Marking exam papers exposes the flaws in teaching

It is staggering how many teaching staff I know that do not read examiners’ reports or even the exam specification and so their class often misses out on marks. Photograph: Alamy


The Secret Teacher in The Guardian

A detailed but incorrect answer appears beside every question on an exam sheet. The answers are peppered with technical language but their ideas make little sense. This is one of the most frustrating errors I see as an exam marker.

I took the position up a few years ago after some persuasion from a colleague and the lure of some extra holiday money. I was told that it would be excellent training and help me to become a more effective classroom teacher as I would understand the demands of the exam boards more closely.

Yes it is true that I understand the application of mark schemes better than before, and it definitely looks good on my CV. But I don’t think I can do it much longer.

Each year, I clear my diary for June and plan my time carefully to ensure that I can mark to a strict timetable, giving the papers my highest level of focus. And every year I become more and more depressed by the standard of the responses and the restrictive nature of the mark schemes.

The most saddening answers are simply left blank, or there could be a crossed out sentence. This may be understandable at GCSE for a short answer, but I have seen full essay questions left blank in A-level exams. I cannot help but picture the student sat in the exam hall, pen in hand and nothing to write. I wonder how they feel; it makes me sad and angry that maybe they’ve not had all the help they deserve from their teacher.

On another occasion a GCSE student covered a whole page in calculations trying to work out a simple percentage change question. They drew a box and arrows pointing to their eventual (wrong) answer, but they must have spent at least 20 minutes on a question that should take no more than two.

Some students miss out on recognition because they lack the simple skill of clear handwriting; we cannot award the marks if we can’t read the answer. If it is illegible, there is no choice but to only credit the parts I can read.

Then there’s the other side of the scale: some essays are magnificent and show understanding of a topic that goes far beyond the requirements of the course. These are beautifully written and include complex analysis worthy of an undergraduate. But many of these responses go uncredited if they do not fit the exacting standard of the mark scheme.

I have seen some students get marks “capped” because they haven’t included a certain phrase or diagram, even though their overall work was of a high standard. This is reflected in the classroom and I have students asking how many sentences of analysis they need, and how many evaluation points. Whatever happened to writing a good essay and answering the question to the best of your ability?

I understand that exams are necessary to be able to award qualifications to students, and that mark schemes can ensure that grades are fair and consistent – perhaps this is something that cannot be changed. But I just cannot stop picturing the students sat in the exam halls, some with nothing to write at all, some writing illegibly, and others writing brilliantly but not being rewarded.

It’s clear something isn’t working if a student is enrolled on a course, but ends up without anything to show for it.

Some students do not engage – perhaps because they are not supported emotionally at home and in school – and cannot cope with the demands of study. Others are simply not on the right course. Even more worryingly, too many students fail to achieve because of poor teaching.

It is staggering how many teaching staff I know that do not read examiners’ reports or even the exam specification and so their class often misses out on marks.

It all boils down to time. We don’t need another initiative or want the system to change again but teachers need support to deliver well-designed courses and give detailed feedback to students. This would happen if class sizes were more manageable, reducing the level of marking we have to get through. It really is that simple.

Education and exams should not be the final stage for young people, but the start of their life. Yet, too many are beginning this journey far behind their peers. Let’s not let students down. We are measured by their results for that one year; but they may be measured by these grades for life.

Stop using China as an excuse for inaction on climate change

George Monbiot in The Guardian


 

Workers walk near wind turbines for generating electricity, at a wind farm in Guazhou, 950km (590 miles) northwest of Lanzhou in China. Photograph: CARLOS BARRIA/Reuters

China is the world’s excuse for cruelty and barbarism. If we don’t behave atrociously, politicians and columnists assure us, China will, so we had better do it first, before we are outcompeted.

You want holidays, collective bargaining rights and fair conditions in the workplace? Forget it. When Chinese workers have none, such fripperies would “hamper British/US/Australian/Canadian industry”, making it uncompetitive.

Columnists like Thomas Friedman at the New York Times, gleefully regaling us with tales of Chinese workers being turfed out of their dormitories at midnight, marched to a workstation and obliged to perform a 12-hour shift to meet a last-minute order from Apple, insist that we either compete on these terms or perish. France, he once claimed, is doomed if it seeks to preserve a 35-hour week, while people in Asia “are ready to work a 35-hour day.”

In fact French workers are doing fine: it turns out that European countries with shorter working hours (France, the Netherlands and Denmark for example) have higher productivity per hour than those whose workers have to spend longer at their desks (such as Germany and Britain). And a country whose people have both decent wages and time to relax can support millions of jobs – in leisure and pleasure – that don’t exist where workers are treated as little more than slaves.
You want your rivers, air and wildlife protected? What planet are you on? China, we are told, doesn’t give a damn for such luxuries, with the result that if we don’t abandon our own regulations, it will take over the world.

On no topic are these claims made more often than on climate change. What is the point of limiting our greenhouse gas emissions, a thousand bloggers (and a fair few politicians) insist, if China is building a new power station every two weeks (or days or minutes or whatever the latest hyperbole suggests)? Taking action on climate change is useless and stupid in the face of the Chinese threat.

China is not just a country. It is whatever powerful interests want us to be. It is, they suggest, a remorseless, faceless, insuperable threat to civilisation, to which the only rational response is to abandon civilisation. So often is the threat invoked to justify the latest round of inhumane proposals that it needs a name. Perhaps we could hijack one: China Syndrome.

China Syndrome is the 21st century extension of the Yellow Peril myth. First formulated by Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose extreme militarism, racism and anti-Semitism prefigured the rise of Nazism in Germany, the term reflects a long-standing apprehension about the people of Asia, dating back perhaps to the Mongol invasions of eastern Europe. It invokes an uncaring, undifferentiated horde of philistines, possessed perhaps with supernatural powers, but without moral limits or human qualities like empathy, pity, love or self-restraint. Unless we took extreme measures to defend ourselves against this threat, Wilhelm and others insisted, this human swarm would outbreed and overrun the nations of the west.

The myth became a staple of schlock literature and films, spawning such characters as Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless. The idea that the people of China might “steal our jobs” is also deep-rooted. It triggered a number of pogroms in the United States during the later decades of the 19thcentury, during which many Chinese immigrant workers were murdered.

It is, of course, true that China contributes substantially to the threat of climate breakdown: it is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. It is also true that its diplomats often prove to be a hindrance during international negotiations on the subject. That was certainly the case at the UN climate conference in Bonn that ended on Thursday, where they refused even to discussthe crucial issue: how much global warming the policies adopted by each nation will cause.

This stands in apparent contrast to the agreement struck this week, as a result of Angela Merkel’s diplomacy, at the G7 meeting, calling for “a decarbonisation of the global economy over the course of this century”.

But to suggest that China is an inherent and insuperable threat, as many of my correspondents do (mostly those who alternate between insisting that man-made climate change isn’t happening and insisting that we can’t do anything about it anyway), is grievously to misrepresent the people of that nation.

First, of course, much of its energy use is commissioned by other nations. As manufacturing has declined in countries like the US and Britain, and the workforce is mostly engaged in other activities, the fossil fuel burning caused by our consumption of stuff has shifted overseas, along with the blame. Even so, when China’s total greenhouse gas production is divided by its population, you discover that it is still producing much less per head than we are.

Partly as a result of a massive investment in renewables, the Chinese demand for coal dropped for the first time last year, and is likely to drop again this year. Perhaps because of the bureaucratic chaos of China’s centralised, unwieldy government, there is a gulf between the energy transition rapidly taking place within China and its negotiating positions in international meetings, which are “in the hands of completely different sets of bureaucrats.”

But perhaps the biggest surprise for those who unwittingly invoke the old Yellow Peril tropes is that the Chinese people care more about climate change than we do. A survey released on Monday reveals that 26% of respondents in the UK and 32% in the US believe that climate change is “not a serious problem”, while in China the figure is only 4%. In the UK, 7% don’t want their government to endorse any international agreement addressing climate change. In the US the proportion rises to 17%. But in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, only 1% want no action taken.

Of course, the question that arises in undemocratic countries like China is the extent to which public desires can shape government policy. But what’s clear is that China’s failure to act decisively on climate change does not arise from any national characteristic.

The paternalistic assumption that only the rich nations can afford to care is also based on myth: a myth that – like the Yellow Peril story – dates back to the colonial era. As the Greendex survey of consumer attitudes shows, people in poorer countries tend to feel much guiltier about their impacts on the natural world than people in rich countries, even though those impacts might be far smaller. Of the nations surveyed, the people of Germany, the US, Australia and Britain felt the least consumer guilt; while the people of India, China, Mexico and Brazil felt the most. The more we consume, the less we feel.

There is no scope for moral superiority in the climate talks, least of all a moral superiority based on unfounded national stereotypes. Collectively, we are wrecking the delicate atmospheric balance that has allowed human civilisation to flourish. Collectively, we have to sort this out. And it will happen only by taking responsibility for our impacts, rather than by blaming other nations for what we don’t want to do.

Will we see the Harbhajan of old?

Aakash Chopra in Cricinfo

India's leading offspinner of the 2000s fell away because of his tendency to overuse the doosra. Can he make enough of an impact in Bangladesh?


If he is to enjoy further success in international cricket, Harbhajan Singh must remember that the offbreak is his stock delivery, not the doosra © BCCI



There are a few boxes you want the ideal offspinner to tick:

1. Turns the ball
2. Gets the ball to drift in the air
3. Gets the ball to drop on the batsman
4. Extracts bounce
5. Has variations
6. Bowls an aggressive outside-off-stump line
7. Pitches fuller, enticing the batsman to drive off the front foot

About a decade and a half ago, when I first played the 17-year-old Harbhajan Singh, he had all of these qualities, even as a youngster. He was the perfect product of the SG Test ball, which offers a pronounced seam and allows the ball to grip the surface and, if maintained well, offers drift in the air too.

The key to achieving these attributes is that the ball must be delivered with the seam slightly tilted towards fine leg. That way it almost always lands half on the seam and half on the leather, and that allows it to grip and spin. If the position of the seam is maintained, the shine of the ball dictates that it drifts in the air, either away from the batsman or into him, depending which side the shine is on. The young Harbhajan was almost miraculously effective at this.

There were a few other things he could do that most of his peers couldn't. His high-arm action coupled with his height produced more bounce than other bowlers could, and so the fielders at short leg and backward short-leg were always in play. You couldn't simply offer a dead bat while defending, for the turn and bounce could take the ball in the direction of the two close-in catching fielders on the on side. Harbhajan would almost always bowl an aggressive outside-off-stump line and bowl full to entice the batsman to play against the spin, through the off side.

He was also the first high-profile Indian offspinner to bowl the doosra. But the good thing was that even when he had mastered it, the regular offbreak continued to be his stock ball, and it produced more wickets for him. The doosra was a surprise ball to keep the batsman guessing, and in any case, Harbhajan's doosra didn't go the other way as much as it did for the likes of Saqlain Mushtaq or Saeed Ajmal. That was a good thing, for it ensured that his focus was always on the stock ball. The only thing that he didn't have at 17 was the strength to sustain bowling quality for long periods. Once he achieved that, he became the complete bowler.

He flourished, the wickets came, and Harbhajan became an important cog in the Indian bowling unit - so much so that for some time he was the first spinner in the side, even when Anil Kumble was in the squad.

His problems arose when India played Test cricket in countries where the Kookaburra ball, which has a less pronounced seam, was used. Anyone who has grown up bowling with an SG ball faces serious issues adjusting to a ball that has close to no seam - like the Kookaburra when it is old. With no seam to grip the surface, you have to put more revolutions on the ball to get purchase off hard and bouncy surfaces.

Harbhajan couldn't quite master the Kookaburra in his heyday, but that wasn't the reason why he was dropped from the Indian team. The reason was the lack of zip in his offspinners, and a corresponding decline in his wicket-taking ability.

In his last five Tests, he has nine wickets at 63.88 apiece. These matches span three series - two at home against England and Australia, and one away against England.

Every player is a product of his conditioning, and Harbhajan was no different. He was always the first to reach the nets of Burlton Park in Jalandhar, was the last to leave, and bowled through the net session. He would bowl a lot of overs, and bowl a lot of orthodox offspin. That is how your bowling muscles are developed: the more you bowl, the better the ball comes out of the hand.



As T20 cricket took root, Harbhajan seemed to focus more on variations and lost his zing © BCCI





I think the reason his offies became less effective was that he didn't bowl enough of them in the nets and in matches. And that might have something to do with the introduction of T20 cricket and with playing a lot of one-day cricket. That's when it began to seem that Harbhajan had started focusing more on his variations than on traditional offspin.

His trajectory got lower, the speeds faster, and the line was more on the pads as opposed to outside off. He would bowl a lot of doosras and topspinners to minimise damage in the shorter format. Now, all of this was not unexpected - the demands of the shorter formats are such that most spinners go down that route when batsmen line them up to hit with the spin through the midwicket region; so if the ball holds its line or goes the other way, it becomes a little tougher for the batsman. But you need to be careful not to overdo the doosra, because you might lose your stock ball in the bargain. Also, there's still some merit in bowling slow in the shorter formats.

That's what Harbhajan did in the last season of the IPL, for Mumbai Indians. He was back to bowling a lot slower in the air, and the overwhelming majority of the deliveries he bowled were proper offbreaks. Now this could be because the doosra in general is less used on the circuit because of the crackdown against it, or the fact that Harbhajan almost always bowls the middle overs in a 20-over innings.

Even so, it was heartening to see glimpses of the old Harbhajan. Sterner tests await him now that he has made it back into the Indian Test side. His first assignment is the one-off Test match against Bangladesh. That will be played with a Kookaburra ball, and likely on a shirtfront. There will also be the small matter of another offspinner bowling from the other end, and comparisons will be inevitable. Comebacks after a certain age hang by a thin thread, so it's important he makes a mark in his first game back. Will Harbhajan do so?

Aspirational parents condemn their children to a desperate, joyless life

George Monbiot in The Guardian


 

'But to what are we aspiring? A life that is better than our own, or worse?' Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

Perhaps because the alternative is too hideous to contemplate, we persuade ourselves that those who wield power know what they are doing. The belief in a guiding intelligence is hard to shake.

We know that our conditions of life are deteriorating. Most young people have little prospect of owning a home, or even of renting a decent one. Interesting jobs are sliced up, through digital Taylorism, into portions of meaningless drudgery. The natural world, whose wonders enhance our lives, and upon which our survival depends, is being rubbed out with horrible speed. Those to whom we look for guardianship, in government and among the economic elite, do not arrest this decline, they accelerate it.

The political system that delivers these outcomes is sustained by aspiration: the faith that if we try hard enough we could join the elite, even as living standards decline and social immobility becomes set almost in stone. But to what are we aspiring? A life that is better than our own, or worse?

Last week a note from an analyst at Barclays’ Global Power and Utilities group in New York was leaked. It addressed students about to begin a summer internship, and offered a glimpse of the toxic culture into which they are inducted.

“I wanted to introduce you to the 10 Power Commandments … For nine weeks you will live and die by these … We expect you to be the last ones to leave every night, no matter what … I recommend bringing a pillow to the office. It makes sleeping under your desk a lot more comfortable … the internship really is a nine-week commitment at the desk … an intern asked our staffer for a weekend off for a family reunion – he was told he could go. He was also asked to hand in his BlackBerry and pack up his desk … Play time is over and it’s time to buckle up.”

Play time is over, but did it ever begin? If these students have the kind of parents featured in the Financial Times last month, perhaps not. The article marked a new form of employment: the nursery consultant. These people, who charge from £290 an hour, must find a nursery that will put their clients’ toddlers on the right track to an elite university.

They spoke of parents who had already decided that their six-month-old son would go to Cambridge then Deutsche Bank, or whose two-year-old daughter “had a tutor for two afternoons a week (to keep on top of maths and literacy) as well as weekly phonics and reading classes, drama, piano, beginner French and swimming. They were considering adding Mandarin and Spanish. ‘The little girl was so exhausted and on edge she was terrified of opening her mouth.’”

In New York, playdate coaches charging $450 an hour train small children in the social skills that might help secure their admission to the most prestigious private schools. They are taught to hide traits that could suggest they’re on the autistic spectrum, which might reduce their chances of selection.

From infancy to employment, this is a life-denying, love-denying mindset, informed not by joy or contentment, but by an ambition that is both desperate and pointless, for it cannot compensate for what it displaces: childhood, family life, the joys of summer, meaningful and productive work, a sense of arrival, living in the moment. For the sake of this toxic culture, the economy is repurposed, the social contract is rewritten, the elite is released from tax, regulation and the other restraints imposed by democracy.

Where the elite goes, we are induced to follow. As if the assessment regimes were too lax in UK primary schools, last year the education secretary announced a new test for four-year-olds. A primary school in Cambridge has just taken the obvious next step: it is now streaming four-year-olds into classes according to perceived ability. The education and adoption bill, announced in the Queen’s speech, will turn the screw even tighter. Will this help children, or hurt them?

Who knows? Governments used to survey the prevalence of children’s mental health issues every five years, but this ended in 2004. Imagine publishing no figures since 2004 on, say, childhood cancer, and you begin to understand the extent to which successive governments have chosen to avoid this issue. If aspirational pressure is not enhancing our wellbeing but damaging it, those in power don’t want to know.

But there are hints. Mental health beds for children in England increased by 50% between 1999 and 2014, but still failed to meet demand. Children suffering mental health crises are being dumped in adult wards or even left in police cells because of the lack of provision (put yourself in their position and imagine the impact).

The number of children admitted to hospital because of self-harm has risen by 68% in 10 years, while the number of young patients with eating disorders has almost doubled in three years. Without good data, we don’t have a clear picture of what the causes might be, but it’s worth noting that in the past year, according to the charity YoungMinds, the number of children receiving counselling for exam stress has tripled.

An international survey of children’s wellbeing found that the UK, where such pressures are peculiarly intense, ranked 13th out of 15 countries for children’s life satisfaction, 13th for agreement with the statement “I like going to school”, 14th for children’s satisfaction with their bodies and 15th for self-confidence. So all that pressure and cramming and exhortation – that worked, didn’t it?

In the cause of self-advancement, we are urged to sacrifice our leisure, our pleasures and our time with partners and children, to climb over the bodies of our rivals and to set ourselves against the common interests of humankind. And then? We discover that we have achieved no greater satisfaction than that with which we began.

In 1653, Izaak Walton described in the Compleat Angler the fate of “poor-rich men”, who “spend all their time first in getting, and next in anxious care to keep it; men that are condemned to be rich, and then always busie or discontented”. Today this fate is confused with salvation.

Finish your homework, pass your exams, spend your 20s avoiding daylight, and you too could live like the elite. But who in their right mind would want to?

Dying at 22 is too steep a price for being ‘the best’

Shobhaa De in The Times of India

My heart broke while reading the tragic account written by a devastated father on hearing about his 22-year-old son’s sudden death in a San Francisco parking lot some weeks ago. Sarvshreshth Gupta had done all the ‘right things’ ambitious Indian parents expect from their children. He was supposed to be living the Great American Dream, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, interning with Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, before landing a job as a financial analyst with Goldman Sachs in San Francisco. His young life followed the golden script written for — and sometimes by — aspiring desi students. Those who toil hard to get into the best business schools in the US, achieve great grades, repay huge loans, make their folks proud, bag high-paying jobs, work harder still… and then collapse! Like young Sarvshreshth did. The unreasonable pressure of a system that expects young people to sweat blood so as to make other people rich, finally got to the analyst — perhaps, had he listened to his father and walked out of his job a few hours earlier, he would have been alive. Fired, perhaps. But alive.

Sarvshreshth’s exchanges with his sensitive, understanding father tell their own story. And it’s a pretty common one. He writes of being severely sleep deprived, working for 20 hours a day, spending nights in an empty office, completing presentations while prepping for a client meeting early the next morning… all the while putting up with the tyranny of a senior VP breathing down his neck — pushing, pushing, pushing. Whenever his father advised him to take it easy and look after his health, Sarvshreshth would bravely reply, “Come on, Papa. I am young and strong. Investment banking is hard work.” As it turns out, the young man was not as strong as he imagined. And yes, the hard work as an investment banker is precisely what killed him.

When I came across the grieving father’s poignant online essay, ‘A Son Never Dies’, I thought about several parents and their children in similar situations. I thought about my own children and their friends… what a scary world they occupy. Look around and you will find many other Sarvshreshths — young men who are literally killing themselves in jobs that pay big bucks, but extract a gigantic price. Yes, Indians today can lay claim to being the best-educated, highest paid ethnic group in America. But, at what cost?

Right now, hundreds of over-wrought parents are undertaking pricey campus tours of various universities abroad. They believe this is their ‘duty’ since they want their kids to ‘get the best’. Is this what they mean by ‘the best’ ? We have equally good universities in India. What sort of absurd pressure is this that forces parents and students to go overseas in the hope of ‘bettering prospects’? Why not have confidence in your child’s ability to shine in India, without going through the sort of trauma Sarvshreshth suffered? Yes, we have ragging in our colleges, and no, some of our academic laurels are not as prestigious in global job markets as Ivy League degrees. So what? If you’ve got it, you will make it. Anywhere!

Just a short while before Sarvshreshth’s body was found (cause of death not officially declared so far), his father had told him to take 15 days’ leave and come home. The fatigued son’s forlorn response was, “They will not allow”. Hours later, he was dead. This sad story should act as a wake-up call for both over-ambitious parents and over-achieving children. Not everybody can take the almost inhuman pressure of the rat race. This young man was missing home-cooked food, the comfort of family and an emotionally reassuring environment. If only he’d had the courage to say, ‘To hell with it…’ and come home, his devastated father would not be writing that pathos-filled essay today.

It’s time we took a fresh look at our craze for ‘foreign degrees’ and ‘foreign jobs’. Today there are over 100,000 Indian students on US campuses. Most will think of this time as the best years of their lives. Some will stay on and be successful there. Others will return and pursue successful careers back home. But a few will crack, crumble and succumb under pressure. The system sees all kinds. But this is not about the survivors. This is about the vulnerable. Every parent wants a child to succeed. But not at the cost of their life.

I wish Sarvshreshth’s father Sunil Gupta would take this important message to many more parents still debating about their child’s future. Earning a degree and bagging a great job are fine goals. But living a wholesome life with people who love and respect you is infinitely more rewarding in the long run.

Irony. This was the worst thing to happen to a young man whose name means ‘The Best’.

We don’t live to work, we work to live. Why don’t we say so?

Zoe Williams in The Guardian

 

‘It appears that you need to be in the bull-headed world of high finance before you can make this simple assertion: I’m don’t have to justify scaling back my work on the basis that I’m swapping one role (‘hardworker') for another (‘mother'). Photograph: Loop Images/ Alamy



“Hardworking” is the ubiquitous political denominator of our age, source of morality, citizenship, respect and status. It slips inanely into even the blandest legislative literature: the psychoactive substances bill, for instance, vowed to “protect hardworking citizens from the risks posed by untested … drugs”. The precise meaning of the phrase is rarely explicitly spelt out (except in the context of benefits and universal credit, where the working week that qualifies as “hard” is endlessly recalibrated by the Department for Work and Pensions). How many hours constitutes hard work? Can you even count it in hours? Does working hard to care for someone count? What about pets? Is there any room in this formulation for work that you find hard – poetry, aerobics – which doesn’t bring in any money? Or is it really a measure of economic productivity, turned by hazy phrasing and sleight of hand into a badge of honour?

This picture jars, rather, with the priorities of the people who are actually doing all this work, as described in the Flexible Jobs Index, out this week. It is compiled by Timewise, a recruitment organisation that also studies cultural attitudes to the workplace. “If you put together the people who work part-time who choose to, plus the people who are working full-time when they would rather work part-time, because they have no choice: that’s half the population,” says Karen Mattison of Timewise. This tells quite a different story to the one we’ve come to accept, of an insecure and underemployed workforce who would like more hours. About 14.1 million people want to work flexibly. One in 10 British workers – or three million people – don’t have enough hours, rising to one in five in so-called elementary or low-skilled occupations. But professionals tend to have more hours than they want.

We could ascribe this to a fundamental difference in outlook between one class and another, with energy levels and can-do attitudes peaking at the lowest pay grades then tailing off among higher earners. But it seems more likely, to me at least, that all these figures point to the same conclusion: people work extremely hard when they can’t live any other way, and steadily less hard – or wish they could work less hard – when they can afford to.

Hard work does not seem to be valued for its own sake, as a marker of identity or bestower of meaning. Work is part of a greater entity known as “life”, and even the fabled “work-life balance” is a bit last-century; given the choice, we see work as a subset of life, and not its rival.

This is already reflected in the reality of work – 95% of companies already offer flexibility – but it’s completely absent from the way people talk about work. In the language of recruitment, ambition and fealty remain inseparable – the truly committed employee thinks only of the job. “The research is saying,” Mattison concludes, “that we have to stop talking about flexible working and start talking about flexible hiring.” From a distance, it is a complicated distinction, but up close, obvious: there is no language in the process of getting a job that allows you to say you want it but only for 60% of the time. Just imagining this crushing awkwardness – when do you even bring it up? – is enough to trap many people in existing jobs they’re overqualified for because the hours work. It’s very wasteful, for them and for employers, who could often get someone much better than they could afford if they were only prepared to have them for fewer hours.

This is one of the critical modern taboos: the way we really feel about work – that it’s OK in its place but cannot be the wellspring of all fulfilment – nor occupy all our hours; versus the role of work in the sociopolitical narrative, in which the solidity of your citizenship is built on the foundations of your fervent industriousness. Partly this is because everyone insists on framing it as a conversation about work versus children; which in turn makes it a women’s issue, which in turn leads people to dismiss flexibility as a signal that ambition has receded, leaving only maturity and reliability in its stead. Going part time is the cultural equivalent of shifting from Cos to Boden.

Furthermore, the new consensus about hardworking people, hardworking families, human units defined by the intensity of their effort, actually sounds, when you decouple it from whichever smooth voice whence it came, a bit Soviet. It calls to mind those glory years of post-revolutionary propaganda in which to work – particularly with your top off – was to wrest back dignity from the capital forces that had tried to steal it from you. And yet we are meant to exist in this era of self-interest, in which our sense of identity is created not by work but by consumption. It’s a totally contradictory trope: of course it couldn’t brook challenge or nuance or an honest account of what work actually means to people. It would disintegrate.

“This is a work-life thing. That life isn’t just children. That life is life,” says Clare Turnbull, who has worked in the famously inflexible world of asset management and hasn’t done a five-day week since 2001. I’d asked her if she would go full time once her children left home. It appears that you need to be in the bull-headed world of high finance before you can make this simple assertion that we should all be able to make: I don’t have to justify scaling back my work on the basis that I’m swapping one duty for another, one role (“hardworker”) for another (“mother”). I don’t have to justify it at all. This life is life.

The Muslim Ummah have abandoned the Rohingyas

by Girish Menon

While the Rohingyas starve, live in fenced in camps or are on boats in high seas with no country willing to accommodate them the Islamic organisations are loudly quiet in their response while western human rights organisations as well as Jewish holocaust survivors espouse their cause. So what happened to the universal brotherhood of Islam? Why don't they offer refuge to their fellow brethren?

The Rohingyas were used by the British during the second world war as a fifth column to defeat the Japanese in Burma. Towards this end they were resettled in the Arakan area of Burma, given arms, money and training by the Allied forces. After the British withdrew from the area and new countries like East Pakistan was created, the Arakan province was to become a part of Burma. At this time the Rohingyas started a jihad against the Burmese government to get their territories to be a part of Jinnah's East Pakistan. Many Islamist organisations were active in this jihad.

----Also watch

-----

At the time the Rohingyas used the 'dar-ul-harb' concept to refuse to integrate with the Burmese population where they were in a minority. Like their Muslim brethren in the northern plains of India they did not wish to live in a country where they were in a minority. They were actively supported in this jihad by Islamic organisations in Pakistan.

The Burmese, unlike the Indians, when they defined their citizenship laws were unwilling to accommodate this group with a separatist and jihadist motive and the Rohingyas were deemed stateless. So, from then on the only way out for the Rohingyas was to pay smugglers to get them out of the Arakan province into countries where they could lead a decent life.

So why are the Islamist countries not going the extra mile to help their brethren? Why is Pakistan (The holy land for the pure) not inviting these Rohingyas to resettle them in their lands? Why is the Islamic State not taking them to Iraq or Syria nor the al Qaeda making attempts to rescue them? Can we say that NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) supersedes the Islamic Brotherhood?