BBC's excellent experiment taking the choirmaster to a school where the boys were way behind girls in literacy.
Results were amazing. Partly because Gareth taught the boys in their way and also because he concentrated on literacy for 8 weeks with them. The reaction by my 6 year old son's teacher was that :
1. she did not believe boys needed teaching differently to girls (wrong - and there are neuroscience tests that prove that now!)
2. She wished she had more time to teach literacy (so leaves it to us!). Scrap French for 5 year olds if there isn't enough time for English I say and all the extra curricula stuff and general messing around. Get teaching.....
Monday 27 September 2010
The highway to hell: Dire predictions for the future of marketing - iMediaConnection.com
"Interesting stats from the head of Ogilvy. Consumers now twice as internet enables as marketeers. IN a nutshell, consumers are using the internet at a greater rate than marketeers are devoting time to it....."
Digital marketing is at a dangerous crossroads. At the iMedia Brand Summit, Brian Fetherstonhaugh explained how a perception revolution is the only thing that can save the industry from itself.
Tuesday 21 September 2010
Globalisation and the political nonsense of border controls
This is another article on 'non joined up writing'.
Simon Fairlie wrote in the Sunday Times (19th September 2010) that the government had solved the dangers posed by the 9000 year old practise of feeding swill to pigs ( a great recycling system) after a farmer failed to cook the swill and caused a disease outbreak. Instead of making sure that controls were in place and education to ensure that swill had been cooked prior to feed (and after all we had survived 9000 years with the same practise) our esteemed politicians decided to ban the practice (not nice for pigs when they are designed for a meat and veg diet and rubbish for carbon emissions). Instead we now grow GM soya by cutting down South American Rain Forest and contributing to global warming. Clearly better to kill off the whole human population via global warming disasters than risk the non cooking of pig swill.
This morning papers run articles that the latest ban on Tier 2 workers is going to have an impact on our ability to climb out of recession. Another great politician blunder by failing to sort the problem. All industry is now dependent on global workforces. Some of the best performing internet businesses rely on global programmers. Closer to home the last government raised the standard of living so that it is now not possible for employers to be able to get white English people of their unemployed backsides because benefits far outweight what they are worth paying in the workforce (and what the wider population will pay for goods). What is this governements plan to tackle that? Border control, stop the workers coming in. Wouldn't a better answer be to just reform benefits? Make people want to work?
The crutial issue is though the damage that will be done now when industries as diverse as ship building and catering cannot employ workers because no one at home is qualified or motivated enough to do the job anf foreign workers cannot come here. Why this 'visible' labour, that adds into our wider economy through spending in shops etc. is not acceptable when the government bangs about Globalisation being good and then lauds the industries using labour around the world to manufacture/programme/process and hence build the economies in those countries is beyond me.
Simon Fairlie wrote in the Sunday Times (19th September 2010) that the government had solved the dangers posed by the 9000 year old practise of feeding swill to pigs ( a great recycling system) after a farmer failed to cook the swill and caused a disease outbreak. Instead of making sure that controls were in place and education to ensure that swill had been cooked prior to feed (and after all we had survived 9000 years with the same practise) our esteemed politicians decided to ban the practice (not nice for pigs when they are designed for a meat and veg diet and rubbish for carbon emissions). Instead we now grow GM soya by cutting down South American Rain Forest and contributing to global warming. Clearly better to kill off the whole human population via global warming disasters than risk the non cooking of pig swill.
This morning papers run articles that the latest ban on Tier 2 workers is going to have an impact on our ability to climb out of recession. Another great politician blunder by failing to sort the problem. All industry is now dependent on global workforces. Some of the best performing internet businesses rely on global programmers. Closer to home the last government raised the standard of living so that it is now not possible for employers to be able to get white English people of their unemployed backsides because benefits far outweight what they are worth paying in the workforce (and what the wider population will pay for goods). What is this governements plan to tackle that? Border control, stop the workers coming in. Wouldn't a better answer be to just reform benefits? Make people want to work?
The crutial issue is though the damage that will be done now when industries as diverse as ship building and catering cannot employ workers because no one at home is qualified or motivated enough to do the job anf foreign workers cannot come here. Why this 'visible' labour, that adds into our wider economy through spending in shops etc. is not acceptable when the government bangs about Globalisation being good and then lauds the industries using labour around the world to manufacture/programme/process and hence build the economies in those countries is beyond me.
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