I'm reminded of Amazon's meeting rule where the first 15 minutes are devoted to reading any documents because it's assumed no one did it ahead of the meeting. This is a problem in the workplace as well.
That's not entirely true at Amazon. It's expected for many of the more involved people in the meeting to read ahead of time, and at least be familiar with the subject.
At the same time, the time is given because not everyone will have time to read ahead of time. That 15 minutes at the start is their calendar block; think of managers who have back to back meetings all day.
It's not some referendum on people being careless.
I loved it when lecturers made the PowerPoint slides available before the lecture, as it meant I could read the slides ahead of time and thus keep up in the lecture. It made it easier to take meaningful notes.
I'm somewhat convinced that the average person can't sit and listen to someone talk for more than 20 minutes straight without their mind wandering. If a lecture is non interactive, then just make it available in written form and use that lecture time for seminars instead.
When org charts are from 2 reorgs ago, team members are going straight to members of other teams where collaboration is needed, the backlog is 100% maintained by the developers with no input from managers, I wonder what exactly they do outside of meetings where they usually just relay orders from higher up.
As I understand it, those were gross payments -- ~"for John Hawkwood and his company of merrie men" -- and he paid his men out of that.
But some of their compensation probably also came from whatever they were allowed to loot when they took a city -- which of course gave commanders an incentive to let their men loot a lot, so they'd be happy with that and not demand as much regular pay out of the commander's gross fee from his employer.
There were problems with the grammar school system as well.
They were created to provide a pathway to the middle class for bright children from working class families. But the entrance exam was heavily biased in favour of children from middle class backgrounds.
Famously the first 11+ tests had questions like "Name the various types of servants in a household and what they do".
In later years, getting out of school tuition was the main way to prep for the 11+, which put grammar schools financially out of reach for a lot of working class families. It had basically become a parallel state funded education system for the middle class.
My kid got in, and it turns out everyone else used a tutor (I stupidly took the advice not to do so from his teacher, who thought he'd get in just fine). This is in fact why playdates seemed to die out in the year or two before the test, the kids were being tutored but for some reason nobody would admit it.
When I went for the intro evening, the parents were simply the same kinds of people (often the same actual people) as the private primary where my kid went. Essentially, it is a private school where you don't pay fees. Same parents, with £30K more in the bank each year. The kids get into the top unis at a similar rate to the local fancy private school, which takes in all the classmates who didn't get in.
I have to say, they are a good bunch of kids. There's none of the bullying problems that everyone else is reporting in my kid's year. They have an environment where they have other quite nerdy kids doing nerdy kid stuff, without judgement.
But they are not a socially diverse bunch of kids. I'm not seeing any social mobility at all. Where are the kids whose parents are in the trades? Parents who aren't working? How come everyone I meet works in finance, law, accounting, medicine, or other white collar work?
I think it's the tutoring. It lets the marginal white collar kids win over the marginal "other social class" kids.
I am guessing you live in an area with high average housing prices in the catchment area of your school? Over the past 60 years, several generations of parents moving to catchment areas of good schools creates a self-reinforcing loop where only middle class people can afford to live near good schools.
My parents were both grammar school kids with working class parents, who didn't get any special prep for the 11+ beyond what their state primary school gave them. Both were the first people in their families to go to university and both managed to get into Oxford (where they met!). There was definitely a sweet point period when the system did what it intended in that sense, but there was obviously the drawback that if you ended up in the comprehensive system, you were stuck there and you had a situation where children got labelled at a young age.
Obviously some areas still have grammar schools and the impression I get from people living in those areas is that to stand a fighting chance with the 11+, you need out of school tuition or for your parents to be educated enough and have time to tutor you yourself. House prices are also obviously high in grammar school areas too! I've seen recent 11+ papers and having bright children at state schools around that age who are at the top of their year academically, I think they would struggle with them without any preparation or tuition.
> But the entrance exam was heavily biased in favour of children from middle class backgrounds.
> Famously the first 11+ tests had questions like "Name the various types of servants in a household and what they do".
That doesn't sound like a question a middle class kid would know anything about - not unless your definition of "middle class" is far different from mine.
> In later years, getting out of school tuition was the main way to prep for the 11+, which put grammar schools financially out of reach for a lot of working class families. It had basically become a parallel state funded education system for the middle class.
But given most schools now in the country (given only a small subset still have grammar schools) are done by catchment area, much of this still exists in comprehensive education too. Now, if you're well off you just buy a house in the right area so your kids get in to the good school.
I suspect in the past, people were less mobile, there wasn't the same disparity in wealth between different localities in the same general area, and school league tables weren't published. So the idea of moving to an area for (among other things) better education for their children wasn't something that was done.
I'm not really sure that's true. One of the things about grammar schools was that they covered quite wide areas since they were the top 25% scorers of exams. So think three ordinary sized secondary schools to a single grammar (which were usually single sex as well in those days).
Could be. My guess is that in doubt, just copy what the other guy is doing. We see that all the time. Leetcode interviewing, return-to-office mandate, layoffs...
Maybe this is blurring the line between online and TV, but TV streaming services definitely have gambling ads. A gambling ad literally just came on the Channel 4 player in front of me as I started typing this.
