You must be a school teacher Bugsy, & rather sensitive to your own incompetence.

Just what Bugsy is irreverent about the 15 year old year 10 graduates in the 50s & 60s being able to handle the math required to do an electrical apprenticeship, & the 17 year old graduates of year 12 today, requiring a remedial math course to do the same. Even after a remedial crash course, many still can't make change for a bus ticket, without a computer to do it for them, let alone understand the concept of electrical formulae.

Oh you want to guess what people do for living Hasbeen? I assure you if I was a teacher, I wouldn't have time to burn on this site like all you retired codgers with inflated senses of self worth and no clue.

I am am really sorry to hear that the education system appeared to fail your kids and that they had take remedial math courses to get an electrical apprenticeship, but one of the larger indicators of academic achievement comes from parents and family environment.

Lots of other kids seem to manage it though.

Bugsy,

You show yourself to be no more than an ignorant, self-important lout, with no redeeming features and a piss-poor character.

You also show yourself to be both uneducated and untrained. There's a vast difference, but you fail on both counts.

What you don't show is any comprehension of educational values. It's the old story, "never mind the quality, feel the width". Ignorant dunce.

Get a grip, Bugsey. Oh, you already have ?

I taught for a year in the early sixties. I was no great shakes, but I got all my kids through - and in those days, there was no automatic promotion from one year to the next, the kids (and their teacher) had to earn it. I was lucky, I had only forty nine kids - one college friend had sixty two across three Grades. As well, I had the easiest Grades, IV and V, good kids, and a very bright Grade IV to boot. So compared to what others were having to do, it was a doddle. On seventeen quid a week.

How would I go with classes of twenty five, all in the one grade ? How would I cope ? And, horrors, I might have to do playground duty as well ! Yes, there was probably less paper-work back then but more marking, more inspection of kids' work: a weekly Friday morning test in Mental, Arithmetic, Spelling, Dictation and Social Studies, all to mark before the kids got back after morning recess.

But keep doing what are doing, Bugsey :)

Joe

I really must have struck a nerve. I reckon it must have been the codger comment.

So Joe, what you are saying is that you haven't taught since the 1960s, and even then for only a year.

Yeah, keep up the hollow sarcasm you old codger. ;)

I reckon you couldn't cope. You couldn't cope in the 60s, you wouldn't today.

BTW, What kind of questions did you ask on a 'Mental' test?

Hi Bugsy,

Ah youth ! So much to learn. No, I later worked in Indigenous student support, recruitment, preparation etc., for around fifteen years. The best years of my life, working with such wonderful young people.

But as a young Maoist, teaching seemed less important than joining the working class on its inevitable march to imminent power, perhaps in five years. Little did I know that the working class was marching to its own tune, on the way - through hard work - to security, comfort and dedication to the future of their kids. Of course, that browned me off for a time, until I realised that they were right.

I sincerely hope that you, as a young snot, learn from real-life experiences, that you constantly reflect on what you observe, change your views for the better, and that hopefully, by the time you are an old codger too (I hope it happens), you will also know less about the entire world than you did when you were a kid.

Cheers,

Joe