Bullshit Paperwork

I usually try to refrain from commenting on what is happening at my work, but I really need to get this off my chest. The school I work for is currently going through an accreditation process, known as CIASa.

Now, I have nothing against the noble ideals of meeting some international standards, but I think that either this system, or how we have interpreted it, has totally missed the point. I have, for example, just spent the last hour printing out edits to documents. Now, these edits are things as simple as adding a full stop to one sentence. And I have had to print out the whole page again. I have a personal objection to this purely on environmental grounds.

And it gets worse. Within my faculty, there are four staff, who by and large all teach the same material at Year 8 and 9. Our course outlines are the same, and apart from rare cases of ‘interesting’ classes, the cohort is pretty much standard. We have built into the course the ability for students with aptitude and ability to extend themselves, and for students with various difficulties to do simpler or less work.

Yet, we are required to print out copies of each of these, where the only differences are the names at the top. That’s right, I have to print out one copy for each of my Year 8 classes, even though I’m teaching exactly the same stuff to each of them. All that is different is the name of the class at the top. And my colleagues have to make similarly simple changes (like replacing my name with theirs, and the class names again), and print out a copy for each class they have.

This is useless busy work. I still haven’t finished all of the School References for my Year 12s who have finished, because I’m wasting time making minor, pointless edits to paperwork that I don’t even reference once I’ve done it. When we were visited by the initial person who gave us a whole lot of information about the process, he specifically said “this process will not create any extra work for you.” This is clearly false, as we have spent at least 37.5 hours (that we are able to count towards the requirement for our T&D; time) on this paperwork.

I’m not saying that all of the paperwork we have done has been a waste of time. Being a part of the group that helped to rationalise and justify our School’s Vision Statement (Philosophy and Objectives, in CIASa-speak) was actually quite an interesting process. It certainly was better than some other options that were available. But having to care that much about the date of a footer (or, rather, having to insert things like dates at all) annoys the hell out of me. As someone who likes to develop patterns and systems to make my life easier, following the suggestion of the great Pecky:

Don’t ever add the name of the school on the top of any of your handouts. Then you’ll just need to redo them when you move schools.

I followed this through to not adding dates to footers either. Unless in the development phase, where you need to know you are using the most recent version, if you have a simple document that is final, why bother dating it, and in the future, it shows up as being dated (in the perjorative sense, here). Just because something doesn’t change doesn’t make it not right. I’m sick to death of spending time doing this crap, rather than actually being able to teach, or learn new things to teach.

Underwear Ads

Why is it that girls in underwear ads always hug each other? Is that what girls do? Get together in their underwear, and hug?

Dumsfeld the Brave

Donald Rumsfelf is in town. You wouldn’t know it, not by the number of police floating around the Central Business District. Motorcycle cops on the corner near Adelaide High School. Other cars driving around the streets. And I haven’t even been down North Terrace yet… I am more than a little annoyed that we have been forced to virtually shut down the hub of our city, for a man that has been involved in several of the evil regimes that have run the USA in recent decades.

Clearly, Bumsford is a smarter man than his current boss (but I can’t think of too many people who aren’t, just quietly), but he has had his fingers in some pretty seriously smelly pies. In 1976, Ruttfield was instrumental in ensuring the US was safe from swine flu. He urged the president at the time to instigate a vaccination process. The US was safe from swine flu - but 52 people died from contaminated vaccine. Unfortunately, now the US is governed by swine. It’s a shame the vaccine didn’t work against Bush. Oh well.

The biggest irony of Roomseld’s career is that he was a significant contributor to Saddam Hussein’s build of military might. During the Iran-Iraq war, Rumbleford was, according to Wikipedia, _“the main conduit for crucial American military intelligence, hardware and strategic advice to Saddam Hussein.” _So Rimspot was at least in part responsible for helping to create the regime he and his mate’s son have now worked so hard to bring down. Or rather, try to bring down. (Chop off the head and the serpent falls? Doesn’t seem like it to me.)

I think the scariest thing about Roamstick is that he seriously believes that he, a member of Team America, really is part of the World Police. Now, it scares the heck out of me that those guys from _Southpark _are just right on the money. America! Fuck Yeah!

Update: My sub-editor tells me his name is Donald Rumsfeld. Sorry for any inconvenience or misunderstanding caused.

P.S. The whole idea for the spelling games was a typo the first time I wrote his name. Not that funny, I know…

Monthly Archive Problem Solved

Ronan has fixed the monthly archive issue on Blogsome. That is, you can now affix page/2/ to any URL (or at least I haven’t found one where it doesn’t work!), and it will show any items that are not in the top 10 (by default, changable in settings). This also works for page/n/ in general. This used to work only for the main page and categories. It now works for monthly, yearly and daily archives. The rule Ronan has used is nicer than my 3 - in that there is just one line for all three cases (as far as I can tell):

RewriteRule ^blogs/([_0-9a-z-]+)/([0-9]{4})/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?page/([0-9]+)/?$ /wp-inst/index.php?wpblog=$1&year=$2&monthnum=$3&day=$4&name=&paged=$5 [L]

I’ll post this to the Blogsome Forums later today.

Interesting Blogsome URL

I’ve been working with one of the Blogsome Admins to try and fix the Archive Pages bug (nearly there, I hope), and he came across an interesting ‘bug’. If you use a URL that looks like: http://schinckel.net////2/ You get a page that has only post titles.

The Dark Crystal Sequel

“Dark Crystal” Sequel In The Works (May 14th-15th, 2005) - Dark Horizons Jaq will be stoked. The Dark Crystal is possibly the best Henson thing ever created.

Resize Mail.app attachments

I only just noticed this one today. Depending on the file format you add as an attachment to Mail.app, it’s possible to resize the image directly from the Compose window: This works with JPEG, PDF, PNG and possibly others. The toolbar will only appear if the image is large enough to bother with a potential resize, however. And the most interesting thing is that a resize changes the format to JPEG from PDF. And, you can set the popup menu to a value, and each new image you drag will be resized as per the popup. Sometimes, you can revert back to the original file format by choosing Actual Size, but at least once this didn’t work for me.

More PostSecret Goodness

No words. Just let these talk for themselves:

Tiger DVD Burning

Something is either wrong with Tiger’s Finder DVD burning, or Xbox Media Centre’s DVD reading. Any DVDs I burn from a Burn Folder in Tiger will not work properly on the Xbox. The disc name is reported fine by Xbmc, and the first track will play if the disc is inserted (and autoplay is turned on), but no tracks are reported as being there by the browser. Toast-burned DVDs work fine, and all burned DVDs work on the iMac itself, or on a PC. Very frustrating in that I don’t do this often enough to remember, so I keep having to re-burn discs so I can watch them on the Xbox. I can’t wait to finish the house and have my home network all hooked up again. Having to burn a movie back to CD/DVD just to watch it is very frustrating… (All of my DVDs are packed away in storage, and I cannot be bothered opening up boxes to try and find the one I’m looking for).

Forty Faces

Forty Faces Nice idea. I’ve submitted my mugshot…