The pond was in a tither or a dither, or a whatever, for a Sunday meditation …
Oh sure there was always toxic masculinity, with Frank about as toxic as it gets …
But the pond had already spurned the razor-sharp offering of the local minor war criminal …
How could the pond turn to blow-in Frank and ignore the dog botherer, never mind that "We all suffer" marked Frank as a man in hysterical rhetorical paranoid overdrive?
The only suffering the pond suffers is when the insufferable Frank assures everybody of their suffering ...
And the pond had to stay firm against that other reptile regular …
Too soon, too soon, as Colbert sometimes observes, what with the pond's favourite readership, the cardigans of Canberra, all in a swelter or perhaps a welter …
Oh the poor things … too soon, too soon …
What a relief then to discover that dashing Donners, as ever, was ready to rush to the pond's rescue …
The pond knew what Kev would be banging on about, in his patented Catholic fundamentalist dunny door in a gale style …
It would be the way that the Donald shamelessly overrode auto-correct to produce results like this …
Once established, this sort of virus can be found lurking everywhere, frequently with a glowering Donald attached …
Sure, when it comes to typos, the pond lives in a glarse house, but just as surely, the Donald is the farther of all follies …
So take it way Kev, hit him where it hurts, in his toxic mushroom-shaped masculinity ...
Of course anyone who's come within cooee of the pond has heard it all a thousand times before. It's just therapy for Kev, but the pond feels it's like slipping on a pair of comfy slippers … though it has heard that others have to seek ways to alleviate the boredom, the sheer relentless, repetitive tedium of it all. The pond has even heard of betting on Kev's columns, the way some Australians bet on flies climbing up noses ...
Now the pond knows what its gambling school is thinking. What are the odds of Kev mentioning Gramsci and the long march, or if not that, the dreaded neo-Marxist influence, or some other jargon-laden word that ruins everything, and especially Judeo-Christian civilisation, whatever that might be?
Please, don't bet, there's no such think as responsible gambling, there's just a waste of money. You might well be dudded by the dashing Donners …or if you win, it might come with a sense of hollow cupidity or empty existential alienation … (in the postmodernist, post-ironic way).
Oh okay, those who bet on Judeo-Christian heritage, or inter alia, neo-Marxism, postmodernism, postcolonial, deconstruction, indoctrination, and so on can collect their winnings … if they found some mug bookie willing to offer even the shortest of odds required for such a sure thing bet… but sorry Gramsci enthusiasts, better luck next time ...
Of course the pond is just as outraged as Kev by this new fangled internet thingie, and the pond has already got extremely agitated about those bloody homebody penguins self-identifying in a way designed to send Donners into a frenzy ...
Oh they even did a video … here, have another heights of western civilisation joke …
Frankly the pond doesn't know what the full to overflowing intertubes and late night comics would do without these exemplary examples of western civilisation …
Sorry, no links, the pond deplores any attempt by anybody to go online … there's nothing to learn there …
Hang on, hang on, how else would the pond be able to read dashing Donners, doing his usual shout out for the wonders and joys of a good Catholic education? (Keeps the soul Persil-white and the mind full of cannibal thoughts of the transubstantiation kind) ...
Now dashing Donners might be a little selective in his use of data …
1. Raw comparisons of student outcomes in public and private schools generally show higher achievement in private schools. However, such comparisons are misleading because public schools enrol the vast proportion of disadvantaged students who, on average, have much lower results than students from higher socio-economic status (SES) families. Fair comparisons of school performance adjust for differences in the social composition of schools and other background factors. Nearly 30 academic studies in Australia have used statistical techniques to do this in the last 15 years.
2. Studies that adjusted for a range of student and school characteristics show no significant differences between the results of students from public, Catholic and Independent schools in national and international tests and in university completion rates. Public school students appear to achieve higher university grades than private school students despite the latter achieving higher university entrance scores. There is mixed evidence for Year 12 completion and workforce earnings…
There's more here, in cache as a way of avoiding a direct pdf download for those who don't like that sort of thing…
But the pond isn't really interested in a debate. It's long over the education system and rampant Catholicism, and Donners is just another angry old white male shouting at clouds in a way that charms and beguiles the reptile demographic …
Sheesh, you silly backers of Gramsci, you tore up your tickets, didn't you? How are you going to cash in your bets? You can always rely on Gramsci coming through the neo-Marxist, postcolonial field to score a modernist win!
And so to the thing that really gets the pond's goat … the blithe moving of dashing Donners from the gay ancient Greeks and Saturnalian Romans to "a liberal education", as if the Catholic church and Catholic schools were liberal, when in reality, they're damnably illiberal when it comes to homebody penguins ...
The pond understands that dashing Donners is operating on the squeaky gate syndrome … if there's enough squeaking, somebody might feel the need to apply a little more oil to the gate, or cash to the Catholic education system … and it's true that today's toddlers need a little more discipline …
Meanwhile, the pond must add a final treat from an unexpected source … our Gracie …
Now to be fair the pond should record where our Gracie landed, which was an anxiety-laden rant …
Yes, if you're going to park your oldies, you should be able to do it cheaply, quickly and efficiently … bring on Solyent Green the pond says …
But now duty done, the pond must insist on the sublime pleasure of our Gracie's opening … and never mind how she got from the clocks above the faraway tree to locking up oldies in a cost-efficient way ...
A Magaret Thatcher clock?
Now don't get the pond wrong … the pond loves clocks, the pond has lots of half-baked clocks all over the house, but dammit, even in the spirit of getting Donners agitated, there's no way the pond would wander around the house pointing out its Gramsci clock, its Karl clock, its Marx clock, its Trotsky and Lenin clocks (oh they're always feuding, and sometimes you need an ice pick to sort them out).
Sorry, in pond land, and thanks to Gertrude, a clock's a clock's a clock …and the pond would rather offer a cartoon than humiliate a clock by calling it Margaret Thatcher, or even worse, Theresa May …
Not a clock, not a cat, not even in jest ...
Your modern student is a busy person, achieving cultural literacy by age seventeen. When I was that age I hadn't heard of, let alone studied, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Goethe, Caravaggio, Mahler, and the hundreds of other people that we all agree must be experienced if one is to be culturally literate. How do they do it?
ReplyDeleteReading Donners, I am reminded of the English trades union leader, who, when interviewed would say "Now, that's a very interesting question, but the real question is.." and then provide his answer to his question.
Ah yes, Joe, but reading a bunch of very forgettable scribblers of various ilks isn't of much lasting value. The essence of Western Civilisation has been its creation of an Everest of long lasting, essential mathematics: the basis of the many achievements of post Renaissance science without which this would be a very much poorer world, and humanity a weak and struggling species.
DeleteI won't start with the old Greek(ish) guys: Eudoxus, Archimedes, Pythagoras, Euclid, Aristarchus, Hippocrates of Chios etc. And not Hypatia in these days of anti-feminist sentiment. Not even with the Renaissance group - Cardano, Napier, Tartaglia, Galileo etc. I will take my list from a pair of books I first read back around the mid 1960s (and they were already 30 years old by then): Eric Temple Bell's "Men of Mathematics" Books 1 and 2. These are the names you should know, and the men - and they almost all are men - who you should read and understand.
Descartes, Fermat, Pascal, Newton, Leibnitz, the family Bernoulli, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Fourier, Poncelet, Gauss, Cauchy, Lobachevsky, Abel, Jacoby, Hamilton, Galois, Cayley, Weierstrass (and Sonya Kovalevsky, who is female, and you could add Ada Lovelace and Florence Nightingale if you wish*), Boole, Hermite, Kronecker, Riemann, Kummer, Dedekind, Poincare, Cantor. And yes, I did encounter most - but by no means all - of them in my High School and Uni days.
Of course, Bell wrote his books back in the 1930s, so there's a whole swathe of mathematicians which he, and I, wot not of. David Hilbert and Andrew Wiles, for instance, and Grigori Perelman, Emmy Noether et al. So this little list is just a beginning in the pursuit of the knowledge that really matters. For instance, add Bertrand Russell, Goedel and the Incompleteness Theorems that basically show that any sufficiently complex axiomatic system (eg number theory) is either inconsistent or incomplete or both - pretty important don't you think ?
* see http://mentalfloss.com/article/88279/15-female-mathematicians-whose-accomplishments-add
I guess you liked Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology PDF
DeleteI shamefully confess to having been unaware of it Joe - probably because, in Hardy's own words, my attention was almsost wholly on "doing" rather than "critiquing" (and boy, did I have to give all of my limited attention to "doing", at least in terms of achieving some small amount of learning).
DeleteSo anyway, muchos grazias for that, some good reading I can do.
Hardy, of course, was the Cambridge mentor and supporter of the self-taught Indian number theory genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Never mind that the two most powerful drivers of pre-teen and teenage behavior are FOMO (fear of missing out) and nomophobia too which is the existential panic which occurs when their beloved I-phone drops dead or somehow they cant access the now all powerful techno-matrix.
ReplyDeleteTechno-zombies rule OK!
Donners really does refer to "outcomes" a lot, doesn't he. For instance:
ReplyDelete"students achieve stronger educational outcomes..."
"a way to raise standards and improve educational outcomes..."
But I do not think the word means what he thinks it does; what he refers to as 'outcomes' are really 'outputs'. A student at the end of heis secondary education program is very distinctly an output. And even at the end of most tertiary education, we are still dealing with 'outputs'. It's only when we follow up students some time into their careers that we actually see genuine 'outcomes'.
At least that otherwise execrable chap Lewis Terman, despite his appalling reification of "intelligence" as "Stanford-Binet IQ", had the integrity to manage a longitudinal study that did follow the "outcomes" of high-IQ students for much of their lives. And discovered how minimal were most of their "outcome achievements".
He also likes pushing hard against this one too: "2. Studies that adjusted for a range of student and school characteristics show no significant differences between the results of students from public, Catholic and Independent schools in national and international tests and in university completion rates. "
Thanks for that URL, DP [ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZcD0HDZhO04J:www.saveourschools.com.au/file_download/194+&cd=16&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au ], it refudiates Donners very nicely.
"Donners is just another angry old white male shouting at clouds in a way that charms and beguiles the reptile demographic …"
Spot on as always, DP.