I've been helping my younger brother for two years and he struggled, but he got there. There was lots of tension and struggled to get him to do the work at first, but he does very well now, but part of me is still nervous that he's been lying to me still and not been doing the work or the revision and his results are going to be bad.
>>39112 No jumping girls in The Mail, just hugging girls and Ukrainians. The Guardian has gone for its traditional girls in headscarfs. None on the BBC. Didn't see any in The Telegraph or The Independent either. Sky News also has the hugging. JUMPERS ON ITV NEWS BUT THEY'RE ALL IN HEADSCARFS. The Times are using the same images as The Mail. The Mirror has lots of girls hugging and a picture of a kind of cute slightly chunky lass with braces on the phone. I didn't see it on The Sun, most newspapers don't have it as their main headline due to that pensioner on a mobility scooter getting stabbed but I'd even scrolled past a story of Carol Vorderman being in a bikini and it wasn't there, so it's evidently a low priority for them.
WHAT WAS THE POINT OF VOTING FOR BREXIT IF WE DON'T GET LOADS OF PICTURES OF LOVELY GIRLS JUMPING IN THE AIR ON RESULTS DAY?
I think this is probably more of an /emo/ or /uni/ thread, but whatever.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. If you actually know what you want to do in life, fucking up your A-levels doesn't seem like a big deal, because you know that you've got loads of other options - re-sits, a foundation year, Access to HE or possibly a higher vocational qualification. People freak out about their A levels because they're really freaking out about entering adult life; getting the right grades and meeting your UCAS offer allows you to punt that anxiety down the road for at least three years.
The world is full of people who got great A level results, got a good degree from a good university, then realised that nobody actually gives a fuck about Art History or Gender Studies and they would have probably been better off with a BTEC in Motor Vehicle Maintenance. Those people spend a lot of time promulgating the idea that having the "right" qualifications (i.e. the qualifications that they have) makes you an inherently worthwhile person regardless of how miserable your life might actually be, while people with the wrong qualifications are second-class citizens even if they're happy in their lives, satisfied at work and financially secure.
Your brother might have got the grades he needs for whatever he has got planned next, he might have completely fucked it, but that matters far less than having a plan worth pursuing and revising that plan when the facts change. If he needs a bit of time to figure things out, that really isn't the end of the world. Spending a few years pissing about in shit minimum-wage jobs isn't the end of the world if you use that time to do a bit of growing up and work out a sensible plan for your future. Stacking shelves and going to night school is character building.
All too often, we "support" young people by piling pressure onto them and making them into a mirror for our own regrets. If you want to actually help him get somewhere, you need to relentlessly focus on positive and practical action. If his results envelope is full of bad news, then you need to make it clear to him that it's just a detour, not a dead end. Get on the blower to UCAS Clearing and see what's on offer, have a word with the Head of Sixth, drag him down to the local FE college, just do something to show him that this is just a setback that doesn't meaningfully change his long-term prospects.
It's important to give youngsters an idea that failing at one hurdle in your life doesn't mean you've failed at life as such. There are countless ways you can still apply yourself and lead a fruitful life.
One of my childhood friends from primary school left school after his GCSEs and trained as a car mechanic, and he now owns a sizeable garage and makes absolute shedloads of money. He lives in a six-bedroom house in a nice part of town and drives a late-model S 500 Merc and a Jaguar F-Type.
I've got a university degree in marketing and sales management, and I probably earn less than half of what he makes.
OP here - thanks for the advice, lads. It'll be good to pass that on to him. Turns out however that he's got distinctions in most things, so I was worrying over nothing.
I thought, BTW, that I saw some jumping girls on the front of the Express, or at least bouncy running girls. Making all the old men faint at the news stand, how lewd!
>>39135 A major factor is grade inflation. That's why they added the A* grade, as the standard A grade was being weakened. This is also why entry requirements have gone up for a lot of courses over time. For example, a course I applied for 10 years ago at a uni well regarded in that particular field of study had requirements ABB. Now it's A*AA.
On the other hand, that's been a complaint for more than 25 years. I started uni all the way back in the 90s, and even then, educators would complain that new students were coming to university with a profound lack of maths skills.
Personally, I struggled with maths at uni. Not in a way that would have hindered me from graduating, but it was still my pet hate. But I'm in favour of raising standards and the overall level of difficulty at uni, because I think in the past 20 years we've just made it too easy to get a degree. I'm not even talking about some Mickey Mouse degree in Celtic Studies (that actually exists) which you pretty much get just for showing up every other time. But I think there's been an erosion of the idea who a university degree should be for and what you should need to do to attain one.
Making it easier to get an engineering or medical degree serves nobody. You'll have underperforming doctors and engineers, who will find their place in the system but will ultimately deliver substandard work.
I guess you can't do much harm as a bumbling expert with a BA in Celtic Studies, but then again, creating these courses and opening them up to a wide range of people with mediocre A levels only fools certain pupils into believing that a degree is something they should attempt in the first place. There are plenty of other fields you can apply yourself to besides some obscure university degree, and you'll probably end up making more money too.
I know I'm being an elitist cunt here, but I don't see where I am fundamentally wrong.
The problem with education is that we use it as a cross between a cult and a fig-leaf for inequality. You look at the numbers, see that education is correlated with income, decide that it's unfair to punish the smart with higher taxes now, but agree to shove more emphasis into education for the poor so that in the future everyone can be nice middle class weirdos.
And what's supposed to happen is that everyone gets smarter and everyone gets better off, while what actually happens is that you quietly accept that thick people are always going to be poor and take as given that's fair without dwelling on it too much, then for the mediocre and the smart you get a cross between grade inflation and people running to stay on the spot as the employer who used to want some good A levels now wants a degree, and the one who wants a degree wants a masters, and the one who wanted a masters wants a PHd... because fundamentally there are only so many good spots in the hierarchy and it turns out even in the ideal scenario where you've improved social mobility, all you've done is rearranged the deck-chairs on a ship that's still drowning half its occupants. But the charts will tell you the same thing - people with a masters earn more than people with a degree, so grab everything that isn't nailed down and rush to the ship's boiler room to stoke up this rapidly drowning metaphor for one last heroic push.
But I can't really resent uni, at least people have fun at uni and you can sort of doss through it getting to know people and practicing paying your rent on time. Secondary school was worthless educationally and actively harmful to personal and social development.
Where we've really cheated the working class out of their ability to participate is that everything indeed needs a degree nowadays. Some 30 or 40 years ago, you could go relatively far up the career ladder even if you left school at 16. A friend's dad was a factory floor manager, who had come from humble beginnings in that he left school after his GCSEs and worked his way up from being a lowly assembly line worker. And by the looks of it, his salary was well enough to provide for a family. Nowadays, you have to be a production engineer with a B.Eng. at least, which is not a bad thing as such, but it means you'll have some 23 year old who's never picked up a wrench in his life running a factory floor. And probably for a lot less money too.
The problem isn't that you fast track people into positions like that, it's that university degrees in and of themselves are still unattainable for a lot of people in that kind of work environment, and by requiring a degree, you are excluding them from reaching those positions as a result of years of hard manual work, like in the old days.
That isn't to say that a working-class chap can't simply be encouraged to take his A levels and study engineering. But if you've ever spent time with a few people from that social strata, you'll realise that their educational deficit is structural. It spans several generations, where nobody ever had access to higher education.
I once met somebody who was an office assistant, and he was the wunderkind of his family, because he was the first person in generations to leave school with proper GCSEs and get a respectable nine-to-five job. All the rest of his family were dolefolk who got by hustling and shoplifting. There's no point telling somebody like that, hey, get a degree, and everything will be fine.
Workplace progression is non-existent nowadays unless you have the requisite qualifications in the first place. A degree doesn't start you off any higher on the food chain- It merely permits you the ability to move up. If you don't have one you'll be stuck at the bottom no matter how experienced and knowledgeable you are. It's the worst of both worlds really.
And the thing is people will turn around and say "oh well it's never too late to go to uni!" "oh you can get grants and student loans as an adult!" and shite like that when that totally misses the point. You shouldn't have to fuck about doing 5 years as a part time student on top of working just to earn the right to progress in your field. It's a waste of time for everyone involved when that person could just be getting stuck in.
90% of jobs flat out don't need a degree, even at the higher levels. Even a lot of scientific and technical stuff can be just as well, if not better, learned on the job as it can taught in a lecture hall. it's become an arbitrary gatekeeping method that doesn't actually benefit anyone, not employers, not employees, nobody except the uni. Who, obviously, make loads of money.
And I wonder if that's got something to do with it.
>You shouldn't have to fuck about doing 5 years as a part time student on top of working just to earn the right to progress in your field. It's a waste of time for everyone involved when that person could just be getting stuck in.
And that's not even addressing that a substantial percentage of those students fail. Because they have to work for their living.
You hear a lot of people say that mature or working students who already have an established career are more focused than some 18 year old who's really just at uni to party and get laid. And I guess that is true, having met people like that when I was a student. And from being that exact 18 year old myself. But the flip side is that a lot of working students just end up not managing to juggle a career that's temporarily on the back burner, studying for gruelling exams, and somehow paying their bills to boot. Which may even include their half of a mortgage and a financed family car.
>The problem isn't that you fast track people into positions like that
I think that's very much the problem when combined with the massive expansion of white collar work.
In Ye Olden Days, the vast majority of workers were blue collar. They could end up being promoted to a quite senior technical or supervisory role, they might end up attending meetings with the most senior management, but they never became management. It was arbitrary and unfair, but everyone knew that the men in bowler hats were born into a fundamentally station in life than the men in flat caps. Nobody born outside of that sphere held any illusions that they could ever transcend their place in the class hierarchy.
In the modern workforce, we still have the born-to-rule pricks at the top and we still have the permanently disenfranchised at the bottom, but we've got a vast middle class of people who are allowed to imagine that they have limitless prospects for upward mobility. They don't, of course, outside of a token few who are allowed a seat at the top table pour encourager les autres, but the prospect is just real enough that they feel no solidarity.
Back in the 70s, a supervisor who genuinely sided with management was tantamount to a scab. They had the duty to relay orders from the officers, they had a duty to ensure that those orders were carried out satisfactorily, but they had no duty to respect those orders or the men who made them. The only way to become a supervisor was to work your way up from the bottom, which naturally bred solidarity - some supervisors might have been snivelling sycophants, but they were never naive about the reality of life on the shop floor.
A middle manager is something fundamentally different to a supervisor, despite basically doing the same work. They've come in straight through a graduate programme, they've never worked on the shop floor, they've never been assimilated into the culture of workers but have been directly indoctrinated into the culture of management. They don't belong to the same class as the people above them in the hierarchy, they will never be equal to them, but they don't know it.
To someone from a previous generation, a 21st century job advert reads more like indoctrination into a cult. It's not enough to just turn up and do your shift, you're expected to be passionate, you're expected to share a corporate vision. It doesn't matter whether you actually believe that bullshit, because the mere act of pretending will corrode your soul.
>It's not enough to just turn up and do your shift, you're expected to be passionate, you're expected to share a corporate vision.
That kind of nonsense has always boiled my piss. No, I'm not going to share your vision, and whether I'll show even an inkling of being passionate about my work will depend on whether the money you pay me is enough to make me forget about all the cunts I will have to deal with every day when I go home at night.
You're probably right that the working class are being shit on just so that the middle class can fulfill their delusional aspirations of social mobility. If you're upper class and come from a lineage of people who have always had say over others, then you needn't worry about any kind of downward social mobility. You'll always be part of that strata unless you utterly and completely fuck things up. But the middle class know that only a few cancelled paychecks stand between them and a sudden move downward on the social ladder.
George Carlin once said, The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class.
