If you go here, you will find the “spend” per pupil across English local authorities.
What you won’t easily find is the “value” or the worth.
Malcolm puts it on record that:
The most gifted pupils should invariably be handed a decent, readable text, told to relax in a corner, and report back at leisure. Chaise-longues should be provided, alongside umpteen sources of supplementary reference. Feed-back and even ferocious adult/student argument should follow. Cost: minimal, beyond a bit of intelligent teacher time (neither time nor “intelligence” is a given in the modern context).
Then there’s the intermediate mass. Cajole with lots of staff contact and low pupil-teacher ratios. Precisely the formula that takes the public-school types to Oxbridge.
Finally, there’s the really deserving. One example: no autistic child should cost less than £50,000 investment a year. Starting as soon as diagnosis — which ought to be around eighteen months. Since local authorities (thanks to Gove’s cuts) can’t afford that investment, it needs to be nationally-financed.
The only value-judgement should be outcome. If a school is delivering: that’s success. So bench-marking at infants/junior and primary/secondary transfer, then let the professionals do their work. Just don’t keep opening the oven door while the soufflé is rising.
There is an on-going spat between Toby Helm ( a decent small-l “liberal” journo at the Observer) and the all-mighty Goveian Empire at the Department of Education. In such contexts, think Gove as Tarkin and his Death Star.
It looks as if:
The MinEduc Spads (an Orwellian reference there, please note) were let off the leash to harass Helm. For reference, the SpAds at the Department of Education have form. One is diabolically rude and arrogant, the other destroys the evidence. For the record, they are (or, as of the next few days,were):
Dominic Cummings;
Henry de Zoete.
When that assault failed, heavy infantry, in the form of the redoubtable Sarah Vine, was deployed.
Oh Minister, what toe-curling secrets will your wife reveal about you next? His terrible driving. His love of scented baths. Is there ANYTHING writer Sarah Vine won’t disclose about life with Britain’s Education Secretary
This one will run and run. Tomorrow’s Observer may be worth the read. Oh, look! here it is!
Malcolm has a new Mac set-up. Complete with 24-inch monitor. Nice.
Doing the business, though, he managed to trash his external drive with the accumulated iTunes tracks. Over half-a-gigabyte’s worth. Not so nice.
So there is a whole stack (geddit?) of reloading to be done.
Tracks
First off the pile was a mess of Julie London (the erstwhile Miss Gayle Peck, Mrs Jack Webb and Mrs Bobby Troup). No obvious reason: can’t think why (but those 33 rpm covers, as right, might be a clue).
And so, playing in the background, Malcolm had the Calendar Girl album smokily crooning.
This is from 1956, and comes from a time when some degree of planning, of “concept”, went into the construction of an LP. And the cover has those sub-Vargas images, which were ironic and cheesy even back in 1956.
Copper comes from Arizona, Peaches come from Georgia, Lobsters come from Maine, The wheat fields are the sweet fields of Nebraska, And Kansas gets bonanzas from the grain. Ol’ whiskey comes from ol’ Kentucky — Ain’t the country lucky? New Jersey gives us glue(which Malcolm always miscues as “gives us ‘flu”), And you, you come from Rhode Island — And little Rhode Island is famous for you.
Cotton comes from Louisiana, Gophers from Montana, And spuds from Idaho. They plough land in the cow-land of Missouri, Where most beef for roast beef seems to grow. Grand Canyons come from Colorado, Gold comes from Nevada — Divorces also do — And you, you come from Rhode Island, Little ol’ Rhode Island is famous for you.
Pencils come from Pennsylvania, Vests from West Virginia, Tents from Tentassee. They know mink where they grow mink in Wyomink; A camp chair in New Hampchair, that’s for me. Minnows come from Minnowsota, Coats come from Dakota, but why should you be blue? For you, you come from Rhode Island — Don’t let them ride Rhode Island, it’s famous for you.
Words
OK: Malcolm is a sucker for those witty, and usually arch, lyrics as patented by Cole Porter, which so regularly involve a list-poem. Before Porter here was William Schwenck Gilbert, who was pushing the limits in his own Victorian way.
And list-poems, which involve as simple a device as can be imagined, should not be scorned.
If the simple term is an embarrassment, there’s the fancier “catalogue poems”. Every teacher of English will have used them as a stimulus (see, for a US source, Betsy Franco’s Conversations with a Poet: Inviting Poetry into K-12 Classrooms). The Library of Congress web-site has a list of 180 modern list-poems, a few of which are none-too-bad — Malcolm likes in particular #122, Paul Muldoon’s two Soccer Moms, Mavis and Merle, who harken back to 1962, and:
remember Gene Chandler topping the charts with Duke of Earl when the boys were set on taking the milk bar’s one banquette and winning their hearts.
Class
When Malcolm was still at the chalk-face, one starter was Christopher Smart’s For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. In more ways than one, that has to be the ultimate “cat-alogue poem.” Malcolm suggests it’s the only bit of Jubilate Agno — written, in a lunatic asylum between 1758 and 1763, but only published in 1939— which is still in circulation. But then, what we now term “free” verse took a while to catch on.
Up-market
At the sophisticated end of the market, what is Chaucer’s General Prologue if not a list-poem? —
But nathelees, whil I have tyme and space, Er that I ferther in this tale pace, Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun To telle yow al the condicioun Of ech of hem, so as it semed me, And whiche they weren, and of what degree, And eek in what array that they were inne; And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne.
Or chunks of Shakespeare:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands,— This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
Or , much earlier still, all those thundering begat-ings of the Book of Genesis?
Cambridgeshire, of all England, The shire for Men who Understand; And of that district I prefer The lovely hamlet Grantchester. For Cambridge people rarely smile, Being urban, squat, and packed with guile; And Royston men in the far South Are black and fierce and strange of mouth; At Over they fling oaths at one, And worse than oaths at Trumpington …
Which seems remarkably akin to the trillings of Ms Dearie.
The girls today in society go for classical poetry, So to win their hearts one must quote with ease Aeschylus and Euripides. One must know Homer, and believe me, Bo, Sophocles, also Sappho-ho. Unless you know Shelley and Keats and Pope Dainty Debbies will call you a dope
Note that knowing ho-ho — Gaydar on the twitch. After which count the titles and into Brush Up Your Shakespeare:
Apart from the icy Fenland winds of mid-winter, the matter of selection is another of Malcolm’s irritating, long-standing disputations with the University of Cambridge.
It goes like this:
Once upon a time there was a truly outstanding applicant coming their way. He was accepted by one of the venerable Cambridge colleges on the basis of gaining two just E grades in his A-levels: then, as now, the very basic level of higher-education qualification.
The applicant’s personal problem was he didn’t know whether he was being offered a place on the basis of his sporting excellence (he was also a cricketer and a footballer of some quality) or that of his intellect. When another, provincial, red-brick university set the standard higher, he went for the challenge, and surpassed it.
The bod-in-question went on to pioneer a new academic sub-discipline. He once told Malcolm there had been only four people in the UK capable of assessing his Ph. D. thesis: today he presents papers to conferences attended by thousands.
Probably no loss to Cambridge and its prestige; or for the bod-in-question. Possibly, had he the additional kudos of “Cantab” after his titles, things might have moved a bit faster, his resourcing been a trifle more generous. Perhaps, too, the quiz-machines in the pubs of Cambridge might have set the bar a trifle higher: the bod-in-question reckoned to tour the drinking dens of his adopted city and finance his drinking habit (and more) thereby. He was, indeed, banned from at least one hostelry because of this: the fleecing of the machines, that is, not the imbibing.
Whether he would have remained the all-round good egg he is, well, that is an imponderable. He might have acquired the usual Cambridge chip worn on the Cambridge shoulder. He might have ended up cheering on Cambridge United, at home and away.
If there is a “moral” here, it is not to trust others’ notion of “excellence” above all else. And to find one’s own way in the world.
