reiterated that.
As for me, I’m a slow learner. I still hope and I still have the fight of others at the forefront of my hope. And one day, one day that hope will materialise into some sort of vindication when this whole flawed inspection system is looked at properly – for the good of people who have suffered from it, for the good of true and honest accountability, for the good of all children – you know the phrase – Every Child Matters??
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/apr/23/sharon-shoesmith-crisis-child-protection
Am I surprised? Not in the slightest.
As soon as they announced the fact that the decision was going to be announced prior to the election, it seemed to me that there was only going to be one outcome. Whilst those of us who work in the public sector are banned from breathing during a time of election, in case it influences a single person’s vote, I hardly felt that a positive decision for Ms. Shoesmith was going to take place this side of May 6th.
Think about the potential impact of such criticism on New Labour, Ballsup, Ofsted and their whole approach to education and social care inspections. Surely, a positive decision for Ms. Shoesmith would have brought all of this deeply into question at a time when partisan declarations in public is not allowed?
One could argue that a negative result for Ms. Shoesmith has done exactly the same – i.e. no criticism against the government condones their alleged actions and we can all move on and continue in the same manner.
Obviously, I am not suggesting that Judge Foskett was influenced in his decision. That would be unthinkable and make a mockery of the neutrality of the governors of the land.
But before Ballsup gets that smirk-like, vindicated look all over his Cheshire Cat face, let us remind ourselves that the judge had some serious reservations about what happened.
Whilst he upheld the decision to sack Shoesmith, he did so with some reservations.
Here is a quote from the Guardian today.
Was Shoesmith made a scapegoat for the Baby Peter tragedy? Some might think so, some may not, was the gist of Foskett's commentary. Was the Ofsted report "beefed up", as Shoesmith's lawyers alleged? Foskett declared it to be outside his remit.
Foskett did feel compelled to comment on aspects of this extraordinary story. He was appalled by some parts of the media's reporting of the case. He was dismayed by Balls's behaviour at the infamous press conference where he put pressure on Haringey to sack its director of children's services without compensation, and troubled by evidence that Ofsted head Christine Gilbert briefed nastily against Shoesmith just hours before Balls dismissed her. "I cannot think that any party will truly look back at how matters were handled in this case with complete satisfaction," the judge concluded.
I’m not sure whether he used the word “appalled” in relation to the media but it would have been a good one to use. Trial by media is a very, very dangerous thing. Shoesmith had to go because someone had to pay a price for this tragic child’s death and she was at the top of the firing line. However, the fact that the media lambasted this woman without knowing anything about her record or even her responsibility reiterates the concern that media bods essentially influence outcomes without there being consideration and time for the full facts to be taken into weighty consideration.
In saying this, I have to say that I am a fully signed up member of the right to the freedom of speech. I am just a little concerned about how the media can have such influence. Had she been in a criminal court, there would have been rules to prevent such commentary before a decision had been made.
Judge Foskett was “dismayed” by Balls’s behaviour.
I’ve been dismayed by Balls’s behaviour for quite a long time thank you very much.
He was reactionary in the extreme during the quoted press conference. As Minister for the Department of Children, Schools and Families, he may have the power to remove any Director of Children’s Services or certainly put pressure on those in charge but there are ways and means of doing this. Ballsup took the decision to make such a suggestion in a very public arena. He was responding to the media, to the Daily Mail and Sun readers. He wanted to show that he was the great man of action rather than doing the dignified and politic thing of going to Haringey to have meetings with the Chief Executive to discuss such issues without the glare of publicity that he so clearly craves.
The fact that he can put such pressure on individual authorities is in itself a concern.
He can pressurise people to sack a Director of Children’s Services (DCS). A DCS can put pressure on governing bodies to sack a head teacher. A head teacher can put pressure on individuals to lose their jobs etcetera, etcetera. This is all well and good where there are stringent and fair capability procedures but less positive when it is a whim, when it is reactive, when it set against unrealistic or inappropriate measures, when it is personal, when it is for ulterior motives.
That is when it becomes dangerous, immoral and open to the most unruly abuse.
If I were Ballsup today, I would be in apoplexy. Maybe that is because I still manage to have some sort of conscience. From what I have read and heard about the judge’s comments, I certainly wouldn’t be smug about the decision. Anyone with half a brain can see that, despite the decision, Mr. Ballsup does not come out of this with much grace or exoneration. He has been criticised, severely. I somehow doubt that he will see it in that light, and there are probably a multitude of spin doctors on the case as I write.
And what of Ofsted? Where does this decision leave that organisation?
The good judge was concerned about the changes to the report and the fact that so many emails went walkabout.
Is he really that naive? Foskett said he was “troubled” by the evidence that Christine Gilbert had had her bout of influence. How did the good judge think this had come about? Did he think that Ms. Gilbert had done this on a whim in response to the media? Did she have a quiet word with Mr. Balls? Did she have a conversation over dinner with her husband who just happened to mention NuLabour’s thinking on what should be done? Was she acting in this way because she knew that the system of which she was head was massively flawed in that they had recently given Haringey a clean bill of health, albeit without spectacular endorsement, and she was essentially covering her own back? Did she think that perhaps the inspection regime was not really getting to the nitty gritty of local authority happenings and there might be the possibility that local authorities could somehow veil the truth of their real practice?
It could be one, many or all of these reasons. To comment specifically on Ofsted, according to Judge Foskett, out of his domain, but he felt a need to comment nonetheless. That, in itself, is quite telling. Those who are prepared to read between the lines should look at his statements very carefully.
“You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment” is a phrase, or near as damn it, that was used most successfully in Michael Dobb’s “House of Cards”. It was a phrase of irony, chosen for a reason.
Perhaps the judge, through this non-comment is trying to direct people to have a serious look at whether a)Ofsted really is independent (ha ha) and b) whether the inspection regime is actually doing the job it allegedly sets out to do.
I am a little dismayed that Foskett felt that the decision on whether the report was “beefed up” was “out of his domain”. Surely, if there were changes to that report, this had a serious impact on the accountability as to whether Shoesmith retained her job or not.
I am not suggesting that she should have retained her job. As I have said previously, someone had to be held accountable but if she lost her job because of the report, if the report was the only form of accountability then of course it must have an influence and be in the judges domain, or am I being naive?
Let us be very clear about this. The report was changed. There was no mention of the ability of the leader in the initial report. By the time the final version came out, there was a statement at the very top of the recommendations. What more evidence is required?
The judge went on to say that "the prospect of summary dismissal with no compensation and a good deal of public opprobrium is hardly likely to be an inducement for someone thinking of taking the job or, perhaps, in some circumstances, continuing in it."
Well, quite frankly, who in their right minds would take such a job in the first instance?
The current structure of Children’s Services is like a double whammy. If you’re not kicked for your attainment in schools, then you might be kicked for the social care offered (or not) to the young people in your charge. There are so many ways that you are culpable, according to this decision; an accountability that was always there, and Shoesmith, like her counterparts knew this.
There are some DCSs who are probably paid more than the Prime Minister and certainly more than his ministers and MPs to do this job. With such high public sector pay there has to be that ultimate accountability. But really, is it appropriate to put an educationalist in charge of social care and visa versa? Ensure that there is some joined up thinking and collaboration. Ensure that those who are actually in contact with children, i.e. in schools and other settings, don’t have to contact 73 different people, organisations and departments to get the much needed support for these poor kids and their families but complete joined up departments may not be the answer.
I haven’t seen a single comment about this in the election. Let us see what the reports of the Shoesmith outcome brings.
On that note, I return to the Guardian for my closing statement, taken from the gloriously amusing Malcolm Tucker commentary; not about this case of course, but it could apply.
I have a quotation to help you, from my soon to be released Little Book of Getting Your Shit Back Together After You've Broken Some Skinny Fuck's Nose for Bringing You News You Didn't Need to Hear Right Now: "It's not the despair that will kill you, it's the hope."
It’s not the despair that will leave us bereft, it is the hope. I’m pretty sure Sharon Shoesmith’s hope has vanished today. Not only that, it shows once more that the system is far greater than the individual.
Are there really no other cases of unfair dismissal or provocation to leaving a job than Shoesmith’s? Of course there are other cases but when you have given your life to education or social care, when you have committed yourself to the good of others sometimes at the expense of yourself and those nearest to you, there’s probably a sad dose of reality that the system is too damn big to take on.
It doesn’t mean that there is not injustice out there. It doesn’t mean that these people have lost the fight but perhaps they are realistic enough to know that the hope of vindication might be a hope too far and maybe the outcome of this case has reiterated that.
As for me, I’m a slow learner. I still hope and I still have the fight of others at the forefront of my hope. And one day, one day that hope will materialise into some sort of vindication when this whole flawed inspection system is looked at properly – for the good of people who have suffered from it, for the good of true and honest accountability, for the good of all children – you know the phrase – Every Child Matters??
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/apr/23/sharon-shoesmith-crisis-child-protection
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
SATs
I have to say that on my way home from work this evening I was a little confused. Radio Four reiterated to me that the NUT and the NAHT had voted to boycott the Year 6 SATs this year.
Strange, I thought. I was convinced that this time last year there was a similar vote during conference season.
I searched on the Internet and found the following statement.
Britain's biggest teachers' union today unanimously backed moves to boycott next year's Sats in a major escalation of a campaign to force the government to drop the tests.
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) will now ballot members to take industrial action and refuse to administer the Sats in England in 2010, defying government warnings that to do so would be unlawful.
So the important phrase was “backed moves”. Last year the two education unions decided to back moves to ballot for a boycott rather than actually boycott the tests for 2009. Apparently, that wouldn’t have been very fair on the children who were due to take their tests the month after conference. After all, that is what they had been preparing for all year.
So they decided to have a ballot in 2010.
They have now done this and agreed that there is going to be a boycott this year.
The BBC reported on this earlier this evening.
Head teachers have announced plans to boycott next month's Sats tests for primary school pupils in England.
It throws into confusion the national tests due to be taken by hundreds of thousands of 10 and 11 year olds.
Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, says the boycott is against a "flawed testing regime".
Schools Secretary Ed Balls urged heads to "think hard before disrupting children's learning".
Did everyone get that statement from Ballsup? “Think hard before disrupting children’s learning”.
Can someone please remind me what preparing for SATs has to do with children’s learning?
It’s taken rather a long time since conference season last year to the action taken this year. I am flummoxed as to why the NUT and the NAHT didn’t hold a ballot during the summer term of 2009. Had they done this, an entire Year 6 age group would not have to endure the teaching to test that some (!?) have had to cope with during their last year of primary education.
Personally, I would have held the ballot immediately after the conference to ensure that last year’s eleven year olds didn’t have to take the tests either. They’d already had their final months in primary school ruined. Would they really have felt disheartened and demoralised by not taking the tests? I am sure there could have been sensible conversations with these children explaining the moral injustice that had been placed upon them. Would they really have seen it as a double whammy if they had prepared and then been unable to ‘perform’?
The sad thing is that by not taking the ballot when I feel they ought to have, another cohort of children have had another year of teaching that has been directly relating to passing an examination that will be of no benefit to them or their school whatsoever.
I sat and spoke to my niece the other day. She is eleven and due to take her SATs this year, obviously now dependant on which union her teacher and head teacher are in.
She struggles with her maths and is currently having booster classes to get her to the required Level Four. Like her aunt, she will never have a natural flair for the subject and she will probably have to work with grit and determination to the get the required GCSE when the time comes. Whatever she has to do now, as far as these booster classes, will make no difference to the additional work that will be required when she is sixteen. There is also the possibility that if she does get the required Level Four, this will disguise her problem with maths and she may not receive the additional support in Year Seven and so on. If she attends a school that has streaming, she may be placed in a group that is beyond her natural ability. She will be further demoralised and will feel further inadequacy.
This is what we do to children when we falsely coach them to a level that is above their natural inclination.
This mathematics and booster classes is annoying but it pales into insignificance when one looks at the teaching and encouragement she has received for her writing.
She is an exceptionally creative young girl. Her drawing has both maturity and a real personal touch. One could say that she is gifted.
She has written stories since she has been able to write. She devours books and has frequently been told off by her mother for reading in bed with a small torch once she has been asked to sleep. Her stories are imaginative, flowing, beautifully constructed, eloquent and rather good to read.
Her teacher has made the following criticisms of her writing.
1. She is using too many elaborate words that complicate her sentence structure.
2. She should use more ‘ly’ words in her writing.
3. She should not start any story or sentence with a conjunctive.
4. She would be marked down if she used a start to a story such as the following sentence – “She had gone.”
My niece has therefore learned to ignore her true style of writing in order to get the Level Four, or actually Level Five that has been predicted. How ironic that she is allowed to use “wow” words if they have an ‘ly’ ending but cannot use the innovative words that she has learned to contextualise from her extensive reading.
And, she cannot use a conjunctive to start a sentence ; re-emphasising in the way so many writers do.
As for the start of a story, what precisely is wrong with, “She had gone.”
Where had she gone? Where was she? Why had she gone? What was she getting away from? Who is she with? These are just a few questions that spring to mind on reading such a sentence which makes this reader want to read on. Surely that is something that children should be encouraged to not deterred from writing?
What a sad indictment on our education system and the poor saps of teachers who are so convinced that this form of teaching is for the greater good of the pupils. Can this really be moral?
A few years ago my child was taking his Year 6 SATs. He had a vivid imagination and had a similar experience to his cousin. His unique and exciting writing was too quirky for the exam. It didn’t follow the rules. He used too many words that were allegedly above his comprehension despite the fact that he contextualised them perfectly.
At the end of Year Five, his teacher declared that he had actually shown clear evidence, through teacher assessment that had been verified by other tests, that he had achieved a Level Five in writing. I jokingly asked the head teacher what they were going to do with him for a year before he took his SATs. She haughtily responded that they took very good care of gifted and talented children in the school.
I spent months awaiting the sort of freedom to which I felt my child was entitled. I wanted him to be able to wander off using his imagination to the greatest of effects. Instead there was little differentiation between what he was asked to do and that of his friend who has moderate dyslexia and a Level 3C going into his final year.
I didn’t want special privileges for my child. I just wanted him to be taught and encouraged to develop his style, his originality, his skill. Instead, all I saw was reams and reams of photocopied sheets and boring exercises that he could almost do in his sleep.
Meanwhile, getting him to write a story of his own volition was now proving to be difficult.
It is now three years since I have seen him write for fun in the way he used to.
Now that is immoral, and going back to Ballsup glorious statement today, nobody thought about the interruption to my child’s education by making him endure an entire year of pathetic teaching. In fact, one can hardly use the word ‘teaching’. He was taught nothing.
The head teacher wondered if I wanted to enter him for the Level Six test.
I looked at her incredulously and reminded her that it was only loyalty to her and the school that was making me send him to school during the SATs week.
Had I had the support from others, I would have sent him into school with the option of sitting there and writing absolutely nothing. I wanted to subvert. I wanted him to sabotage his own paper, and I would have done this had I managed to speak to the head teacher of his secondary school to explain what we were doing.
Madness, sheer madness.
The last time I taught Year Six we had tests coming out of every orifice. At that time, they were playing with SATs and we had tests for DT as well as some optional tests for other subjects. I can say with hand on heart that I never taught those children to pass a test. Thankfully, I was given the freedom to teach them how I wanted and how they wanted to learn. We had fun and enjoyment. The focus was still very much on activities rather than the outcome of a standardised test. I never had the children in rows. I hardly had them in groups but I still managed to differentiate the work.
We had debates and discussions about contemporary issues. Entire days were spent scrutinising newspapers over their response to a particular subject. We made bridges and created all sorts of masterpieces of art. We listened to music together and watched extracts from films and television programmes. I taught them how to make notes and how to use these notes to paraphrase and create.
We had competitions in sports between the girls and the boys (their choice, not mine).
We had such fun, and I am sure that if you asked any of these children, who are now approaching thirty, they would say the same.
What was the difference between these children and my child and niece? They all had to do SATs but the difference was that there were no league tables for my Year Six group.
We had the test papers and sometimes, they had their uses to confirm that my own teacher assessment was correct. I would say that I was probably right in my predictions to the tune of 99%. I was not an exceptional teacher. I just knew my children and had the opportunity to use my knowledge to the greater good of the children themselves; their individuality, their skills, their needs.
Today, I congratulate the teachers unions for their decision but once more they have been too slow. Haste was of the essence to prevent another group of children enduring the horror not of the tests but of the teaching that accompanies them.
Each of the main parties are still clinging on to this notion that the SATs give us an indication of how well the children have been taught. Did the SATs a few years ago give any indication that my child had been taught well? On paper, one could argue that he was a success and therefore he had been taught well. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, he had the most appalling year of stagnation and a distinct lack of quality teaching.
SATs do not even tell the story that their damn statistics allegedly indicate and that is before you even get onto the debate about the teaching and learning that cannot be tested and the enjoyment and enthusiasm that should empower young people to want to learn – if only teachers were allowed to do this.
Mr Balls, please have a think before you open your mouth. Why didn’t you, your party and the previous government “think before disrupting children’s learning”? Why did none of you listen to experts? Why did none of you listen and look and see? Why did none of you make any correlation between the UNICEF wellbeing results and the fact that our stressed out children are feeling this pressure?
Why did no-one listen to what Robin Alexander was saying having actually spoken to children and sensed their fear, loathing and trepidation? Why did you not even listen to the government appointed yes-man of Jim Rose who also said that the curriculum was “open to abuse” of being too channelled because of the SATs? Well, dear Jim may not have said that but anyone with half an understanding of education can read between the lines and realise that is what he actually was saying, even it if was by default.
Let us hope that the teaching unions have finally found their voice and they are going to be prepared to use it over the next few months, whatever the outcome of the election.
Strange, I thought. I was convinced that this time last year there was a similar vote during conference season.
I searched on the Internet and found the following statement.
Britain's biggest teachers' union today unanimously backed moves to boycott next year's Sats in a major escalation of a campaign to force the government to drop the tests.
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) will now ballot members to take industrial action and refuse to administer the Sats in England in 2010, defying government warnings that to do so would be unlawful.
So the important phrase was “backed moves”. Last year the two education unions decided to back moves to ballot for a boycott rather than actually boycott the tests for 2009. Apparently, that wouldn’t have been very fair on the children who were due to take their tests the month after conference. After all, that is what they had been preparing for all year.
So they decided to have a ballot in 2010.
They have now done this and agreed that there is going to be a boycott this year.
The BBC reported on this earlier this evening.
Head teachers have announced plans to boycott next month's Sats tests for primary school pupils in England.
It throws into confusion the national tests due to be taken by hundreds of thousands of 10 and 11 year olds.
Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, says the boycott is against a "flawed testing regime".
Schools Secretary Ed Balls urged heads to "think hard before disrupting children's learning".
Did everyone get that statement from Ballsup? “Think hard before disrupting children’s learning”.
Can someone please remind me what preparing for SATs has to do with children’s learning?
It’s taken rather a long time since conference season last year to the action taken this year. I am flummoxed as to why the NUT and the NAHT didn’t hold a ballot during the summer term of 2009. Had they done this, an entire Year 6 age group would not have to endure the teaching to test that some (!?) have had to cope with during their last year of primary education.
Personally, I would have held the ballot immediately after the conference to ensure that last year’s eleven year olds didn’t have to take the tests either. They’d already had their final months in primary school ruined. Would they really have felt disheartened and demoralised by not taking the tests? I am sure there could have been sensible conversations with these children explaining the moral injustice that had been placed upon them. Would they really have seen it as a double whammy if they had prepared and then been unable to ‘perform’?
The sad thing is that by not taking the ballot when I feel they ought to have, another cohort of children have had another year of teaching that has been directly relating to passing an examination that will be of no benefit to them or their school whatsoever.
I sat and spoke to my niece the other day. She is eleven and due to take her SATs this year, obviously now dependant on which union her teacher and head teacher are in.
She struggles with her maths and is currently having booster classes to get her to the required Level Four. Like her aunt, she will never have a natural flair for the subject and she will probably have to work with grit and determination to the get the required GCSE when the time comes. Whatever she has to do now, as far as these booster classes, will make no difference to the additional work that will be required when she is sixteen. There is also the possibility that if she does get the required Level Four, this will disguise her problem with maths and she may not receive the additional support in Year Seven and so on. If she attends a school that has streaming, she may be placed in a group that is beyond her natural ability. She will be further demoralised and will feel further inadequacy.
This is what we do to children when we falsely coach them to a level that is above their natural inclination.
This mathematics and booster classes is annoying but it pales into insignificance when one looks at the teaching and encouragement she has received for her writing.
She is an exceptionally creative young girl. Her drawing has both maturity and a real personal touch. One could say that she is gifted.
She has written stories since she has been able to write. She devours books and has frequently been told off by her mother for reading in bed with a small torch once she has been asked to sleep. Her stories are imaginative, flowing, beautifully constructed, eloquent and rather good to read.
Her teacher has made the following criticisms of her writing.
1. She is using too many elaborate words that complicate her sentence structure.
2. She should use more ‘ly’ words in her writing.
3. She should not start any story or sentence with a conjunctive.
4. She would be marked down if she used a start to a story such as the following sentence – “She had gone.”
My niece has therefore learned to ignore her true style of writing in order to get the Level Four, or actually Level Five that has been predicted. How ironic that she is allowed to use “wow” words if they have an ‘ly’ ending but cannot use the innovative words that she has learned to contextualise from her extensive reading.
And, she cannot use a conjunctive to start a sentence ; re-emphasising in the way so many writers do.
As for the start of a story, what precisely is wrong with, “She had gone.”
Where had she gone? Where was she? Why had she gone? What was she getting away from? Who is she with? These are just a few questions that spring to mind on reading such a sentence which makes this reader want to read on. Surely that is something that children should be encouraged to not deterred from writing?
What a sad indictment on our education system and the poor saps of teachers who are so convinced that this form of teaching is for the greater good of the pupils. Can this really be moral?
A few years ago my child was taking his Year 6 SATs. He had a vivid imagination and had a similar experience to his cousin. His unique and exciting writing was too quirky for the exam. It didn’t follow the rules. He used too many words that were allegedly above his comprehension despite the fact that he contextualised them perfectly.
At the end of Year Five, his teacher declared that he had actually shown clear evidence, through teacher assessment that had been verified by other tests, that he had achieved a Level Five in writing. I jokingly asked the head teacher what they were going to do with him for a year before he took his SATs. She haughtily responded that they took very good care of gifted and talented children in the school.
I spent months awaiting the sort of freedom to which I felt my child was entitled. I wanted him to be able to wander off using his imagination to the greatest of effects. Instead there was little differentiation between what he was asked to do and that of his friend who has moderate dyslexia and a Level 3C going into his final year.
I didn’t want special privileges for my child. I just wanted him to be taught and encouraged to develop his style, his originality, his skill. Instead, all I saw was reams and reams of photocopied sheets and boring exercises that he could almost do in his sleep.
Meanwhile, getting him to write a story of his own volition was now proving to be difficult.
It is now three years since I have seen him write for fun in the way he used to.
Now that is immoral, and going back to Ballsup glorious statement today, nobody thought about the interruption to my child’s education by making him endure an entire year of pathetic teaching. In fact, one can hardly use the word ‘teaching’. He was taught nothing.
The head teacher wondered if I wanted to enter him for the Level Six test.
I looked at her incredulously and reminded her that it was only loyalty to her and the school that was making me send him to school during the SATs week.
Had I had the support from others, I would have sent him into school with the option of sitting there and writing absolutely nothing. I wanted to subvert. I wanted him to sabotage his own paper, and I would have done this had I managed to speak to the head teacher of his secondary school to explain what we were doing.
Madness, sheer madness.
The last time I taught Year Six we had tests coming out of every orifice. At that time, they were playing with SATs and we had tests for DT as well as some optional tests for other subjects. I can say with hand on heart that I never taught those children to pass a test. Thankfully, I was given the freedom to teach them how I wanted and how they wanted to learn. We had fun and enjoyment. The focus was still very much on activities rather than the outcome of a standardised test. I never had the children in rows. I hardly had them in groups but I still managed to differentiate the work.
We had debates and discussions about contemporary issues. Entire days were spent scrutinising newspapers over their response to a particular subject. We made bridges and created all sorts of masterpieces of art. We listened to music together and watched extracts from films and television programmes. I taught them how to make notes and how to use these notes to paraphrase and create.
We had competitions in sports between the girls and the boys (their choice, not mine).
We had such fun, and I am sure that if you asked any of these children, who are now approaching thirty, they would say the same.
What was the difference between these children and my child and niece? They all had to do SATs but the difference was that there were no league tables for my Year Six group.
We had the test papers and sometimes, they had their uses to confirm that my own teacher assessment was correct. I would say that I was probably right in my predictions to the tune of 99%. I was not an exceptional teacher. I just knew my children and had the opportunity to use my knowledge to the greater good of the children themselves; their individuality, their skills, their needs.
Today, I congratulate the teachers unions for their decision but once more they have been too slow. Haste was of the essence to prevent another group of children enduring the horror not of the tests but of the teaching that accompanies them.
Each of the main parties are still clinging on to this notion that the SATs give us an indication of how well the children have been taught. Did the SATs a few years ago give any indication that my child had been taught well? On paper, one could argue that he was a success and therefore he had been taught well. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, he had the most appalling year of stagnation and a distinct lack of quality teaching.
SATs do not even tell the story that their damn statistics allegedly indicate and that is before you even get onto the debate about the teaching and learning that cannot be tested and the enjoyment and enthusiasm that should empower young people to want to learn – if only teachers were allowed to do this.
Mr Balls, please have a think before you open your mouth. Why didn’t you, your party and the previous government “think before disrupting children’s learning”? Why did none of you listen to experts? Why did none of you listen and look and see? Why did none of you make any correlation between the UNICEF wellbeing results and the fact that our stressed out children are feeling this pressure?
Why did no-one listen to what Robin Alexander was saying having actually spoken to children and sensed their fear, loathing and trepidation? Why did you not even listen to the government appointed yes-man of Jim Rose who also said that the curriculum was “open to abuse” of being too channelled because of the SATs? Well, dear Jim may not have said that but anyone with half an understanding of education can read between the lines and realise that is what he actually was saying, even it if was by default.
Let us hope that the teaching unions have finally found their voice and they are going to be prepared to use it over the next few months, whatever the outcome of the election.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)