Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
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Links ( 'Nother Solent is this blog's good twin. Same words, searchable archives, RSS feed. Provided by a benefactor, to whom thanks. I also sometimes write for Samizdata and Biased BBC.) The Old Comrades:
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Thursday, February 10, 2005
I could have been a contender. Before this royal thing broke the big story was the release of the government papers relating to our departure from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. I never really understood all that, despite working at the Treasury at the time. All I know is that it was this dreadful, ignominious national humiliation and everybody got a little richer after it happened.
Nonetheless the crisis was the occasion for me to suffer a significant loss. On that day, having finished a hard day's work of national unimportance in Government Offices Great George Street, euphoniously known as GOGGS, I came out of the side entrance. And as I stepped into the light a whole bunch of reporters leapt to their feet. Cameras were yanked to the ready position, boom mikes swung to meet me, a few flash lights went off. Then they realised that I wasn't Norman Lamont.
The wonderful thing was that for once in my life a really great line had popped into my head at just the right moment. "Actually," I could say, sweeping past, "I am the Chancellor. I knew you reptiles would never penetrate my cunning disguise." I had the line, I had the situation: a funny spot at the end of the six o'clock news was assured. The only thing stopping me was that between one step and the next I had realised I was wearing a nightie.
This could have happened to anyone. Well, anyone female. I was fairly pregnant at the time and my cousin had recently passed on to me a whole pile of pregnancy clothes. I had been working my way through the pile and that morning I had put on a comfortable, simply cut pull-on dress with a soft collar like they have on rugby shirts. I had wondered whether it was not a little informal, but I didn't have enought pregnancy clothes to turn one down. Anyway something about being the focus of the concentrated attention of the world's press suddenly made it obvious to me that it was probably obvious to everyone else that I was walking the corridors of Her Majesty's Treasury in poly-cotton sleepwear. In the circumstances the headline would be not "Sassy Treasury Girl Trades Jokes With Journalists" but "Mad Woman Stalks Whitehall, Believes Self To Be Chancellor."
So my quip un-quipped I shuffled past the cameras and the cables and went disconsolately home and to bed. At least I was dressed for it.
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
A common fallacy about the nature of teaching. Every so often a certain claim is made by a teacher, usually in a Letter to the Editor denouncing the impudence of the non-teaching laity, which has long annoyed me. A version of it came up again in yesterday's Guardian. This article by Peter Hyman describes how he, a former speechwriter for Tony Blair, fares in an inner city classroom. Interesting stuff. I'm sure he is, or is becoming, a good teacher. But here it is again, right at the end of the article. One day it all works: the students are focused; I think they are understanding the point, thinking for themselves. The next time - perhaps because I have done less preparation, perhaps because the students have had a bad day - the lesson is lacklustre, the students less sparky.I added the italics. The usual version of the complaint refers to airline pilots rather than surgeons. I mentioned both in an article I did for Right Now magazine. I said, Every year or so this comic [the magazine of the National Union of Teachers] features an outraged letter on these lines: "Would you have your appendix removed by an unqualified surgeon? Would you cross the Atlantic in a plane with an unqualified pilot? Why, then, would you permit an unqualified teacher to instruct your child?" To which I answer (1) No, (2) No and (3) Why ever not? Anyone trying to extract an appendix by instinct alone will be up for manslaughter the following morning. Anyone trying to fly a 747 guided only by his Inner Light will soon be one of several hundred corpses bobbing along with the waves. Both these skills are failure-critical and arbitrary, in the sense that one cannot deduce from first principles which blood vessels to snip or buttons to press. Teaching is neither.It is obvious why teachers want to be placed in the same bracket as surgeons or pilots: it's to keep out competition from classroom assistants, home educators and other riff-raff. The irony is that there is a profession that resembles classroom teaching much more closely than either that of surgeon or airline pilot, and in which good performers are often much better paid than either. That profession is sales. A teacher must get a sceptical audience to share his view of the desirability of what he is offering, as must a salesman. A good teacher must know his subject as a good salesman must know his product. For both there is more to success than product knowledge; enthusiasm and empathy are also involved. Both are born not made, although experience and training can help. For both the constant human interaction can be exhausting. Both will be rejected and insulted every day. The best love their jobs anyway.
Yet this comparison is put forward a lot more often by salesmen than by teachers. Teachers don't like it at all. For one thing, salesmen are not seen as virtuous. This is not mere anti-capitalism, although there is plenty of that, but is more that teachers still cling to their traditional Automatic Professional Virtue Rating, not perceiving how much of that rating came from their low pay.
For another thing, any fool can be an unsuccessful salesman. Those wretches who mumble through a prepared script about double glazing - who would like to be compared to them? But compare I will: I pitied the worst teachers I knew even more than those individuals desperate enough to sign up for a job cold-calling.
The very best salesmen, however, can earn a fortune. A star performer can be the salvation of a failing company and, boy, do they know it when applying for a raise. Wouldn't it be strange if teachers played by the same rules? I don't necessarily put this forward as desirable for all: as Charles Murray pointed out in his book In Pursuit of Happiness, many teachers understandably value the feeling of collegiate harmony that comes from the worst-paid staff member at a school being paid an amount not too much less than the best-paid, and from the pay scales being fixed and known.
My analogy between sales and teaching is only analogy. It has its limitations. However Mr Hyman's colleague should accept that everybody can teach a bit, just as everybody can sell a bit. Not everybody can teach or sell well. Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Peter Simple, thou knowest not what thou has wrought. In the late seventies my only opportunity to read the Telegraph (buying a copy was against my religion) was when copies of it were spread out to protect the tables in my O-Level art class. What sinful pleasure it was to slide my ongoing masterpiece Still Life With Adidas Trainers an inch to the side in order to sneak a look at Way of the World or Peter Simple. One of the two columns, I can't remember which, used to feature the "Ladies' Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society" who knitted hand grenade covers for the Khmer Rouge. I thought this was a very naughty right-wing joke. Joke's on me. There really is such a body. In San Francisco's Bay Area, believe it or not. And it's on mugs and T-shirts and everything. Nostalgically, I wonder, was the whole "terrorist sewing circle" thing a widespread joke that I only saw through the lens of Peter Simple, or is it another case of an insult being taken up with pride by those it was directed at?
Ah, whichever. The late seventies. Those were the days. Days when you'd stick a safety pin through your lip and a nail through your nose and then snarl, "What are you ****ing staring at?"¹ at any bourgeois creep who looked your way.
Those days may not be utterly gone. Just the other week Scott Burgess had some fun with a glorious Guardian article on an exhibition of transgressive knitters who take on capitalism and war. (Do they win?) Instructions are provided by the Guardian for a knitted hand grenade.
Carrying on the grand tradition of doing all you can to shock and then complaining when it works, one Rachael Matthews says, "It seemed odd that you were allowed to read a book on the tube, but knitting was abnormal." Ms Matthews is a maker of knitted willies "with realistic head and veins." I'm sure her creative solidarity is much appreciated by the current leaders of resistance against US warmongering imperialism.
¹ Or rather, "What are you ****ink starink ab?" Before I go, MMM writes: If you are still looking for the Henry Ford story,I am! it sounds a lot like the one from Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich" Chapter on Specialized Knowledge.He or she adds, "now it's back to Calculus II studying." This gives me the excuse to wheel out my favourite Calculus Profondity: ſ t = deatht = birth existence dt = Life HENRY FORD UPDATE: Captain Heinrichs sent me this link to Henry Ford's Time Machine, containing another famous Fordism: "I don't know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across there (to England) and I don't care. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today."As I said, the man had other skills. Good thing he did. Incidentally, that article quotes the words at issue in the court case as "ignorant idealist" rather than "ignorant pacifist."
Hail and farewell. I'm back, after a bout of that awful affliction that's going around, "work", I believe they call it. Goodbye again for a bit: must hop down to the newsagent to buy a copy of the Guardian to get outraged about. Monday, January 24, 2005
Just because I want a thing to be true doesn't mean it is. Just because I want a thing to be true doesn't mean it is. Just because I want a thing to be true doesn't mean it is. Oh, I give up. True, true, all true! Believe and rejoice!
(Via Instapundit.) If Christian fundamentalism did not exist... it would be necessary to invent an entirely new cliché to avoid having Islam stand out. At the present time what Abdel Rahman al-Rashid said is true: "It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims."It was not always the case that Islam was particularly violent. We are frequently reminded of the relative tolerance of Spain under the Moors, but repetition does not make it any less true. One day the fever of Islamofascism will burn itself out, and honest Muslim commentary such as Mr Rashid's article is the best hope of bringing that day forward. But for now, like he said. Hello, elephant, I see you. Madeline Bunting in the Guardian can see the elephant, too. Her Guardian article is entitled "Elephants in the room." But she isn't going to mention any particular elephant by name. Allusion will be made to the existence of the category of pachyderms, but that is all:
Some fears that reared their heads in the discussion seem bizarre, such as the fear of Islam as a proselytising, expansionary faith; Catholicism has comparable ambition, but no one is demonising the rosary-reciting faithful - there's as much evidence of a stampede of converts to the confessional box as there is to the mosque. But some fears are well-founded: fundamentalism has emerged as an aberrant, aggressive phenomenon in all the world's religions.Emphasis added by me. Bunting continues: Recognise faith identity and does one end up arbitrating between extremist interpretations of those faiths - the evangelical Christian and the Sikh mobs between them constraining free speech?As if Salman Rushdie had never existed. (He won't exist much longer if the renewed call for his death issued by the Iranian Supreme Ayatollah the other day is heeded.) The only effect of this pussyfooting around is to generate sarcasm. In all the world's religions, sure, but not equally. A certain uneveness in the problem of religious violence is why earnest Guardianistas find it necessary to organise conferences on Islam, Race and British identity. If the Guardian really wanted to generate goodwill towards Muslims it could talk about the bravery of Iraqi election workers and voters. And here's where I turn my sarcasm button off: it did.
Very snug. When musing on state employees going back to bed without penalty while the private sector toils on or suffers the consequences, I realised that the entire situation was summarised by J Dormouse: And when Mr John Dormouse was complained to, he stayed in bed, and would say nothing but "very snug;" which is not the way to carry on a retail business. The entire text is here. How oddly it reads without the pictures. And by double clicking on any word, even "the", you can get a dictionary definition. Correction: not any word. It doesn't work for "'ticing." It's against my principles to tice anyway. Incidentally, I must do some more private sector toiling myself in the next few days. This will probably do my blogging no end of good: anything to put off the start of work. Here I am, back after longer than I thought. As usual when I return after a gap, my mind is blank. Blogging, wot dat? Perhaps I ought to go back to bed and consider matters. I could if I were an Indian schoolteacher employed by the state. "A third of state school teachers are absent on any given day, according to a recent survey. The same applies to the country’s primary health clinics, which are more often empty than staffed." That's from a post in the Adam Smith Institute blog that links to an article in the Financial Times by Edward Luce about bureaucracy in India. Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Sorry I haven't blogged for the last couple of days. Busy. Hope to be back tomorrow. I have followed the news just enough to be reminded of why I am not a conservative. |