Education, Education and God knows what else

Fortnight round-up:
- A thousand parents make a thousand unfunny jokes about teachers
- The unfunny jokes relate to a child who ran away with her teacher
- They were both from a town covered by the same local news as the town I am in, hence knowing every single detail of the story
- Gove stops the GCSEs
- Canadian cheese smuggling rings are broken
- *Topless* photos of Kate where published everywhere
- Apple are useless
- My school promptly ban the ability to use time wisely, to the downfall of my BTEC

Today I talk of Gove.
No wait, I don't talk of him, I will talk about him and his hair-brained ideas.

As I've been in a bad mood all day (Apparently, you can drop a GCSE at my school, but not the IT you must take with Triple Science. I digress), I'll start with his good ideas.
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Okay, so that was mean. He does have one good point. The multiple exam boards. They were never going to work out, and it also makes it as hard as hell to buy second-hand revision guides (Oh brilliant! A cheap maths guide! Oh no wait, it's on AQA. Wait, which exam board am I on?*). However, the old system it does make quality control easier. If Edexcel reported an 80% pass rate in the English Language exam, whilst OCR only recorded a 30% pass, something is wrong. But of course, there would be no need for quality control with multiple exam boards, they would just do great exams. To attempt to conclude a minor-half argument so terrible it would reduce my Critical Thinking teacher to tears of pain, a rare glimmer of good idea sometimes crosses his mind.

I'm not denying that GCSE's have their faults. My Chemistry exam, taken in January of this year, was insane to learn. I was given four months to learn the first three units (Of which there seven, one is the equivalent of three units), which wasn't enough so it was all crammed in at once. I didn't revise, so on the day I was bullshitting it. Chemistry is not my strongest science, and yet I managed to get 86/100 UMS points, or an A. Yet in Physics, I had a year before taking the equivalent exam. I got a B. Admittedly, I'm even worse at Physics than I am Chemistry, but had the exams be switched around I'm fairly sure that the grades would too. Whilst I don't agree with the all-exams-at-the-end idea**, I do think they shouldn't be taken in the first January of the course.

And as far as I can see, there are academic-only subjects in the Ebacc. Yes, there may be an idea to introduce more "creative" subjects later (music/art/drama/dance), but I see nothing of vocational subjects. Gove forgets that not everybody is destined for Oxford. There are students, and I do know a couple of them, who will never get a decent GCSE. Instead, they take a vocational course in health and social care, or hair and beauty. Admittedly, they're not as great as 5 A*'s, but it'll get them a job. The English Baccalaureate will run their abilities into the ground, passing them through with bad qualifications and no life skills.

The GCSEs/BTECs have faults, no doubt. But they did encompass the range of students, and that's all that really matters.

*Edexcel
**Over the two years, I have to take more than 17 exams. Imagine having them all in one month. And all the revision.

Atos

Fortnight round up:
- Wales want the whole English GCSE saga cleaned up, while Michael Gove is being a stubborn little shit by not asking for a nationwide review.
- Topless photos of Kate Middleton are posted by a *regulated* French magazine
- "Sam" gets the US into a shitload of trouble
- Middle-eastern countries may *possibly* be using the dodgy US video as a front for a backlash against the US presence in their countries
- Brits are murdered in France
- My first week at school is full of homework and catch-up
- I start fencing and manage to injure myself before we even start fencing

Today, I shall talk about Atos.

For those unaware, Atos is a company hired by the government to sort everybody claiming incapacity benefit (and DLA - disability living allowance) into three groups: Those who can work, those who can't work, and those who can do a "work related activity" (working with extra support etc). The general idea is to stop people claiming the benefit when they can work.

However, there are questions surrounding the contract between the government and Atos. Some people believe that they are paid more to declare people fit to work - thus causing the government to have to pay out less.

Now, when the complaints first started (on shows like Saints & Scroungers, Rip Off Britain etc), I just thought it was one of those few that slip through the net, as always happens. A few stories of someone with severe asthma, someone with trouble walking, ones like that. These people had either worked for most of their life and then had to stop, or attempted to work but physically couldn't. They also have multiple health records from their GPs and doctors in hospital proving they are ill. Yet their assessors would look at them on one day, ask them a few questions and decide their capacity to work based on that short time. As one arthritis sufferer said, "I have good days and bad days. You can't judge based on a single day."

It caught my attention when these little stories popped up repeatedly did I think something was up. Looking into it, it seems that Atos have declared that nobody is disabled and everybody is fine. Woo! Good thing they've sponsored the Paralympics.

Wait, what?

Yes, amid all their controversies, they thought it was suitable.

But that is not a point I shall explore.

I find myself much without an ending, as anything I say can be said better in an old article by Mark Steel. See you in a fortnight.
http://www.independent.co.uk/hei-fi/views/mark-steel-odd-choice-for-a-paralympics-sponsor-8091782.html

I dislike making excuses.

But since Kingsoft Office:
- Threw away my work
- Refuses to now open

I cannot post until tomorrow (I type all of my posts into a word processor for spelling, grammar and formatting purposes)

Hate that this is the second time in a row that I've done this, argh! Might have to change posting day to Saturday at this rate.