Parlez-vous Français?

It would be difficult to make it up (although there are times when I wonder if the Telegraph does). Apparently oral tests are to be axed from foreign language GCSE examinations because they are regarded as being “too stressful” for pupils. In their article, Pupils ‘pass’ language exam without speaking in this morning’s Sunday Telegraph, Melissa Kite and Julie Henry report:

“The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority will announce this week that teenagers will no longer have to demonstrate they can speak a language in the traditional oral exams that currently account for half the marks at GCSE level.

In the long-established oral test, students converse for about 10 minutes with their teacher in their chosen language. The exchange is recorded on tape and sent to examiners. In future, oral skills in lessons will be assessed by teachers who will award marks that will be moderated by examiners. It is not clear whether any oral work in class will be taped or how examiners will judge a teacher’s assessment.”

I liked the comments of the shadow Schools Secretary, Michael Gove (also reported in the same article):

“After being told they could get a pass without writing a word in a foreign language, now pupils are being told they can pass without speaking it. Once again this Government is moving the goalposts on examinations. Instead of proper rigour, we have got a watering down of standards. Language teaching is facing severe problems and our children’s capacity to succeed in an ever more competitive world won’t be helped if qualifications can be awarded without their actually acquiring proper skills.”

If only they knew it, the proper response might be “Sans blague”.

Uphill all the way

Very much cheered this evening by reading Lucy Kellaway’s latest FT column, Happiness is finding your inner receptionist. She writes:

“A couple of weeks ago another cheering piece of work was published by scientists at the University of Warwick showing that happiness over a lifetime is U-shaped. It looked at thousands of workers in 80 different countries and found that most people start off happy, and then slide towards misery, reaching a trough at 44. By our early 50s we start to get happy again and by our 60s and 70s happier still.

It isn’t altogether clear why we get cheerier as death draws closer. I suspect it is mainly because the burden of ambition and expectation slips away. We no longer hanker after what we are never going to have. I’m not quite there yet and neither are most of my contemporaries. Ambition still rages, and prospects are intolerably uncertain. But if we hold tight, the upward curve of the U will carry us along soon. We don’t need career coaching. We just need time.”

I read this to my youngest (a confirmed pessimist at 18) and his response was the title to this post. I am next going to email the link to my eldest!

Graduate divas

See Liz Hoggard’s A London Life column in today’s Evening Standard, commenting on a recent report (not cited) which has apparently concluded that Generation Y and UK bosses are “speaking in different languages”. She says she can’t help admiring the new breed of “graduate divas”, who are ‘young [born after 1982], university educated, techno-savvy’ and ‘know themselves to be in great demand’. But if my daughter (young [born in 1985], university educated (Warwick) and techno-savvy-ish (knows how to turn the PC on) is anything to go by, they are not really much different to how Liz Hoggard and her contemporaries were in the late Eighties. And didn’t she think then that her generation spoke a different language to the older generation? I did in the early Seventies.

The disappearing dining room

After a week away, with no broadband access and days spent birding rather than scanning my Netvibes page, I am having some trouble getting back into blogging. While we were away, the builders have been hard at work, first taking up the dining room floor, then removing it all together, plus plaster, joists, ten tons of soil and rubble: we not only have the full set of deathwatch, wet and dry rot, but (at least for the moment) our very own Time Team experience. I also now know why we have no cellar: the house is built on sugar granite. But back to the dining room (or lack of it): according to Sophie Borland in the Daily Telegraph last week, Open-plan living leads to death of dining room. We will not be going that way, and I expect (and am paying for) our dining room to be back from the dead sometime soon. Her article suggests that dining rooms are disappearing because we want bigger living areas and because ‘lifestyle changes mean that fewer families sit down and eat a meal compared to 30 years ago, when it was common for households to sit round a table several times a day’. There is certainly some truth in this, but perhaps the real reason is that in the old fashioned kitchen there was a cooker, a sink and draining board and cupboards. Not much space was needed. There was usually a larder for food; and a wash room for the mangle and twin tub. Today most kitchens have dishwashers, microwave ovens, conventional ovens, hobs, a wide range of kitchen appliances, double sinks, food preparation islands etc. etc. Try getting all of that into the old sized kitchen. Plus for convenience most people like to eat close to the microwave, so people eat at the kitchen table. As the dining room was invariably next to the kitchen, what is more natural than knocking through to provide the space a modern kitchen needs. As for us? We have a hatch linking the two.

Giving

A fascinating Point of View on BBC Radio 4 this morning: David Cannadine talking about the changing art of giving. As Cannadine reminded listeners, “the practice of giving money away has been around for as long as there have been people possessed of more wealth than they required for their own immediate needs”, and his talk ranged in its all too brief 10 minutes from Sir Thomas Bodley to Warren Buffett, via Tate, Carnegie, Rockefeller, the Sainsburies and Bill and Melinda Gates. Cannadine identified a number of reasons why the rich are prepared to give their money away, including “the imperatives of religion, the desire for social recognition and acceptance, the need to assuage feelings of guilt, the craving for immortality, the pleasure of handing out large sums of money, and the genuine passion to try to do good, and make the world a better place.” To which I would add, at least as regards the great art collections assembled by the North American robber barons, the desire to prevent anyone else getting their hands on them. Walking around the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Frick Collection last year, I had the overwhelming feeling that whatever the reasons that drove them to collect, the last thing they were going to allow to happen was for their collections to be acquired by one of their rivals.