UK Politics Thread (Part 2)

You forgot potentially passing it onto your family members who you live with,some of whom may have had underlying conditions.

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Absolutely. I am a teacher and I loathed working online. It negates nearly everything that I love about the job. My students rarely switched on their cameras, had continual connection problems and were demotivated and disengaged. Teaching any group larger than 8 or 9 was a nightmare and I was left feeling frustrated and useless every day.
Thank god I teach university students. What it’s like trying to teach children I can’t imagine.
There are some of my colleagues who actually like it, but they are the type who only think about their paycheck. Anyone who really cares about the job would want to get back in the classroom as soon as possible.

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Woof. Massive unnecessary dig at @JU97ICE there. It’s not like its @SBYM moving back home.

ağlayan-adam

In fairness I hadn’t factored in @SBYM staying away. Perhaps I should say ‘moderate recession’? haha

The issue is that changing the medium from in-person to remote is not just an issue of getting people onto zoom and delivering your typical lessons. Remote teaching became a near default for us in the mid 10s at the university I used to work at. We won national awards for the approaches developed and we leveraged our ability to do it to turn us from a regional state university into one of the biggest in the country. The key was we approached the problem holistically that required an overhaul of the entire curriculum. Departments were given years to make the transition. It was a big enough job that it accounted for about 1/3 of my salary, and that allowed me to do 1 course a semester, equal to 3 a year. That is not a teaching requirement, that is simply being paid to do the work to enable us to a deliver a course remotely. This means from the time we started preparing it took us about 5 years to get to the point that we had an entire curriculum available for our grad program to be done remotely.

This is a million miles away from what teachers faced in 2020. And what I saw of the teacher friends I had going through this was that they redoubled their efforts to first try to learn for themselves how to effectively transition to a remote method, and then did the work to make that transition…all on the fly while still having to find a way to deliver the material they had in the mean time and not getting paid to do that extra work.

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Your bolded point is exactly right and mustn’t be glossed over.

PS. Sounds like your uni had the right approach - care to share the institution? Certainly still lots of room for disruption in Oz higher ed.

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University of Central Florida in Orlando. In the 90s it was literally just an urban commuter Uni for people who couldn’t get into the major state unis, FSU or UF, or for those who needed to stay at home for financial reasons. By the end of the 00s we were one of the largest universities in the country with over 70,000 registered students. This was almost entirely because of the advancements we made in remote learning.

As an aside, the transition started because we acquired a lot of regional satellite campuses scattered all through the region with the intention of being able to teach to multiple different classrooms at the same time. The limitation of simply delivering the same material to people via videoconference was soon realized and the scramble to rethink the entire process started from there.

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I did a year at a regional Uni campus (Burnie) in 2001 and nearly all the courses were via video. Often these would be back to back for 4 hours into the evening. For a young adult where you are there because you want to learn, it was tough. But now think of doing this for a kid where learning is likely the last thing on their mind.

Could be worse, you could have been the IT company that implemented all the online teaching for local primary schools. And then managed the parents who all swore black was white that they weren’t logged into a different Google account…

Hi :wave:

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It can alwayss be worse.

I could be an Everton fan.

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at the beginning it was a platform based on reform after years of Conservative power. But he quickly got himself into scandals as @Arminius can attest and has already survived one non-confidence vote. When he new his opposition was in crisis, he called an election mid-term to secure himself a new 4year term. He’s quite literally a post turtle…

I prefer to refer to him as the illegitimate son of Fidel Castro which I truly do suspect to be true.

Is that some kind of excruciatingly slow mail delivery service or an avant garde modern art movement?

Personally I have a theory on IT departments. Everything is fine until they roll out a “system update” Everything goes to shit the next working day. They seem to like to fiddle. If it ain’t broke, dont fix it.

I’ll post this here. Not expecting anyone to have a look at it all but little snippets just confirm everything we’ve been saying above. The conversation with Chris Bryant is something, he gets right under Boris’ skin at one point 1hr 44min in for that section of questions.

In honesty the whole lot is a travesty.

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An old Rancher is talking about politics with a young man from the city. He compares a politician to a “post turtle.” The young man doesn’t understand and asks him what a post turtle is.

The old man says, “When you’re driving down a country road and you see a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post turtle. You know he didn’t get up there by himself. He doesn’t belong there; you wonder who put him there; he can’t get anything done while he’s up there; and you just want to help the poor thing down.”

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Fucking brass neck on this bastard. I don’t know how he has the nerve.

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Is he any worse than whoever else is competing?

That’s like asking whether I should poke my left eye out or my right eye.

Tax dodging pillock who has no idea how to buy petrol i.e. spending money and given the Chancellor job thinks it’s alright now to be PM. Fuck off.

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