Nursing Care In Hospital
It is being reported, that nurses are calling for more compassionate care in hospital.
I’m 65 and last year I collapsed and ended up in hospital. It was a teaching hospital and the doctor asked if I wouldn’t mind being used for interviewing practice by medical students.
It made a miserable time, almost enjoyable! Especially, as some students were attractive female ones.
Do other hospitals encourage their medical and nursing students to do this? It certainly, is a good way to get them up to speed in an important and perhaps neglected part of their training.
Greece’s Final Bailout?
I don’t expect so!
But they got one yesterday, as the BBC reports.
Will we ever sort Greece out?
In some ways all we’re doing with Greece, is like giving an alcoholic a bottle of Scotch a day.
Until the Greeks change their habits and accept their lifestyle will have to change, we’ll have to keep bailing them out.
In some ways, the key to a country’s future is its education system. According to this report on the BBC, the UK system ranks sixth in the world. We could obviously do better, but on looking at the full table, Greece is ranked 34.
It’s The Teachers Fault
This report says that the reason for the GCSE results fiasco, was that teachers marked course work too generously.
Surprise! Surprise!
It just illustrates the dangers of using course work to grade results in exams, that was pointed out by so many experts before the practice was introduced.
I might have benefited from course work in my English O level,but I doubt it, as it wasn’t my strongest subject. But at least I performed well enough in exams to just get a pass in both English Language and English Literature.
Do We Need A Royal College Of Teaching?
This question is raised in a news item in The Times today.
After all most professions have them and it could easily be argued that they raise the status of their professions.
In some ways, it’s strange that one doesn’t exist already.
Those New Exams
I suspect, that in twenty years time, we’ll look back and say that Michael Gove’s proposed changes are wrong.
I say this because my youngest son, was the in the first year to take GCSEs exclusively. The teachers didn’t know how to teach for the new exams and the results were bad.
If change is needed, it should be gradual, not stepwise.
Those Exam Results
Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times says what all of us have been thinking about the GCSE results. They can’t go on rising without any visible means of support for ever.
After all teachers like results to improve as it makes them look good and if they get worse, then teachers look bad. It is better that kids find out they’re not the new Jane Austen or Stephen Hawkins at school, where hopefully teachers can do something about it.
It probably why understanding of statistics is so bad in this country, the first set they come across are massaged in their and their teachers favour.
The Sex Lives of Depraved Penguins
According to this report on the BBC, what penguins got up to, so shocked Captain Scott’s biologist on the Terra Nova polar expedition, that they censored his findings. Here’s the first few paragraphs.
Accounts of unusual sexual activities among penguins, observed a century ago by a member of Captain Scott’s polar team, are finally being made public.
Details, including “sexual coercion”, recorded by George Murray Levick were considered so shocking that they were removed from official accounts.
However, scientists now understand the biological reasons behind the acts that Dr Levick considered “depraved”.
The Natural History Museum has published his unedited papers.
Now of course, thanks to the work of David Attenbrough and others, every ten year old, knows what penguins get up to, even if the secrets of their own conception are a mystery to them.
Why Is A School Using Libel Lawyers?
On BBC London News this evening, there has been a story about a primary school, using well-known libel lawyers to sue their local council for damages over something written in a report. I didn’t get the full story, but I shall be watching later tonight and searching the papers in the morning.
After all, as a taxpayer, I don’t like schools wasting money and hiring libel lawyers definitely comes under that category.
C did her first pupillage as a barrister in libel chambers and it never ceased to amaze her how much money was wasted by clients in cases.
A Course in Photography
I saw this board outside Jessops in Islington
Phptography Course Anyone?
I wonder if anybody does a course for Junkberries.
Bad Maths
I’m 65 this year. Could my generation’s everyday maths, be better, as we had to cope with £sd? When I served in a bar in the 1960s, you learned things like 3 bottles of Guinness at 1s. 8d. were 5s. You had to do it all mentally, as the till was just a drawer.
I also played a lot of cribbage and other card games. Many of which need a certain amount of arithmetical dexterity. So have computer games lost all this?
But in some ways my biggest advantage was that my mother had very good arithmetical skills, partly brought on as she had been a comptometer operator before and during the Second World War, at Reeves just down the road from where I now live. So when we travelled in the car, she would always set me puzzles.
Interestingly, comptometer is rejected by the computerised spelling on this computer and WordPress.
The Anonymous Widower 