Back to Italy

It was -13 degrees when we left Riga and +14 degrees when we flew into Rome again today. Writing this at one of the airport kiosks while waiting to fly on to Reggio di Calabria. I am certainly proud to be Latvian and proud to be Australian - we live in a wonderful country people and don't forget it!
Got frisked at the airport because i set the scanner thing off in security - there was a lovely looking Italian lady and a big hulky fat Italian man doing the frisking - guess who I got?!?!?

Latvia

Well the place has changed a lot over the past 9 years since we were here in 2001. The EU funding has been put to good use restoring the beautiful Paris-style 6 storey buildings which seen no maintenance under the Soviet occupation. There is quite a bit of foreign investment especially from the Swedes & the Finns. The people still have 30% poverty in the Latgale {in the east} and further austerity measures are about to bite with an increased 23% VAT rate and reduced ability to apply for social assistance even though wage earners pay 30% social contribution insurance on top of flat 25% income tax. Unemployment is about 14% with average monthly wage of about LVL500 or about AUD$1000. I think though that they are better off than Portugal at the moment with 5% of the population living on food handouts. Very cold and snowy today and -12.

Minus 15 degrees does this...

How about some Gluhweine mixed with Riga Black Balzam? Not great really!

a Riga and surrounds

Flight to Riga was fine and taxied to Hotel Valdemars, where we stayed 9 years ago but it has been refurbished and is very nice.
Texted back and forth with Tante Solveiga who thankfully marshalled the interpreting and transport troops to meet us in Dobele today. Alfred, Vija, Ruta and Elza were wonderful and took us out to to mums house off Uzvares iela about 10km or so out of Dobele. So cold - minus 5 degrees and lots of snow but sunshine today and the house was showing its best face. The roof is ok and so are the walls. Just no doors on the two doorways and a pile of rubbish inside.

Mumäs place from 62 years ago...
Keyboard is all in Latvian and a little hard to type with so I'll leave it at that for the moment!

The whole house and nothing but the house...

Inside Dobele Castle

a Rome

Rome is so full of history that it is easy to be overwhelmed - imagine doing some gardening and finding a centurions helmet in your veggie patch! But we have taken it a bit easy and just wandered around the old Cite and dodged the crowds (even in November the place is packed!), the beggars, the touts, the scam artists. Food and drink and the way in which Italians do food and drink is exceptionally stylish. Sit down at a bar for a foot resting and a drink and get presented with drink and snack and watch the world go by.
Italian is vaguely improving though it is good that not many shopkeepers choose to speak much English as it forces you to dig deep.

Posting a letter here is a fraught with time danger as at home - wait forever in line to buy a stamp!
Footsore and well satisfied we move onto  Riga today and a bit colder Im guessing. Its been up to about 17 degrees and sunny mostly here in Rome.

Here we go

Well - here we are at the night before the day we go. Taking only 1x30 litre rucksack ( a waterproof BMW motorcycle one) with two trousers, a few icebreaker shirts and a spare pair of shoes. Got the paperwork elsewhere in my shoulder bag. Wearing streeeeetch trousers and a short sleeved icebreaker on the plane. Checked in online today (only allowed up to 24 hours before) for a pair of seats on a window side so only have to climb over each other to get to loo and walk around. Qantas want $80 per seat to book an exit-row seat - we gracefully declined. On the 0651 out of Springwood tomorrow - see I'm already getting used to the European 24 hour time - and have breakfast at the airport.
9 hours to Honkers and then 14 hours to Rome after a few hours break - always supposing that the Qantas planes and passengers behave. I saw HP7 on Thursday night and so of course now have to read the book to compare movie and story - a big book to carry on the trip but it should keep me occupied.
Have also got an App for the iPhone which will have me speaking like an Italian native by Tuesday (apparently!) so I'll look into that as well on the plane.
Ciao

Measuring stuff

Tania and I get talking about all sorts of things as we wander off for coffee at our local (La Montagne at Winmalee shops) and this time the topic of "measuring" stuff came up especially in relation to the NSW Higher School Certificate (HSC) but it actually relates to lots of things.

I believe that as a society we seem to value content knowledge more than we value understanding for application ie. we value 'knowing about' rather than 'understanding what and how'. I don’t think we are curious enough about things and this is possibly because there is so much choice about everything. It is beyond us to understand everything so we choose not to. But is this the reason HSC exams only test content knowledge? I don’t think so – I believe we sacrifice the gifts of significance, relevance and complexity to the gods of the easily measured.

What are the consequences of only knowing and never really understanding? What about:

·         Computers - we know about using them for some things but because we don't really understand them, we only use a fraction of their capacity or potential. When they don’t function as we expect them to, we don’t know why and most often resort to turning them off and hoping they work when we turn them on again. The IT Crowd on the ABC have got that right!

·         Phones - we use a phone and just want it to work and often don’t understand all of the choices and fine print in the plans which gouge us for more money than we really need to pay eg. when our mobile roams onto the tower of another company we are charged more for data downloads.

·         Cars – I am continually struck by the number of new cars I see broken down by the side of the road – we just want to drive them but don’t understand that we still need to check basics (tyre pressure, service intervals, water and oil levels etc) to make them continue to function

·         Testing – we set exams about content knowledge because it is easier to mark validly and reliably ie. students either know it or they don’t according to the marking criteria. But what is the purpose of the test - to gain an understanding of what the student has learnt over the duration of a course or to ask them things that can be marked in a valid and reliable fashion?

All testing is exactly the same – the test writer asks questions and expects certain answers and these answers are articulated in the ‘marking criteria’. The most valid way to do this is to ask questions that have only 1 answer – this makes it easy to give a mark out of a100 for example. That’s fine if the purpose is find out how much someone knows about something eg.

1.      2 + 2 = 4

2.      Apply Bernouilli’s formula to this situation…

3.      Write a creative essay about the setting of Hamlet…

The type of questions that lend themselves to being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ are not really questioning for understanding and application but only really testing for pre-authorised and accepted knowledge. Even the ones that seem to be asking for a bit more than content regurgitation (question 3 above), aren’t really because they still marked by criteria which outline the content of an expected answer – hence what is right and what is wrong. What about the unexpected? Is it wrong?

Rachel Ward said once that she didn’t consider herself dumb at school (though she did poorly apparently) – its just that no one ever asked her about what she was good at. And I might add, certainly didn’t value it even had she been asked.

We hear in the media that curiosity, creativity, imagination and innovation are aspects most highly prized by business in the 21^st century. It seems to me that those aspects of a person have always been highly prized – some of the most interesting people you can talk to tend to be those that see ‘B’ while everyone else is seeing ‘A’.

I can’t see how the HSC (or NAPLAN or any other school testing exercise) helps measure curiosity, creativity, imagination or innovation. These are seemingly too hard to measure so we sacrifice them to the god of validity and the more easily measured – a test which is handwritten, paper-based, completed alone, takes 3 hours, with no feedback supplied except a moderated total  score sent in the mail some weeks later. Does this make a student more curious or creative?