Beyond the Weakened

And it is the next day the man has a fever but it is not the same man and not the same fever and you drive and she drives and we all drive together the man who would be driving all he might be thinking about is which iron he should use to drive the ball the hole the course of antibiotics and the course of holes are one in his streetlight-revealing nightmare ride the drive is all until you get to the calm and empty hospital and you wonder why it is so empty and what they do to get it that way the blood the bits the fragments of lives and the young girl with the sprained foot she thinks is broken and will she ever dance again and will ice packs cause frostbite no but if they fall into the sea then we will all drown as the poor baby polar bears drift out and drown too.

Weakened

Sunday you send the man with the auto-immune syndrome through the barrage of tedium and nightmare sensations that is modern healthcare catheters and all and you wonder why he is confused because you are confused and don't know it and after all why should he not be confused for the light is weak and grey and blue and the staff are greenish grey and blue and the beds are metal or maybe plastic and the same cloth the same wood veneer the same walls and paint and after a while the same people seem to come at you with needles and tubes and clipboards and in the end what is it all for all for all for go to sleep and if not waking up you won't mind but in the end you do.

Atlantean Standards (Part I)

I am beset with images from my past as a young man in a world of crusades and crusaders. I remember the hymns: in one, exhortation to lift high the Constantinian standard; in another, to follow 'standards of worth, o'er all the earth'. In all of these, the idea of a standard is literally that of a rallying-point, a banner, a flag, a sign that will 'stand hard' against all enemies.

It was in the age of the moderns, from the 18th century or so, that the meaning of 'standard' finally fell into the sense of 'a definite level of attainment or achievement'. No more knights keeping watch on the mountain heights, no more banners unfurled o'er all the world.

Tonight I was with family, and not for the first time, the talk drifted into the realms of a curious statistic that all present had cause to track out of interest. It was something to do with standards, in the latter, weaker sense.

In Atlantis, split the healers into two groups. For every hundred, take fifty into the first group and put fifty in the second group. Call the first group 'private healthcare' and the second 'public healthcare'. This is the Atlantean healing ministry. Now take all those who are ill and unwell, who suspect their bodies are failing and who are sick in the organic sense. Divide them, for every hundred, into twenty and eighty. Put the twenty into the first group, the eighty into the second group. Yes, this is true; in Atlantis, half the healers attend to one fifth of the unwell — this is the private sector. It follows therefore that the healers in the second group work four times as hard, normally for about half the pay (or less). The main consequence of this is that healers in public service often want to move to the private sector, where their quality of life will improve eightfold or more.

It is the same in the teaching ministry, although the pay differential is not that great. Rather, the independent fiefdoms of education may sometimes generate gross inequities. There are idle sods in some of those fields who cultivate and nurture a bare fraction of the crops that others do, but yet earn twice as much for their clever neglect of the more difficult crops.

It is this which makes me pessimistic for the future of Atlantean standards. An infamous study shows that whereas the mighty mercantile arm of Atlantis generates a whopping GDP on par with some more-established mercenary economies, her people's prosperity payload (PPP) is more akin to that of some of the poorer pirate 'nations'. Atlanteans are mostly poor; it takes them decades to pay off the burden of their 'public housing' which once was a beacon of hope in that island of the main. As my mother pointed out (and as I have mentioned before), her salary in days of yore would have bought six thousand bowls of noodles a month, of which she only needed sixty or fewer (since they were BIG bowls) — for me, her poor firstborn, my far larger salary would not have sufficed for a thousand, and those rather scanty unless concocted by the generous couple at the noodle stall in the old place.

Our money, it seems, is not up to the standard it used to be. And neither is the quality of our striving. What is the point, then, of throwing inferior money at superior problems? Most of us have already surrendered to economic temptation and fallen into the ways of the dark side. Just consider how many professionally unqualified scum are out there making easy pickings from people who want their flab surgically removed, while the poor and sick get treatment of a much lower level than they would otherwise have got from these greedy louts called aesthetic physicians.

Free market? 'Faugh!' I say. No market is free when the information symmetry and the level of intelligence (and greed) are so disparate. We should string the self-advertising, pocket-enhancing buggers up to dry, from the highest of our standards, and let real surgeons do real work for those who need it. Perhaps the teachers should do their part too, so that the daft will know that sucking the fat out of the abused body confers no health benefit at all, but increases the chance of an ignominious death.

Infirmity

I will hit the second prime of the decade in a few months' time. And since it is a new year, I have resorted to cataloguing my infirmities for two reasons: primus, in order to make decisions concerning their cure, removal, or amelioration; secundus, in order to chart my progress towards decrepitude, or if this body be indeed a temple of the Holy Spirit, towards dilapidation.

Head: I have always been colour-blind and there is no help for that. My hearing is slightly worse, my eyesight has begun to approach the edge of presbyopia while the astigmatism has made me shortsighted in many environments. Smell is still a good sense, improving with age for some unknown reason. I have occasional tension headaches, with accompanying clenching of the muscles temporalis, which does not help my temper and makes me even more aware of the passing of time.

Upper Limbs: My wrist muscles need more work. I still strain them too easily. The pain from my right shoulder, in particular, tends to create phantom pain in my right wrist. I can no longer differentiate the two. I am beginning to get pains in the joints of the phalanges. The acromoclavicular joint injury I had 25 years ago is still a nagging pain once or twice a year.

Upper Body: The little growth I had, just off the sternum, stabilised years ago. My lungs are clear despite various scares. My back hurts more quickly when I adopt unnatural postures. This is a warning sign. I try to keep flexible.

Lower Body: Things are OK. Despite the many recessive genes I carry, nothing's gone too badly wrong hereabouts. My lower back has a little wear and tear, but less than my upper back. I have a fat butt.

Lower Limbs: These get abused the most. I have tried many kinds of shoes, but the fact remains that I walk too much and I have flat feet. I have had a small fracture or two in the past. I am quite sure that it is well with my soles these days.

Internal Organs: All's well. Brain not so good these days, but guts still functional. Blood has actually improved since the days of my youth.

Integument: Skin as bad as ever, which is to say not so bad. Some coloured spots, but not unusual ones. Hair going slightly grey as the maternal genes dictate. White in some spots which are not open to the public.

Ah well, we all grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Assessing Your Teachers

I was musing about such heavy matters when I came across this post courtesy of my IP Hosting agent.

Let me summarise the matter for you.

There are two kinds of assessment available, criterion-based assessment and normative assessment. In the former, you must meet concrete objectives (e.g. has demonstrated ability to stand on the head without other bodily support, sip hot black coffee and mark 25 ELA1 answer scripts without breaks while singing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Der Messias backwards). In the latter, you are ranked against others who are put through equivalent trials and you score points (normally with little attention paid to where you score them as long as you score them).

Organisations such as the International Baccalaureate Organisation prefer the former. Other organisations (including some without websites) prefer the latter. (For those of you who have recently watched a certain Godfarthur video clip, you know what I mean.)

Some institutions concentrate on the production of grades, irrespective of how those grades are produced and what raw material these grades originate from. Some concentrate on other things either to obscure the grade data or to show that they can do plenty of other tricks as well. In such institutions, officers will be appraised on anything and everything; this is called 'open-ended appraisal'.

In some institutions where there is too much to appraise, the person who can present the most convincing case will net the booty. It doesn't always mean that the best teacher will get the largest bonus; if bonus funds are limited, even good teachers may be paid less. Furthermore, as teaching ability is a non-linear convex curve which plateaus off, it might be rapidly outstripped by the non-linear non-continuous functions available in other areas. How does one compare a gold in some violent territorial spheroid-transfer sport with a fair crop of distinctions from a once-idle class?

It strikes me that this 'profession' is one in which the direct clients have little structured feedback into the remuneration of their assigned officers. Rather, feedback from competing officers is sometimes used to assign bonuses. I use inverted commas around the word 'profession' because in many cases there is no local body which licenses teachers in a criterion-referenced approach. Lawyers, doctors and engineers have professional organisations which provide discipline and professional enhancement; teachers do not, and frankly would not welcome criterion-based assessment.

In my previous life, I once compared the assessment criteria of a large national healthcare institution with that of a large national educational institution. Here is a very brief summary.

Healthcare:

• A = international or regional reputation/standards met (lists follow) in clinical competence, clinical workload, teaching, research, and administrative ability
• B = regional to national, high impact output...
• C = good quality, regular professional output...
• D = meets departmental standards, some professional output...
• E = below departmental standards, poor output for time spent...

Having seen the full document, I am impressed at the amount of work done in the attempt to set criteria for grading.

Education:

• A = performs at two grades above current level in academic work, para-academic work and non-academic work
• B = performs at one grade above...
• C = performs at...
• D = meets requirements...
• E = does not meet requirements...

Having seen a huge sample of these documents, I am not impressed by the accuracy or effectiveness of many such documents. I am not alone, and so national education agencies have changed the format. I am still somewhat unmoved.

So, do you think we will be a better healthcare or a better education hub? And can you propose better ways of ranking teachers?