I am going to reinvent the wheel and patent it…

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One response to “I am going to reinvent the wheel and patent it…”

1. 

   J.M. Prince

   June 22, 2009

   And I was just telling the lovely Juliana just the other day that you never can tell about these things. Which unfortunately is the point.

   Educational bingo notwithstanding, we’re not gaining on the problem. Not in 20 or even 30 years of trying to ‘regimentize, regularize, and standardize’ what’s being done in the schools. Learning as a human prospect is ever fickle. Here’s a comment from Lucy Kellaway on the same issue in Britain, where they have had ‘standardized testing’ for much, much longer, perhaps close to 75 years in one form or another.

   In summation? It has almost no decent or long lasting relationship to the ‘real world’ of work. It predicts horribly about who might be successful in either later life or in careers of their choosing. It does not and can not predict anything close to ‘intelligence’. Other than that? It’s been a wonderful invention to waste staggering amounts of time, energy and dwindling public dollars & support. It’s largely an exercise in another aspect of ‘magical thinking’. Numbers be magic! They must be measuring something important. Well sometimes. If done well. But at the moment? Pedagogy has not advanced far enough to tell us.

   Via Lucy Kellaway for the FT.com:

   “Where the school exam system fails the office life test

   By Lucy Kellaway

   Published: June 15 2009 03:00 | Last updated: June 15 2009 03:00

   http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ed81f702-5944-11de-80b3-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1

   “The real problem with the exam system is that it teaches lessons about work itself that you need to unlearn pretty smartly if you want to get ahead in business.

   First, it teaches you that there is a fairly straightforward relationship between effort and result. In exams, if you work very, very hard in the evenings you are going to do an awful lot better than if you spend your evenings in the pub. In most office life, this is not true. The relationship between effort and reward is much more complicated.

   Second, in an exam there is nowhere to hide. If you fail you may try to pin the blame on your teachers or the examiner, but in your heart you know there is no one else to blame but yourself. You either weren’t bright enough, or you didn’t work hard enough.

   One of the beauties of office work is that there is no shortage of candidates to blame for one’s failures. Management, the market, the culture, one’s colleagues, the competitors, an IT failure; the options are endless. You can screw something up royally and get away with it indefinitely. Indeed, so long as you are quite senior you can bring the entire banking system down and still get a big bonus.

   The third bad lesson from exams is that failure matters. If you flunk finals you don’t get the chance to do them again. Real life is much more forgiving. That presentation went badly? There will be another one along soon enough, which might go a bit better.

   More dangerously still, the politics of exams are upside down. You work as hard as humanly possible while trying to unsettle fellow students by claiming to have done nothing at all.

   With real work it is the other way round. The secret is to do as little as you can get away with, but make it seem that you are slogging your guts out.

   In offices, people go home early and leave their jackets on their chairs and instruct their computers to send out work e-mails at 1am. There is no such thing as being seen to work too hard.

   Finally, exams demand clarity of thought and expression and penalise waffle and bullshit. Whereas in business, alas, waffle and bullshit have become the gold standard.

   There is, however, one thing that exams do teach you about work that is essential to remember in offices – that boys and girls are different. My daughters weep after exams, because they are girls. They say that they have done horribly badly, because they focus on the bit they got wrong rather than the bit they got right. Boys come swaggering out of exams declaring it to have been a piece of piss.

   The difference is confidence.

   Last week, YouGov published a survey claiming that the average office worker acquires confidence at 37 after an average of 30,000 hours on the job. This is one of the worst statistics I have ever seen. Boys arriving in the workplace will profess themselves confident after the first hour. Most of my female contemporaries, thinking that work is an exam in which the full marks one wants are never quite forthcoming, are still searching for confidence at nearly 50”.

   Watch for the BS standard. It’s always gaining. JMP