Jim Stewart's Blog

I despair. There is no rule to require face coverings in schools. So head teachers are complaining because they are not sure whether they can allow them.

The guidance is silent on what schools should do if staff or pupils want to wear face coverings

Really? And this is from the head teachers – from the people that are responsible for educating children. Guidance is that spacing should be 2m – there is nothing to stop you from using 3m, 4m or even 10m.

Education is not about learning a subject, it is about learning how to take a subject and use it.

At some point we need to stop relying on government to tell us when to eat and sleep and use intelligence. There is an issue with face coverings making people less careful about spacing, but other than that there is no problem (unless they are made of fleece material).

Did I mention my onions?

First day back at work. Quiet day, just a few emails and a lot of bills. A nice gentle introduction to my office. I spent some time trying to re-tame my passion fruit plant. It now completely covers a 5m stretch of fence. The bees obviously love it judging by the number of flowers being visited by them.

I also got a letter from Lloyds. Apparently I have, or have had, an insurance policy which was underwritten by them, and they are transferring the risk to their Belgian company. They have a list of over 5000 companies that I might have dealt with for some sort of insurance. Other than that they offer no support in identifying the policy. It made me start to think about the insurance policies I have. They come with everything these days, not just for cars, houses or travel. Quite an eye opener.

Did I mention my onions?

Did you know that driving with your arm out the window in Spain gets you a fine?

More rain today. More rain every day. I know it is supposed to rain about 150 days a ear here, but it can feel like a lot more.

The government say they check on 1 in 5 people in quarantine. I have call blocker on my home phone . and I have noticed several calls that have not come through. My suspicion is that the government have contracted a company that uses an auto-dialler to make the contacts. Auto-diallers tend to hang up if they are met with call blocker. So I expect I might have police at my door sometime soon to check up on me.

Work starts tomorrow (actually it started at midnight). At least that gives me something to do with my time. I am finding it interesting watching all the “normal” stuff on people’s facebook pages. I heard a comment this weekend – “If life feels like normal then you have got it wrong”.

The most interesting thing to me is that the people that wanted a “new normal” seem to be the people most interested in getting back to “normal”. I guess it was just words and not a real commitment to change.

Did I mention my onions?

A bit of a mistake today – didn’t realise my auto-save option was turned off on my software and ended up losing an hours work. Ah well, I’ll learn next time.

There seems to be a lot of angry intolerance going around at the moment. I always say that in this world there are just two ways to deal with opposing choices as to how to live in society. The first is to persuade the opposition that you are right, the second is to kill the opposition.

Yes, it is a bit simplistic, but I am sure you get the idea. If people don’t fit in to your world view then you can adopt a confrontational approach, which is the pathway to dominating and oppressing alternative views. Alternatively you can encourage people to change their view to yours.

This is becoming a more important topic with all of the discussion over Facebook and other social media. Should Facebook delete content that is against their world view? If it encourages violence can it be accepted?

How do we deal with people saying things that we believe can cause harm to the vulnerable. If they were being attacked by an armed person we would defend them. Do we really believe the pen is mightier than the sword? If so then surely social media can cause real harm.

But what if the majority disapprove of your views – for example if you were a communist in the USA? Should people be able to stop you sharing your political or religious views? Did you know that political leanings are not a protected characteristic? It seems we can discriminate against people based on politics. Odd that.

My gut feeling is to restrict practices that harm the weaker in society, but then you get hit by the need to define harm, and that seems to be very different for each of us., whether we see specific religious or political views as harmful.

Maybe, just maybe we need to accept people being able to say harmful things to avoid the greater harm to society of not being able to challenge wrong.

At this point I am really ready to start work. So I was checking out phones and internet connections today. I have had a bit of noise on the phone line – and I spotted that the internet connection was running a bit slow and sometimes not at all.

So I ran the automatic line test – which failed to complete on the first time because the internet was so bad. Then I got it to run and it told me there was no problem. Hmm, 50% of the guaranteed speed is a problem in my eyes.

So I had to call the help line, who agreed with me. At the same time I asked about a new contract. At that point they told me they could only offer 36Mb – which I thought was odd because I had 63Mb, or so I thought. Apparently they have downgraded my line, but not my price.

They have now backdated the reduction in contract price.

To be honest I’m not really that bothered – my internet speed is fast enough.

I’ve been editing a video of our USA 1996 trip, with lots of open spaces. It made me think about the lifestyle of the recent past there. It is amazing how big a change there has been over a short time period. We have an insatiable drive for bigger and better.

I would love faster internet, why, not sure, I don’t need it. Do we really need to keep stumbling headlong into a more complicated world. Certainly this virus has made people start to ask questions.

I remember the young people calling for a more local lifestyle at the climate change conference in Cambridge. It is almost like they saw this crisis coming. I remember thinking how hard it would be to achieve – and yet it now looks achievable.

Managed to escape quarantine today for a few minutes on the basis of a medical emergency. Talking to the GP from the car park through an open top window was fun.

I know a lot of people go to the doctor as much as a place to talk as anything else, but I really got the impression the GP was really looking for a patient to talk to. Quite an interesting reversal.

I drove through the town and saw so many naked faces. Wearing a mask is so easy in this country – after wearing one in Spain for a hot summer day I found it simple. One of the problems in Spain was the little gap between the face and the mask really built up the heat – especially from our breath.

I’ve been watching the politics of election in the USA. They always say they are a democratic country, but I am more and more convinced democracy is a myth there. There have been so many examples that show democracy is not at the heart of the electoral process.

I first became aware of some of the problems with reports of Gerrymandering (a term created in the USA). I saw one district that was dumbbell shaped – the middle part was drawn along a main road so had no voters. Three is an interesting report on the 2004 election here. It will be interesting seeing if they have another review this year.

Then there was the hanging chad issue in Florida. Interesting the time it took for a recount of the questioned results – when you live in a country like the UK where manual counting of all the votes in the country take place in a night it makes you wonder why it took weeks to check just a fraction of the votes in the USA.

Now there is the postal vote issue in the current election. But never mind, there are voting drop boxes all over the place. Except now we hear that Republicans are trying to get rid of them in certain states. One state has a single box for over three quarter of a million voters.

So if democracy were to be threatened here what would that look like?

There is an important part of the face covering instructions missing. Use mouthwash first.

My second delivery from lost stock arrived today – no live guests in this one. But I did open it outside the front door to be sure.

I see that Film 4 are advertising a two night Hobbit session. A bit odd since there are three films.

Overall it has been a bit of an interesting day, if a bit bitty. I have started to play with my new video editing software and the recordings I made in 1996 of the sponsored bike ride from San Francisco to Atlanta.

It was an interesting trip. One town stopped us outside – we were due to stay in a black church. This was a time when churches were being burned down. We were told the whites would shoot the church up if they saw white people in a black church. There were two guys we met, drinking from paper bags. Already happy at the start of the day – when they heard we were doing a charity ride they took every cent from their pockets and gave it to us. One church we stayed in apologised because they only had deer – people could only afford the bullets to hunt, not the meat in the supermarket.

It was an interesting seeing the best and worst of people. And first impressions were so wrong at times.

Isn’t it interesting how you can feel constrained when you are told you have to do something that you had no trouble doing.

I really have no problem staying indoors – especially with the wet weather we are having. But I am required by law to stay indoors, so I really want to go for a short walk to get some air.

Never mind – I got back to find some of my plants have decided to die off because of the weather, but all of my tomato plants (that I thought would die) are producing nice red fruit. This includes my hanging basket plants with tiny tomatoes.

My squash has found the weather just right based on the growth – it has almost taken over the bed it was planted in.

Today was box set day, lots of lounging around doing very little looking for signs I might have the virus. I looked up the symptoms. It must be a nightmare for a hypochondriac. But just thinking about it, if I have a bad cut that gets infected my temperature could go up. At that point my doctor will probably tell me I need a test before seeing him. I remember I had a tiny pin-prick on the Saturday when I went to Vienna to look at houses. I had a medical on the Monday – by then my blood was showing signs of the infection (as was the swollen knee). It took me eight weeks of antibiotics to get it under control. Delays in treatment can be really serious for injuries we often don’t think much about.

I guess this will be part of the problem over winter. It will be the mixture of flu and COVID that will confuse the system. It really brought it home to me how complicated it is going to get for the medical profession over the next few months, trying to work out what is right for patients.

So far I know of three people that have been found passed out on my street under the influence of alchohol. Adding to the pressure on medical staff at this point really seems dumb. We haver a great NHS, but people are taking it for granted. I guess that is the problem with a good health system.

On a brighter note I have been chatting to my distant cousin in Nairn, and worked out why we had two brothers with the same name in one part of our family (actually uncle and nephew – but mother was not wed at the time so they became brothers). I count four people so far that have got in touch because of DNA links that identified family links that were not exactly as people had been led to believe…. If anybody knows a Stewart from Paisley who suffered detached retinas then please let me know – his daughter is interested in finding out who he is.

I smell a rat.

I’ve been watching news reports for the last couple of days making reference to a bias in the re-assessment of grades. All of them were very emotional. Few of them contained much in the way of evidence. With so many people being downgraded it would be easy to pick out problematic examples. I always get suspicious when news reports don’t have evidence.

So I went and looked on line. Guess what – there was a statistical analysis of the process available and easy to read. Why wasn’t it front place in reports?

Okay, this could get a bit technical, so I’ll simplify what I found.

First – year after year there is a bias at the top grades against the poorest areas. Every year. The final assessed results this year follow the same bias, not more or less – the same. So the argument that the process of adjusting the CAG (teacher grades) has resulted in a bias toward the rich is no more valid this year than any year. I’ll come back to that later.

The second thing that the analysis showed was that the teacher assessed grades were better than you would typically expect. The report doesn’t point fingers, it just notes this is natural. A teacher with a B/C student is most likely to opt for a B this year. I understand that. This has compressed the grades upward, which is one of the things the algorithm was designed to correct.

But there is another more important thing in the report – the report shows that the teacher assessed results have a larger than normal bias toward rich areas. That was the second thing the algorithm fixed. It removed the excessive rich bias and replaced it with the normal rich bias. So this means the downgrading affected the grammars and fee paying schools more than the poor schools. Hmm. I guess it wasn’t hard for the former public school boys to choose the teacher assessed grades as the best option then, it helps their former educational establishments.

So what will a return to teacher assessed grades mean? Look at the top first. Changing grades will not create new university places. What it is most likely to do is introduce a wealth bias. That’s right – it will replace people from poor backgrounds by people from rich backgrounds simply on the basis of wealth.

The other side is the pass/fail issue. Getting a pass is really important for some less cerebral careers. This is a problem, because the algorithm looks like it was very heavy handed. Normally you expect around 1 in 50 would get a U, the teacher assessed grades were closer to 1 in 500. It might have been sensible to avoid “fixing” this.

How does this vary from normal? Well, actually it is the same process that is normally used, the only difference is the teacher assessment. Distributions are adjusted every year, but it seems the big difference this year is that the rich bias has been dealt with. The whole idea of the grading system is to produce a sensible profile of students. If everybody gets an A then admission to university would need to use different criteria for entry (maybe which school people came from). Moving from the algorithm based results to the teacher assessed results will have the effect of moving pupils from rich areas up the ladder compared to pupils from poor areas. I’ve seen so many of my friends jumping on the Tory bashing bandwagon without thinking about the end result.

However there is something that comes out of this which I think is much more important. The statistical analysis shows that teachers in rich areas are over generous with assessments of pupils. This might be the first time this evidence has been so clear. So how about the normal bias toward rich areas? How much of A level and GCSE results come from teacher assessment? Given that we now know that teacher assessment is biased toward rich pupils is it maybe time to change that process?

Bottom line for me is that, in my opinion, there is a problem with the system every and this year has just highlighted it. Sadly fixing this year for the rich pupils will probably be the end of it – after all, if this was just about the pupils from poor families there would be no way there would be so much press coverage.

Writing this before I leave Spain. I’ll post this when I get back home. I had to travel to pick up the keys to my new house, unfortunately in a virus hit area. Thankfully I have been able to isolate myself to a large extent, living in a small town and having my own house to lock myself away in.

The town has a public address system. They use it for a lot of things, but one thing is they announce every death with a deep bong of the church bell. People seem to live a long time here! They also announce positive tests for the virus. I was supposed to stay another week, but on Friday the announcement raised the level of alert with another three cases in the town. So I have decided to leave before travel restrictions set in.

Like many small towns the streets here are washed with disinfectant several times a week, and during the day most people wear masks as soon as they leave their house. There is a local policeman that walks the streets with his fine book at the ready looking for people to punish. The woman I bought the house from told me her husband had walked to the supermarket during lockdown in order to get exercise. The local police stopped him and gave him hard time – they told him they knew he had a car so he should not be out walking.

At night the young people come out without masks (masks are required inside for children over 5, and recommended from age 3). And when I say night I mean around midnight. This is when the children come out to play in the park. The suggestion is that this is why the virus is spreading.

The food is amazing. Sadly I have to go to the supermarket (apply hand cleanser and put on gloves at the door). But it is only 100m away, and a guard is there to make people wear masks. I can’t wait to check my weight on return, I am sure it will be a few kilos down after just 2 weeks.

So now I have to get ready for 14 days locked away in the UK. I can cope with that. In fact I would rather have a test before flying (yes I now it isn’t 100%, but it is 50%) and after arriving, but that seems beyond governments to arrange – amazing how F1 can manage it. But I guess if you look at the numbers travelling we still don’t have enough test capacity for all travellers. Heathrow alone saw over 200,000 passengers a week in a July where they only had 12% of flights.

So there it is – I go straight to my car, I do not pass go, I do not collect £200, I go to my house and I lock the door for 14 days….

Box sets here I come.

A lot in the news about students not getting the grades they expected. A lot of focus has been on the results, but I started to think about the expectation and where it had come from. So many seem to have not kust hoped for the best, but expected the best.

Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.

Maya Angelou

I remember waiting for my results. I had to go to the post office to get them before delivery rounds started because I was going on holiday. It was nervous times – you really feel your whole world depends on it.

I have never been in favour of exams as a way to judge people – some of the most successful people I know were failures at exams. But this is the world we live in.

I did start to think about the current situation and expectations. “When will we get back to normal?” Are we just hoping, or expecting. What about the rest of the saying?

I have a hope and an expectation.

That’s why I don’t think there’s any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times. The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.