| Thoughts prompted by supervising high school exams |
[Dec. 6th, 2006|01:00 pm] |
My exam supervision job is now over; finished on Friday. You get a lot of time to think, when you're in a quiet room for three hours and you aren't allowed to read a book or anything. Mind if I free-associate at you for a bit?
When I was at school, there were complicated names for what you did each year. New Zealanders start school on their fifth birthday. For me, that year was called J-1, J standing for Junior. If your birthday was at the start of the year, like mine is, you were J-1 until that December; otherwise, until the December following. Then you were J-2 for another year, and then J-3, only J-3 was also called Standard 1. The Standards went up to Standard 4 in most primary schools. After primary school you'd go to intermediate school for two years, in most cases, and the years there are known as Form 1 and Form 2. Then there was high school, from 3rd Form up to 7th Form. Yes, at high school the nomenclature switched from "Form N" to "Nth Form". I don't know why.
At the end of 5th Form, you sat your School Certificate exams. School Certificate was a national standard. 6th Form Certificate, the following year, was set by individual schools. Then at the end of 7th Form, if you stayed in school that long, you sat either Bursary or Scholarship exams (again, national standards) if you wanted in to university. School was compulsory up to 5th Form and those last three years were the only ones anybody would repeat.
All those names has been simplified now. The school years are numbered straightforwardly: Year 1, beginning at age five, up to Year 13. The last three years still have exams, but all three are now national standards, and they're referred to as Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3, with Scholarship still there as an alternative to Level 3. Years 1–6 are primary school, years 7 and 8 are intermediate school, and years 9–13 are high school.
Quite often when old, complicated things are replaced by new, simplified things, I can be heard, if only in my own mind's ear, to lament the passing of the old version; a little bit of the romance in the world has disappeared. Not here. There was nothing romantic about standards and forms and School Certificate. I have heard, though, that the new "unit standards" way of assessing student progress, so useful for practical how-to courses like changing a tire or fixing a hot water cylinder, has pleased precisely nobody except the Ministry of Education: it's demoralizing for students, over-bureaucratic for teachers, and mystifying to employers looking at CVs. When you try and measure everything, you end up devaluing the things that are hard to measure.
I read somewhere that that's been the cause of a lot of stupidity in new housing schemes in the UK. See, in about the '60s, there wasn't much cheap housing about, and what there was was old and shabby and falling to bits. So the government committed to building huge numbers of new apartment blocks for the not-so-well-off to live in. And they demolished a lot of the old houses to do it. And then different governments, local and national, started competing at election time by promising to build more new housing than their opponents... until, to make room for their new projects, they started knocking down perfectly good buildings. They were measuring the gross number of new housing, not the net number of new – old. I'm told the UK is now the ugliest country in Europe, for precisely that reason.
Which brings me back to high school. See, the exams are in my old high school, Logan Park, which was a great school when I was there in terms of teaching and available courses, but the building complex was, and remains, absolutely plug-ugly; all concrete blocks and flat brown roofs and featureless windows. I think it got me down more than I realized, because when I went to university in 1996 and attended geology lectures in one of the beautiful original buildings, it was incredible just how much my mood perked up. Not that the university is better than the high school there; all their new buildings, anything built since about the '60s, are, once again, utterly soulless. But the university still has some old beauty left in amongst the concrete boxes, which the high school, built there some time in the '70s if I'm not much mistaken, has completely missed out on. This is something New Zealand just doesn't understand. If you want to see nice-looking buildings here that people actually take pride in, you're basically looking for either a church or a marae. And not a new church either.
It's always funny supervising the Level 1 exams. If you actually managed to follow my little guide above, you'll have figured out that Level 1 is the Year 11 students, who, at this end of the year, are mainly sixteen-year-olds with a few yet to have their birthdays. They're teenagers, and most of them look it, but in a big exam there are always a few girls, but no boys, who look like they could be at university, and a few boys, but no girls, who look like they could still be at intermediate school. And that reminded me of something else I've read...
It's a well-known fact, these days, that girls who grow up without fathers are more likely to get pregnant early and sleep around more than girls who grow up with fathers. Conservatives, I'm sure, find it very convivial to their way of thinking. It's all about discipline and morals and rôle models and authority in the home. Except that it can't be, because not only do fatherless girls have sex earlier, they actually go through puberty a year or two earlier than their peers, and it's hard to see what that has to do with morals. One suggestion from evolutionary psychology is that the stress and hardship of growing up in a poorer, less secure home, prompts girls to start reproducing earlier to ensure their genetic future. Sounds good, but, again, doesn't work. Other forms of stress or deprivation, both in humans and in other primates, slow maturation. Some have suggested, out of desperation, that maybe it's the other way round — there's some genetic component to early puberty and promiscuity, and women with that gene are more likely to end up partnerless (and their daughters therefore fatherless)... but apparently that doesn't work either.
Perhaps — and from here on this is my own speculation (like I said, you get a lot of time to think while supervising exams) — we're looking at it from the wrong angle entirely. Most primates don't grow up closely connected to their fathers. Maybe, instead of saying "Lacking a father speeds maturation", we should say "Having a father slows maturation". Now, that does fit in nicely with known primate biology. In male orangutans and gorillas, maturation is not merely slowed but actually suspended if there is already a fully adult male in the territory. No reason why it couldn't happen to female humans. And there is a good, and well-understood, reason why it would happen to female humans: in-breeding avoidance. Er... I don't think I'll elaborate on that just here.
There was something else, too, but I've forgotten. It'll come back to me, I'm sure. |
|
|
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
nakedcelt's journal