Learning Experiences

[davywavy]

'cos of my injuring myself again, I recently had three months off from Ninja High and only recently went back to it. Last night was the first night of fighting I've done in a while, so you'll all be delighted to know that not only was I given a nosebleed, but this morning I'm covered in bruises - including a black eye.
That got me some interesting looks on the train this morning, as well as a seat to myself.

Still, it's been a learning experience in how not doing something for several months leads to a loss of ability - and that gives me a rather neat segue into my subject for the day, education.

Y'see, we hear it every year at about exam results time. The outcry over ever-increasing and record numbers of A grades which showed that exams are getting easier and education standards are falling. Back in 2008 I observed that the Olympics must be getting easier too, as British Athletes grabbed a record number of Gold Medals that year.
There was an undercurrent to my observation about the Olympics which one or two picked up on at the time, which is whilst that obsessive training to a single task* leads to success it has little wider application, and so it is with the record number of A grades in exams, especially when compared to other educational systems. Something my brother speaks of from his time working in India is the way Indians sometimes ask him why the British threw way the best education system in the world, and the way he gets miffed because he knows it's a fair question.
It sometimes surprises me the degree of objection I get when I observe that as the two best educational systems in the world are widely regarded as being the South Korean and Finnish systems, we might benefit from at least considering what they do and possibly emulating them. I don't know any Koreans, but I know couple of Finns and by crikey they're well educated, the jammy sods. I dont' know much about the Finnish or Korean systems, but as a general rule learning from people who are better than you is a pretty good idea more often than it isn't. The Coalition's proposal to make the system more like the Swedish one aren't a bad idea - the Swedes come in about third or fourth best, by and large - but as it's an idea from teh ev1l toriezz once again it must be wrong no matter what for some people. I once asked a fan of the comprehensive education system why they liked it, and it really struck me that in their initial answer they mentioned fairness and equality a lot, but didn't mention education once. It kinda depressed me as well, if I'm being honest, and I didn't pursue the debate as enthusiastically as I usually would after that.

Anyway, enough of this seriousness for a bit of history! If what the Indians say is true then there was a point when the British education system was best in the world, and maybe it's possible to look at that. Maybe you've heard of the Indian Civil Service? It was the organisation which ran Britiush India for about seventy years, and its members were colloquially known as the 'Incorruptibles' (due to their immunity to bribery) or the 'Heaven born' (due to their talent)**. Entry to this organisation was based on an open examination taken at the age of 19, and the service required high standards of attainment in arithmetic, English grammar and composition, history and geography along with excellent handwriting and spelling. If you wanted to join the Treasury, you also had to be prepared to answer examination questions on the first three books of Euclid and translate a passage out of Latin, French, German or Italian.

But I'm not a cruel man. Here's some questions from the examination required to enter the service as a junior clerk (the lowest rank). It's Friday, and you arne't doing any work, so here's a challenge: without google, how well do you do? Are you smarter than a 19 year old?

History

•What were, at different times, the titles of the Chief Magistrates of republican Rome? Name the first and last of the 12 Caesars and the principal writers of the Augustan Era.

•What were the Petition of Right, Instrument of Government, Act of Uniformity, Act of Settlement, and Act of Navigation?

Geography

•Draw an outline map showing the overland route to India

•Mention seven colonial possessions of Great Britain, specifying wherein their political and commercial importance to this country.

English Grammar

•Construct sentences exemplifying the use of the relative pronouns in the possessive and objective cases.






*I read an article about Rebecca Adlington's training regime at the time. Blimey, it was stunningly focussed.
**You might think I'm kidding here, but I'm not.

Comments

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Have you ever come across any of the interview questions for Google?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

No, do tell?

I always liked the interview questions for the foreign office, and always had a vague hankering to go for interview even though I wouldn't want to work there.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

I notice that most of those questions are entirely fact based. And I don't think I can answer a single one of them. I'm not entirely convinced that makes me a raving thickie, or that learning more facts will make us better educators.

I agree with you that much of the problem with current educational trends is that they are unduly egalitarian. I think this actually leads to huge inequalities. Where you can't distinguish between people on academic grounds, educational institutions and employers have to look to extra-curricular activities. And the richer you are, the more useful CV padding activities you can afford for your kids.

This desire for everyone to do well in school so we can pat ourselves on the back about how well our kids are doing is harmful and unrealistic. What is important is how well they are doing compared to everyone else, not to some arbitrary baseline.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Nonsense! Giving everyone prizes is only fair, and so what if the education system doesn't reflect wider reality?

[raggedhalo.livejournal.com]

I lived with a Finnish guy for a couple of years at Uni. He could speak something like five languages with a degree of competency that bordered on fluency. He was a really creative musician (got to number three in the Finnish underground dance charts*) and was studying Engineering. So, yeah, I can well believe that the Finnish system is rather tasty.

Arguments around fairness and equality are appropriately linked to education, as education is (IMO) the single biggest factor in one's "life chances."

As for your questions, the only one I think I even have the remotest chance at is the last, and that would require me to give it some serious thought.



*: I appreciate that this is perhaps not a particularly high acclaim ;-)

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

They tend to be particularly brain-bending questions. Some of them have actual specific answers, some are how-would-you-solve-this-problem type questions, and others are completely open questions with no obvious routes of solution just to test how you approach that sort of challenge.

Here are a few examples, but there are hundreds floating around the internet. I'd like to think these occupy one end of a scale that the Indian Civil Service questions are at the other end of. One measures academic learning as a proxy for work ethic. The other is asking what raw tricks your brain can do.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Absolutely education is all about long-term opportuntities, which is why when people talk about 'education', I want to hear them talk about 'education', and not social engineering.

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

I don't have a problem with everyone attending the same school regardless of ability. I think its an admirable idea that people should socialise with each other regardless of ethnicity, ability, gender, etc.

I have a problem with everyone attending the same classes within said school, regardless of ability. In, say, maths you'll end up with some people racing ahead and chafing at the bit to study calculus, complex numbers, etc, and people struggling to get to grips with multiplication. Teaching that class would be a nightmare.

The same students might be having exactly the opposite experience in foreign languages, history, english, or any of the non-mathematical subjects. A comprehensive school with appropriate streaming should be able to cater for this, and allow people to move up and down streams as their abilities either improve, or fail to flourish, in an individual subject.

And I couldn't answer a single one of those questions.

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

Giving people who would be well advised to go to uni the chance to do so, but don't because they get shunted into some sink-estate comprehensive where they don't get the chance to show what they can do is, I think, an important part of social engineering.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I do have some depressing memories of school, sitting next to some slobbering imbecile who just couldn't grasp the difference between nouns and verbs whilst I passed my time staring at Lindsey Miller's bra strap through her shirt.

I mean, all bra straps are interesting bra straps when you're 14, but in hindsight I'd rather have got on with the class.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

So best identify those people early and ensure they need to education to get out and make the best of themselves, I'd say.

I'd call the mechanism to do this 'grammar schools', but for some reason many people prefer keeping smart poor kids badly educated through comprehensives. It's a mystery to me, really it is.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

I like those google questions; work through how you think rather than what answers you can roll out; although the mathmatical one product of daughters ages" and whatnot I don't, always disliked those sorts of questions.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Well I could have a stab at the geography questions, but the rest I'd be pretty much stumped on.

Guess it's the coal pits for me.

What I've always done much better on in interviews is getting on with the person I'm talking to on a personal level, when I got my "breakthrough" job it was because I ended up talking to the interviewer for half an hour about the local pubs, his band and stuff like that; didn't really matter to him in the end that it'd take me a month or so to get up to speed with what he wanted me to do as we'd clicked on a personal level.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

They do look very similar to the FO entrance exam. I posted about it a few years ago - if I can find a link later I shall do so.

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

I have a grudging respect for the the mathematician's daughters question, because it's a tedious maths problem wrapped in a clever logic problem, and you need to make sense of the exchange before you can even start to try and answer it.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Those sorts of questions always make me sigh and start writing out equations; which I have quite enough of when I'm doing day-to-day coding...

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

True, but ideally comprehensives should allow people with different strengths to shine in the areas they're good at. Hence the point about streaming within the school. You might not have the maths to get into a grammar school, but if you had a flair for languages you'd never know it at a typical comprehensive. And so you lose out both times.

I'm not convinced that grammar schools work. I'm not convinced comprehensives work, and I'm certainly not convinced about the focus on exam results as the mark of a good school.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Oddly, I had a similar experience - my best ever interview was the one where I said, pretty much, 'Hello' and 'Goodbye', and the rest of the time just nodding whilst the guy just sat and talked at me for an hour before offering me a job on double my previous salary because (he said later) it was obvious he could get on with me.

Ha! Suck-er.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

ideally comprehensives should allow people with different strengths to shine in the areas they're good at

Well, they've had forty years to do so and don't seem to have cracked it yet. How's about we try something else that demonstrably works elsewhere?

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

I hate them because I can never work out the terms they don't mention. What number on the building? Which building? MIT? How old do people start playing the piano in the US compared to anywhere else? None of it means anything to me.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

People tend to like those they can just talk to as you nod and contribute occasionally to prompt them for more information about their favoured subject, it was pretty much how the interview went; I'd asked about the team, he'd started talking about what went on outside work and I just kept leading him on for more information about what he did :)

Then I went away and crammed for a month on a language I'd barely used before.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, as I don't know you, I hope you don't mind me asking as I often find the answer illuminating: were you grammar, privately, or comprehensive educated? Or other, for that matter.

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

Its a bit like communism. Does it work? We've no idea, because nobody's sat down and done it properly.

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

Grammar School

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Yep, that sounds familiar :)