Who trains these ideots?

George Bernard Shaw. I am tempted to add "and those who can't do either, recycle old chestnuts from George Bernard Shaw".

I am very much more in tune with Reg Routledge, former MCC coach, who said "The most gifted players don't make the best coaches. These are the people who have had to work least at their own game: who've had to think about it less. It stands to reason they will be less able to help others. Denis Compton, for example, was the most talented batsman I ever played with. But I would not let him teach my dog how to cock his leg."

The best lecturer I ever had was not the one who wrote erudite and incomprehensible text-books, but a hard-working chap who not only knew his stuff, he knew how to learn it, because he had had to do so himself.

I believe that one of my strengths as a teacher was not my first-class degree (which I haven't got - I just managed to scrape an 'ordinary' ) but my ability to explain and demonstrate things clearly, in different ways if necessary, until the light dawned. I'm sure my practical background before becoming a teacher helped. Sadly, this ability wasn't valued in the current educational system because I wasn't a whizz at administrative paperwork, and wouldn't roll over and die when the head told me to. But that's a different story.

George B.

edited to remove infuriating 'smiley' added by the system

Edited By Georgineer on 20/08/2020 13:24:22

In my young day elders were all wise, good humoured and kind. Far better quality than today's second-rate Meldrew impersonators. Let's face it, even old people have gone to the dogs.

Everything these days is complete rubbish, including me!

Dave

There was a great piece on Radio 4 this morning about decision making in government and management etc.

It basically said the more members a committee had and the more experts, the worse its results would be.

Civil servants create ever larger departments to gain more control, kudos and income.

The colonies office was quite small when we had a lot of colonies, as we lost them the department grew and grew and ended up being a huge set up with nothing to do but waste money.

If you can find it on i player it's worth a listen.

Mick

oh it also spoke about the bane of my professional life; MEETINGS

They said 80% of people in 80% of meetings were doing nothing constructive at all, just wasting time.

And meetings beget meetings, requiring pre-meetings to discuss what will be on the agenda for the actual meeting.

And nothing actually ever comes from all these meetings, its just somewhere to store the managers so they are not under the workers feet.

Mick

.

Aagghh !! The dreaded cliché of the Pareto Principle

MichaelG.

.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 20/08/2020 16:44:28

Pithy quotations have a remarkable way of passing on other peoples biased opinions. If you are good at something you have something to teach, if you are really good at something you may just be capable of passing it on. Thats not a quote just my observation. Shaw's quotation is surely a comment on how we select teachers.

Anyway back in the day if you were not a productive tradesman you wound up as a Foreman just to get you out of the way.

regards Martin

Edited By Martin Kyte on 20/08/2020 16:58:12

IIRC, it all started when he discovered that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. But the 80/20 split does seem to crop up quite a bit.

What experience? If you can lay bricks where is the experience? I can mix my own muck & lay 350 facings a day on a half b wall with no training whatsoever. Bricklaying is not rocket science & if one is just laying block walls or skins of hollow walls in cottage whalloping then 2 years is more than enough. We have a brick layer in the house opposite to us who built his own house. The place looks a disaster with curly chimney, quoined reveals & more brick features that one can throw a stick at. But in the end it is the only one in the village. Proves nothing other than he can do flash brickwork. If the job only demands easy brickwork, why waste time to learn the skills never needed?

Edited By Sam Longley 1 on 20/08/2020 17:42:55

s am longley, IF the job only demands easy brickwork , what IF the job demands something other than the easy stretcher bond ? or even Granite ? 350 Facers per day thats only 5 barrows worth. Now try taking that up 7 storeys and see how PLUMB you can get it. Maybe you should try a corbelled arch or 2 No on second thoughts... just stick to stretcher bond.

Funny you should mention arches. My first house, that I built myself,had an arch way 2.7 metres wide & 5 metres long, all in brickwork. It was a design necessitated by the fact that the house was on the high street & vehicles had to pass through

I won the European Architectural Heritage Year Award for that House, when I was in my early 20's

My next award was for a community centre built on to the end of a very old village church many years later.

I never served an apprenticeship, but employed quite a few. I never had them sweeping floors & wasting time making tea if I could help it. I employed others for that task. My attitude was that they were there to learn the trade, not how to make tea. They did have to understand the need for tidiness in the workplace though.

Edited By Sam Longley 1 on 20/08/2020 18:19:57

Parkinson is quite amusing, but look closer and his examples aren't always fit for purpose. He remarked on the stupidity of having more admirals than ships after WW1, but the reason is quite simple: warships were complicated then and they are far more complicated now. The extra admirals weren't there to operate ships, they were responsible for maintaining them in the widest sense and planning future warships. Not easy: warships are stuffed full of advanced technology, requiring trained men to operate them, and what to do next is in continual flux in response to what the other guy is doing. Global power-projection is a complicated business. You don't put a tea-boy in charge of procuring reactors and turbine sets for nuclear submarines, and submarines have several other equally complicated components.

Even when it was relevant, the Colonial Office was lightly loaded because 'Colonies' more-or-less self-governed within the British framework. Direct rule from London was unusual, more a matter of agreeing policy and resolving disputes than hands on management. However, when independence came, the Colonial Office was responsible for sorting out all the details. At the end of the empire there was a lot of extra work to do. Brexit has the same problem in spades; I hope no-one expected it to produce economies.

Parkinson is spot on with his description of a Board of Directors nodding through approval of a mega-expensive investment in a risky new works, and then the rest of the day discussing refreshments. Parkinson explains this happens because most Directors don't understand new plant, risks, or the inner workings of their business, but they all know how to make coffee. No-one risks looking foolish asking about big complicated decisions they don't understand, but everyone has a strong political opinion about giving the workforce free chocolate biscuits!

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 20/08/2020 18:24:42

I cannot find Brickkies original post & i should hasten to add that I was not trying to belittle the art of bricklaying. What I do find wrong is the attitude that we need to spend years doing appreticeships when they are not always necessary.

In "Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man", A G Street's father said that two boys would do half the work of one boy, and three would do nothing at all.

One of the jokes circulating at work was "Meetings, the alternative to work"

There was one manager who did nothing but run meetings, issue minutes and "send Exocets". For a while I had the misfortune to work for him. But who did he need when things got technical?

My wife was a primary school teacher. In between animal training, she managed to fit in a little teaching. And the longer she was in the profession, the worse things, and the parents, got! (She taught in north London, Sussex and in many schools in East Anglia, so it was not localised )

One of her colleagues was actually pushed violently up against a wall by a parent.

One who complained that her child was being picked on, accepted an invitation to sit in for half a day. Leaving she said "Now i see how it is" and complained no more.

What was said about walking a mile in the other man's shoes?

Howard

Back in the 90's I had a contract to fit screens in 17 schools in Thurrock in the main reception areas . These were to restrict parents from entering the schools & attacking the staff. Alarms were also installed to call more staff in difficult situations. The events were, apparently, very common & some staff lived in fear of attack from aggressive parents as well as children. I was building a school alongside another school in East Tilbury & witnessed a child of about 10/11 actually attack a teacher & it was a surprisingly violent incident & he was punching the teacher in the face.

Following on from Georgineer, I have found that there are some people who I can relate to through their writings and hence from whom I can learn. There are others who I find boring, dry as dust, or just not inspiring, or even just useless. In the former category are Tubal Cain (T.D. Walshaw) and T.K.Hemingway (head of electronics at BAE who wrote two books Electronic Designers Handbook & Circuit Consultants Casebook) In the second category was a lecturer at the Technology College I attended many years ago, who, when asked about a question in the previous year's examination which I failed, admitted that he had not covered that part of the syllabus.

Tubal Cain always makes sense, the trouble is that I then have difficulty remembering it, whilst the circuits I designed to Hemingway's principles worked first time, every time (mind you, the logic behind the circuits might have been duff, but the circuit elements certainly were not).

All of this reminds me of a story of a college lecturer, Phd no less, who was teaching a class of GPO/BT technicans and who kept having a go at us, and referring to the subject matter as "Noddy & BigEars". One day, he said something and we all sat there like a load of statues, until he said something rather more rude. Then one of our number, a man noted for his sarcasm came out with "We are wondering who are Noddy & BigEars". Collapse of class, and a redfaced lecturer who never again used that phrase.

In another instance, our Maths lecturer was teaching us how to calculate the area of a non-right angle triangle (you must realise that none of us had anything higher than 'O' level maths) when he gave us a triangle with sides which were a multiple of 3-4-5 to calculate. Two of us quickly realised that this and shouted out the answer much to the lecturers consternation as he himself hadn't realised! Needless to say we then had to do it the way he was teaching, which was fair enough really.

Peter G. Shaw

I think I was a good teacher ( I taught motorsport engineering at a college, and avionics to MoD Apprentices). What I wasn't any good at was keeping up with the mountain of paperwork the education system threw at me. I think to be honest it was my failing, the other teachers seemed to cope ok. Eventually it caught up with me and I left the College and went back into engineering first hand. I enjoy teaching apprentices much more; 1:1 guidance and watching them learn and improve, especially as they get to grips with problem solving.

You mean:

" Before criticising someone, walk a mile in his shoes. That way when you criticise him you're a mile away. And you have his shoes. "

So you can run faster than him?