Desert Island Disks submission 2 – Identify artist in each case for one mark – song title is usually obvious. Extra mark if it is not. GOOD LUCK
Please reply by sending me an e-mail [email protected] not by adding a comment cos everyone will then know your answers.
Desert Island Disks submission 1 – Identify artist in each case for one mark – song title is usually obvious. Extra mark if it is not. GOOD LUCK
Please reply by sending me an e-mail [email protected] not by adding a comment cos everyone will then know your answers.
Isn’t it depressing just how little imagination or talent exists in the field of management, assessment, regulation, auditing, reporting, evaluation, testing and all those other tiresome terms and techniques applied to the so called art of management, or to what I like to call ‘not being able to see the wood for the trees’ but making a flow chart and a spreadsheet to fix it anyway. The crucial point is an old cliché ‘It’s the human factor – stupid’
A case in the point Offsted say today that 81% of schools are outstanding – so what! Is the result brighter more motivated people, stimulating and exciting education environments, a richer more vibrant, diverse and tolerant society with a narrowing gap between rich and poor. No. It’s some meaningless, wooly headed pat on the back (or kick up the arse for those that haven’t achieved their ‘high standards’) and no doubt another load of absolutely unproven theories about education that will cite Singapore as a role model.
Common sense and good science will tell you that complex systems are highly and unpredictably interactive. What you put in does not lead in a linear way to what you get out. If you put humans into the mix this is even more likely to be the case. We are indisputably a human centric, a human focused system. What really matters is what we do for ourselves and other humans. In other words any subsystems we design to support the super (human) system must be acutely aware of the way humans operate at the grass roots and not make assumptions without recognising that the human factor is dominant and likely to be decisive…and I mean at the sharp end – not as a theoretical data point but as someone in the street or in the office, farm, swimming pool or even in space. What they actually want care about, love and dream of is all that matters – fact.
A good case in point- setting targets- if you set targets and make it important enough for people to achieve them they will cheat in order to achieve them. Then your results will be lies, the humans involved will be dispirited and the service or whatever you are trying to improve will only appear to have improved. This has been shown to be case by DEMOS and other reasonably objective organisations probing the NHS and similar target driven systems such as education. I may look out the paper concerned if anyone is interested – I used it in an anarchist diatribe delivered in my rebellious period.
Similarly if you punish someone and their family for coming forward with information on terrorism activities then fewer people will come forward.
If you blame secondary teachers for lower standards and poor test results then they will make sure that they concentrate on improving their results rather than improving their teaching or the lives of their students. After all bad tests can only produce bad results even if the results are called ‘good’!
If someone sets out to be a manager they should not be allowed to be. It’s the same oft repeated argument about politicians. We need people in management prepared to challenge the status quo, who are in touch with human needs and aspirations, who can read more than a spreadsheet, whose goal is is to look, listen and gather evidence of specific human activity related to specialised domains, not to generalise, theorise and resort to counting stuff. Managers who have experience of the real lives of the people they manage. Managers who have not just taken courses from other managers, managers who actually want to make life better for us humans not just to manage it.
So here is my list of anti managerial strap lines
1. Mistrust all management and managers passionately
2. Go to the grass roots to learn what individual people do and what they need in order to to do better
3. Don’t trust a report anymore than a passing comment in the lav. Reports are usually written by managers with vested interests
4. Counting something does not make it true. I depends on how you count.
5. Counting something that cannot be counted (that’s almost everything that matters) eg. Measures of happiness, are even less likely to be true
6. Saying something does not make it true. It depends what you mean and crucially what other people think you mean
7. Writing it down and getting support for it does not make it truer
8. Humans change and adapt quickly. Management systems stultify that impulse.
9. Managers should never spread fear in order to exercise control. That is bullying.
10. Management is a very difficult job. Respect those rare individuals of talent. If you are managed by one, count yourself blessed.
Finally anecdotally – when I and my colleagues have had to endure a 2 hour management meeting, every time we come out of the room saying the same thing “ what a waste of time.” Isn’t it about time the managers (sometimes in truth that’ s me) listened to that complaint and took it seriously. In future I will.
Back on the steroids. 3.00 am start this morning. Better than yesterday when they kept me awake, buzzing all night. Wrote my worst poem – actually went back and corrected it for once but stuck to my resolve to ‘publish and be dammed’ – of course when I say publish only my esteemed critics circle get to see them and then half the time the link is broken. I don’t feel like ranting at all must be a bit tired after yesterday. I have Christopher Hitchens book ‘God is not Good’ – had it for quite a while filed in the ‘must read later’ section. It actually keeps my record cabinet propped up at the moment. Anyway rather than read the book (too lazy) I read a summary and the reviews. Oh dear seems Christopher did not bother much with scholarship – good on him – who cares – an opinionated rant for me every time especially if the thesis is as clearly right as the book title suggests. He died of cancer and was writing at his hospital tray right up to his death. Quite tempted to read his last book, I think it’s called ‘Mortality’ but I am not as brave as him. Whatever, he was a great loss to the atheist community in the UK and the US and stuck to his guns despite his concerns about lapsing into prayer at the last second. He didn’t.
Other than my university work I have become obsessed with poetry. Happily this obsession is shared with my sisters so we engage in a steady exchange of communications on the subject. They are much too kind about mine – but I like that. What has been helping though is they direct me to other poets work – now this is a good thing isn’t it? I discussed this with Av and we both agreed that reading the work of others is both a laxative and whatever the opposite of a laxative is. My view at the moment is the more I read the less good I get. Now you could say I am gaining an appropriate perspective from those that have gone or go before or you could say I am trying to be as good as them and failing and I should content with being totally me and failing. Not an easy one to solve? Thoughts?
I sense my readership for this blog is steadily diminishing – quite right too – bit like life – only joking – however this is not supported by the stats which show no change even after I have eliminated all my visits and the bogus hits from spammers. I achieve a readership of 3 – 24 per day. – remarkable really – so thanks a lot for bothering. Actually I am proud of this blog, not for any literary merit but for the fact that as far as I know I have not lied once. If I have, I go back and chop it out eg. I put up a picture in the quiz which wasn’t true. What I have done is not include as much offensive material as I would like. I am not sure my readership is ready for that. It’s locked safely away in my poems and concerns the period when I was a monster in the 70’s, and I am not exaggerating when I say monster. Me and my group of Swanley Comprehensive School mates should have gone to jail, and according to some of today’s laws some of us could still be there. Not me as it happens but not for want of trying.
It’s funny how obsessed I am with that period. Probably the worst, angriest and most frustrating period in my life. Oh the joy when I left school (forget having kids, getting married, getting the news that you r cancer can be treated – leaving that shit hole beats em all. LIE)
Tallies with the romantic cliché that artists need hardship to thrive – nah…)
Moving on (I really hope this isn’t one of delirious posts – apologies if it is) maybe I need the two key system for pressing the publish button, one for me and one from the commander in chief – anyway. – feeling good – not so good at beginning of week when new chemo course kicked in – I think you get used to it but then after a long break, 2 months in my case – when you go back your system says “Oh no not this shit again, I though we had done with that.’
Btw I have kept meaning to say that I think I am consistent about using initials to indicate people’s names rather than first names. This is out of respect for their privacy. As many of the comments I get are liberally splashed with full names, nickname and rude words this seems a tad contrived. If you wish to allow me to use you first name in reported conversations or e-mails can you let me know by sending a message ‘first name OK’ or just tell me.
Please continue to send me your news, but remember I don’t reciprocate by sending mine as it’s all up here. If you can’t face communicating with this boring, pompous bastard then communicate with M – sometime we feel a bit like we are in a bubble – self imposed of course – and hearing all your trivia and drivel makes us feel connected with the real world and more important than any of it.
Love and Peace
C
Competition now over
Final score and winner CFA (22 not including first two and 10 bonus points for the last one)
Captions added to images when I can be bothered.
Since posting this page I have updated one image -same photographer, and added two new ones I had overlooked – so the chronological order is now shot to pieces.
I have also withdrawn one which was not really true – so the numbering is also shot to pieces.
When I started this blog I promised pictures. Since then I have presented one animated bidet and a few other s0rdid odds and ends. So in a similar spirit to the ‘Ten Commandments’ post I thought I would set myself the challenge, as honestly as I could, of collecting the images that have made the greatest difference to my creative life. I am sorry this sounds so pretentious but I can’t think of another way of putting it, because I don’t mean life I mean projects – you know what I mean.
To avoid presenting a family photo gallery documenting weddings, births, deaths, Christmas, holidays or cats, dogs, stoats etc all bar one of the images collected here are third party images – in other words I have had nothing to do with them, I wasn’t there, I don’t own them, I didn’t make them but for some reason they have had a big influence on the things I have gone on to try to do. In many ways they are quite burdensome, in so far as I find it impossible to think of a project in which one or other of them has not featured in a somewhat obsessive, repetitive way. There is one exception; the first image is in a category of it’s own – uniquely it has inspired my real life and my creative life in equal measure.
After the first exceptional one they are in chronological order starting from the age of about eight when you will note my sensitivity to the visual was zero but I have an almost overwhelming sense of joy when I see the image – I can smell the overheating components .Things really only kick off from image 3 when I was age 13 which you may note equates to some degree with image 1.
To those nerds among us – I know you are out there – I offer the prize of an honorary mention on this blog if you can associate an image with its source , director, designer, artist – whatever. The first and second ones do not count. It’s just occurred to me its a it like an advent calender and another thing – how very similar a lot of them are – hmmm?
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