Hiatus

I honestly do not know how people blog. How they have so many opinions about so many things, and can keep writing about it all.

Anyway, my opinions have mostly dried up and my weeks shall only get busier. Hopefully, this will all start up again, first Saturday of September.

Farewell,
Lucy

So...

Saturday post this week?
Yep.


Eleventh-hour guest posts appreciated.

Lucy

Faith Vs. Science

Fortnight:
- New Pope
- Horsemeat FINALLY falls out of the news.
- The Tories open their mouths
- Inquiries into various hospitals occur
- I get my results back.

So, in the light of the Pope being elected, I decided to turn to religion for this fortnight. Makes a change from my reasonably middle-of-the-road posts.

Even then, this is still very middle-of-the-road, as far as I'm concerned. That's just how I roll.

Recently (also known as the last three months or so), I read an article on the BBC, about the "first atheist church". Apparently, it involved an informal meeting of a collection of atheists, and in it, there was "a power-point presentation from a particle physicist, Dr Harry Cliff, who explains the origins of antimatter theory."

It wasn't completely science-centric, but it had science in it. I'm not going to bash the "atheist church". If they want to congregate and create an organised religion out of having no religion, then go for it. As long as they're having fun.

But the science presentation is something I may bash, oh-so-slightly. It's not the presentation itself I have an issue with, but the idea that surrounds it.

There's some kind of myth going around, and I find this especially with both militant Christians and militant atheists, that you're either a man of "science" or a man of "faith". You either call out scientists on bullshit or are one, so to speak. This came to a head, not to long ago, with my incredibly specific example, as follows. A reasonably well-known atheist died, and on twitter there were some few tweets by other reasonably well-known atheists talking about something along the lines of "we cannot let faith override us and let us seek sanctuary in science".

Maybe when On Origins of Species was released, this was most likely true*. It was most likely* a case of "you're either science or faith". But we've moved on from that, and there are times when science and faith can mingle. Scientists can be Christians and Christians can be scientists. Case in point: I met a couple of priests a few years back, and I got the chance to question them. They both took the line that it wasn't a case of "faith or science", and they gave me a few examples that lead to the Bible proving evolution. Agnostic me naturally took this a little dubiously, but that wasn't the point.

The point is that it doesn't have to be a split. Atheists can't just be all about science, science, science. The two priests I met had kept themselves open to alternative ideas, and were more interesting people for it. Why can't some atheists do the same?

*I'm not guaranteeing anything I haven't googled.

Picking Up On Themes

Newsreels:
- Much more coverage than is really necessary of Oscar Pistorius
- Catholic church keeps resigning
- Daniel Day-Lewis is awesome and of course anybody who watched Lincoln knows this
- Horsemeat takes over the world
- Egyptian balloon crash
- I break a finger by doing absolutely nothing
- I cried like a baby at Cloud Atlas

"Check out Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell"

I asked, about a year ago, a question relating to a book I'm writing. This was an answer to the question.

The book in question has more or less taken over my life, as my fortnightly round-up evidences. When I saw Cloud Atlas last Saturday, I spent most of the credits sat in my seat, sobbing. But when the guy who had sat in front of me saw the exact same film as me, he spent most of the credits walking out of the cinema, shortly after saying "Don't know what that was all about".

To put it simply, he didn't pick up on the main themes of the novel/film, which were about the way we are all connected. He would have probably had an easier time had he instead watched An Inspector Calls, which has the incredibly easy to interpret* speech from the Inspector, which goes as follows:

"But just remember this. One Eva Smith has gone - but there are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, and what we think and say and do. We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night."

Naturally, he didn't talk in bold, although that would be awesome. The play itself is a message about being responsible for one another, and the way in which we are connected. That theme is relatively obvious, but what might be less obvious is the way in which this is an anti-capitalism play, and each of the characters either represent one of the Seven Deadly Sins or an ill of society (and in most cases - both).

I define a truly excellent novel as one with themes. One that presents you with a story, and gives you so much more underneath it. And more often than not, the enjoyment of a novel (As I discovered when reading Never Let You Go by Kazuo Ishiguro) hangs on the understanding of not just what's happening, but what the author is trying to tell you through the medium of themes, carefully laid in the novel.

Sometimes, it's not about was has been said, but what hasn't.

*Although that's coming from me, and I'm doing AIC in an English Literature course

Well, this is awkward

Let's wait until Saturday for a post, alright?

The Media

Fortnight:
- Horses here
- Horses there
- Horses everywhere
- And also some pork
- A politician lies, but this time, he gets into trouble
- Gove has some -gasp- good ideas for once
- Pope resigns.
- We discover that guns don't mix with more than just primary schools, and sometimes they don't mix with Paralympic athletes.
- An asteriod may either look pretty or kill thousands of people, depending on the maths skills of some scientists

Today, I think I might discuss a little about the formal media (printed press, television news etc) vs social media.

And no, it's not about the merits of "citizen journalism" or anything. I just find that sometimes the formal media tries to force our hand and way of thinking.

This is mostly in light of the horsemeat "scandal", when I discovered that actually nobody cares. Yes, there is the occasional person who worries a little, but overall nobody much minds. It was a simple case of mislabelling, and you find most messages online are merely jokes relating to it. Yet we find the media panicking over and dedicating more time to this story, telling us multiple times that this is something we should worry about, something we should care about. But it's hard to care when every interview they do with a minister follows this line:

Media: "Should we be worried about horsemeat?"
Minister: "No, it's safe to eat and just a case of simple mislabelling."
Media: "What should people do if they're worried?"
Minister: "They can return the product to point of purchase, but it's perfectly safe to eat."
Media: "So, is it a cause for concern?"
Minister: "No."

And yet somehow these interviews drag on and on, with the interviewer attempting to ask the same questions in as many different ways as possible. They're trying to make us scared so they can drag out this story for as long as they can, and as far as I can see their only motivation is to just yell at some ministers for a while, because everybody knows that news without ministers cast in a bad light is no news at all.

Rather than dragging out "scandals" that people have given up caring about, how about some new news stories, yeah?

The Failing Student

The fifteen days in news:
- Algerian hostage crisis comes to a sad end
- Gove fucks about again
- Horsemeat takes over the WORLD
- And then there's some pork in the mix.
- I get my exam entry list and it looks scary.

I apologise this is a day late etc. Down to business.

So, as my tiny round-up says, Gove is messing about with things again. This time, it's with A-levels. At the moment, students study for two years: The first year studying for AS levels (generally taking four), finishing with an exam, and then studying for A2 levels (generally taking three), leaving them with one AS level and three A-levels*. Universities often use a mix of AS level results and predictions in order to offer places. Gove's ideas would mean that students would continue to study to, in most cases, one AS level and three A-levels. However, AS levels would be a standalone qualification and not be a stepping-stone to A2. All exams for it would be taken at the end of the two years.

I'm not quite sure how that would work, but I would assume a student would have to choose which one of their options would be an AS right from the word go, so the AS could be taught at a slower pace to the full A-level. Schools would also have to run every course twice: the AS run and the A2 run, rather than just teaching one class with some students dropping out after the first year (or in the case of my sixth form's language department: stopping after the AS level). And then there'd be the over-achieving student** who'd think that because they're having to take the course for two years they might as well take the full A2 anyway.

Universities are in outrage over this. They'd have to base a student's progress on GCSEs, which are totally different to A-levels (example: French GCSE requires two five-minutes speaking pieces in which you get two weeks to prepare. A level requires a fifteen minute speaking in which you get twenty minutes to prepare). It wouldn't give a reliable view of a student, and someone who didn't do so well in GCSEs may be turned down for a university place when they end up with top marks at A-level.

Many people are saying that this is the wrong way to go about changes. I agree. I could screech all day about the faults of the Ebacc (and I already have). There are many things wrong with the system and A-levels are the ones with the least fault (at the very least, A-levels are the ones I have only a fleeting experience with). We need to start with league tables. Hence my title.

League tables started with a good idea: people can tell good schools from bad. But it's become much more than that, it's become an all-consuming focus of schools. Resources are poured into getting children into that precious A*-C bracket, noticably the few D students who have the potential for a C. That's what, twenty or thirty students? Suddenly, catch-up sessions in core subjects that used to be open for over a thousand students now become the preserve of a closed few, a closed few who often don't bother turning up. It means students like me, who spent a year as a "C" student in Maths despite having the potential of an "A", are completely ignored whilst someone who boasted about getting only six marks on a mock paper can skip out of the much-despised Core PE in order to go from a D to a C. It means a student who gets a C in their Chemistry paper and has the potential for an A must pay for their retake whilst a student who got a D gets it for free, although they don't actually want to take the paper again.

No, the education system isn't perfect. But we need to stop using the idea of the token "failing student", who are realistically very few in number, to mess things up for everybody else.

*This is mostly where my scuffle with my school comes in as I *hope* to finish sixth form with three AS levels and three A-levels. It's complicated.
**Or just the student who attempts to over-achieve *points to self*