I knew I’d be upsetting someone as soon as I started mentioning individuals 
Great to hear you’ve been solidly in work as much as you want, which maybe explains why you don’t post enough on here! 
1 Like
Looks like you, (as in Darren) is getting the benefit of 1/52th of std personal allowance each week. Just depends if there’s been any time since April last year that you’ve been out of work or benefits, you won’t have received that periods allowance. Or are claiming any other allowance such as Blind Person allowance.
Surely he can take any advice as that from a random stranger on the internet and just add it into the mix. No harm in asking, and where else is he going to get multiple views of people who have actually been doing the job (more or less, all posters included )
He can if he wants to, but it’s a recipe for disaster, already too many people take insufficient responsibility for their own lives. The harm comes when he takes someone’s advice then starts blaming anyone but himself for the situation he finds himself in.
It’s a generational thing: if we made a mistake my generation grew up hearing things like “Well it’s your own daft fault” or better still, when following someone else’s advice: “If your mate told you to jump off a bridge would you do it?”
Current generations hear: “It wasn’t your fault/you got bad advice/you weren’t trained/you should sue someone…”
wtf does “current generations” mean? Everybody born after you?
Those that could be grouped together as the younger generations, so from my pov, those from 40 years old and younger
@zac_a, the approach of blaming children has rather been blown out of the water by progress understanding dyslexia and autism. Who would have known that simple things such as a change in the colour of paper could reveal a child previously written off to actually have intellectual capacity? Similarly children with autism, whilst having issues, can be found to have significant talent.
I don’t see how autism or any of the many “spectrum” disorders have anything to do with younger people who regularly (i) don’t know anything about life that hasn’t been part of some formal education course, and (ii) who can honestly look you in the face and say “I don’t know much about General Knowledge” and who (iii) can’t make their own decisions, which may or many not be a product of the society that created situations (i) and (ii).
Whatever the reasons are; society and our results-focussed education system has produced many people who are simply not properly equipped to cope with life.
And I’m not talking about people who left school at 15 or 16, some of the worst examples I’ve seen are university undergraduates, some whom don’t even have a subjective opinion of their own about a subject they’ve spent more than two-years studying, because they only want to parrot what is considered “right”.
One of my favourite examples was a 20-something work colleague, who was someone I liked and I made a lot of allowances for their limited life-experience, she was smart and capable in a business sense, having passed a “modern apprenticeship” in Business Studies.
Someone else was talking about their trip to the cinema to see Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, my young colleague joined in the conversation, thinking we were talking about Neopolitan ice cream… She had never, ever heard of the historical character Napoleon, because it hadn’t ever been in any course she had formally studied.
Or what about the second-year medical student learning to scuba dive, who complained she wasn’t going to “read that big book” just to pass a diving theory exam. It was about 100 pages long, about 50% of which were pictures. She could be working in a hospital near you right now for all I know…
Well I mean the o/p has said he has had a 24 year career and has been driving for a couple anyway after that, so I can’t see that he is in your demographic. If we point out pros and cons he may not be aware of, this may assist the decision-making process.
There has been a great dumbing down that has only recently started to of been addressed. People have been taught not to think for themselves and if they do have to think how to do so. I remember doing my a level maths and talking to the house mistress about it. She was shocked that i had only just started doing calculus as her daughter that was only 3 or 4 years older than me had learnt it in secondary school as part of her o levels.
I discovered the other day that they are beginning to do something about this or at least so it appears. my friends 7 yr old had some maths work to do over Easter. it was basically algebra one of the questions was 5 + ? = 12. I know i didn’t do that sort of stuff till i was 12 or 13
I just suggested it might not be the wisest thing for him to ask an internet forum “what would you do”? I believe we all instinctively know what we should do and I imagine he’s just looking for someone to say what he’s already thinking, which is not an uncommon thing. If he’s still with us, he’s probably had all the input he needs.
I’ve had several years of being gobsmacked by what kids are these days expected to learn, but it’s “learn it for the exam” not here’s how that thing might be useful to you. Year 6 SATS is covering things that even the teachers say is A-level or Degree standard (fronted adverbials being the one that sticks in my mind), it’s a pointless effort that is fooling no one, both my kids know they learn more useful stuff with me and their mother (she’s a teacher herself) than they do at school
The maths curriculum changes regularly.
I covered basic algebra and calculus at about 12? Early secondary school anyway.
My nephew didn’t do much calculus until A level.
But then again, he did Eigenvectors at O whereas I didn’t see them until A level.
I dealt with i (and j) at the start of A level but didn’t see much practical use at that time.
Like all things we need to learn the building blocks. We need to learn the alphabet before we can read a novel.
Or write one!
this is the point im making… was it truly a level standard or just what they did at a level because they didnt do it before.
i agree with you both i remember trying to explain to a family friend who was a builder why maxima and minima were useful and gave an example of how an architect might use it working out the maximum volume of a water tank in a given space for a house he was designing. The builder promptly said well why couldn’t he get up there and measure it with a tape measure we had to point out that as the architect was designing the house it wasn’t built yet for him to measure anything
Yeah, I’ve seen things like that too. Not everyone can think outside of their own level of knowledge.
One that sticks in my mind was (many many years ago) the “training course” for unemployed people who need to be “advised” how to get a job. In a role-play mock interview situation one course attendee said he wouldn’t give the mock candidate a job because he’d lied on his mock application form.
Mock candidate had used a mock address for the mock interview, but mock interviewer said “He’s said he lives at XYZ street, but I know he lives on ABC Road”. 
It’s worrying when people can’t separate fact from a fictional example situation.
The “communication exercise” involving describing to one person, in words, a simple shape you can see, but they cannot see, but they have to replicate the shape using your description, was even more laughable than that.