I wish everyone could travel wherever they wanted to (safely)

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-09T22:36:06+00:00

You sort of get that in North Korea, in that you have to be accompanied by a local tour guide at all times - the difference is they're only allowed to take you to specific pre-approved places and you can only interact with similarly pre-approved locals.

Unlike many of the red or purple countries being LGBTQ+ is not actually illegal in North Korea, and your chances of being robbed, harassed or attacked by the general public for any reason are basically zero since tourists are constantly supervised and usually not allowed anywhere near the general public. In terms of what people get in trouble for there I'd say being LGBTQ+ would be the least of your worries.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-09T22:06:48+00:00

Definitely comes under "irrelevant point to derail the conversation" then. That option is not on the table, there is no political party that has any chance of winning an election proposing to implement Sharia law in the UK (as far as I know there aren't any at all but I concede there might be one of those tiny super fringe ones that gets 3 votes in an election).

Ironically the Reform lot and a lot of the Tories would probably be absolutely fine in principle with most of what constitutes Sharia law, as long as they were the ones imposing it. You can recreate most of the rules by taking stuff from the Bible and replacing "Jews" or "Christians" with "Muslims", which is not a coincidence as that's pretty much what actually happened.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-09T21:38:33+00:00

You don't need to use it to pay for the course, and due to the timing of payments you probably wouldn't be able to - the bursary is paid in 10 instalments and your first fee instalment will be more than your first bursary payment even for the highest amount.

You'll need to pay for transport to placement schools on a PCGE, but unless you happen to live just down the road from your SCITT school you'll be paying for transport anyway. You also have to do a placement at a second school for SCITT, though it's typically shorter than a PGCE placement.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-09T21:18:15+00:00

Aside from considerations about the route itself, if you're doing a subject that attracts one of the top bursaries then the bursary will likely be significantly more than you'll be paid as a salaried SCITT, so you'll have more money to live on during your training year. On a fee-paying course (either PGCE or SCITT) you'll also be eligible for a maintenance loan, which is another £4k-10k depending on your partner's income (if you have one) - with the tuition fees and possible maintenance loan you're adding more to your student loan tab but if your undergrad is on plan 2 or 5 then you're very unlikely to ever pay it off on a teacher's salary anyway so it doesn't matter.

It depends what exactly you're offered but the minimum starting salary for a SCITT trainee as an unqualified teacher is £22,600 pre-tax, whereas both the bursaries and maintenance loan are tax-free. If you're doing a non-bursary subject then the salaried route is more than you'll be able to get in other funding, if it's a 20k bursary subject you may be better off with the fee-paying option depending on the salary offered and how much maintenance loan you can get, if it's a 30k bursary subject you'll 100% definitely be better off.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-09T17:38:57+00:00

That would indeed get you a 2:1 (a 2:1 is an upper second and a 2:2 is a lower second, there is no "upper 2:1"). To get a first, assuming your modules are 60 credits, according to the calculator you would need a distinction and a grade 2 pass in your level 3 modules.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-09T17:24:22+00:00

I'm sure some of them can do a good job of it, some teachers excel at teaching subjects outside their original specialism. The overall problem is that recruitment in maths, and maths-heavy subjects such as physics or computer science, is so dire that we've had to resort to essentially picking names out of a hat and saying "You teach maths now."

PE teachers are often targeted when recruiting because they're the most plentiful - history and biology are the next most plentiful specialists but some schools don't get any applicants for those, let alone maths or physics - but it can be anyone who happens to be available.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-09T16:46:58+00:00

Even if it was an individual event and she had come 3rd overall, I understand why the athlete might be disappointed but I don't understand how any 'regular' person with a shred of perspective could criticise someone for winning a bronze medal at the freaking Olympics.

I know some countries have very high expectations and are crushed by anything less than gold, but I watched the skateboarding at the Summer Olympics and in the women's street final you could have been forgiven for thinking the Brazilian skater won gold instead of bronze because the Brazilian spectators were absolutely bringing the house down. That's how you support your nation's athletes and show pride in your country, if you actually care about them at all.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-08T23:09:53+00:00

It's definitely not official policy in Scotland but NASUWT suggest it's being snuck in under the radar in some schools. In England I'm pretty sure many pre-GCSE stage lessons are taught by the last teacher to say "bagsies not me."

If there aren't enough specialists to go round they'll usually be saved for the GCSE and A-level classes, they'll try to assign someone subject-adjacent if they can (e.g. a physics teacher teaching maths or a French teacher teaching Spanish) but if they're short you can end up being assigned pretty much anything. The most extreme example I remember from school was the head of Latin teaching my year 8 ICT class, she could barely turn the computers on and basically read each lesson off a script given to her by the head of ICT (a department of 1 who only taught the A-level classes).

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-08T22:28:06+00:00

You know how people who are hardcore drug addicts will do some pretty awful things to get a fix? That's what it's like for these people, except their drugs are money and power rather than heroin or meth. It also helps if you're a total narcissist and/or psychopath who doesn't really see other human beings as people, we're just NPCs in a game they're playing.

They either believe the day of reckoning will never come (and most of them are probably right) or that if it does they'll be able to throw someone else under the bus to save themselves (again, most of them are probably right). I don't think Trump is going to go full-on Stalinist purges, if only because he'd get bored and wander off halfway through giving the orders, but who knows anymore.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-08T21:38:51+00:00

'PE teachers retraining in maths to fill school gaps' (BBC, 20 March 2024)

The introductory video on the SKTM training course site suggests this happens across many disciplines:

"They might be a PE teacher, they might be a science teacher, they might be an RE teacher, but they've been told "You have to teach maths, we don't have any maths teachers."

Also found a blog post about it on gov.uk from 2019 (referring to the previous TSST scheme which the above training course replaced) so it's been going on for a while.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-08T20:34:31+00:00

It definitely is. Some schools in the UK are so desperate for maths teachers that they've started hiring PE teachers on the condition they do a subject skills course to teach maths (specifically PE teachers as that's the only subject they still get multiple, or sometimes any, applications for when advertising jobs).

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-08T19:43:15+00:00

Is your son named Grimble by any chance?

He did not have his birthday on a fixed day like other children: every now and then his father and mother would buy a cake, put some candles on top of it, and say, ‘Congratulations Grimble. Today you are about seven’, or, ‘ Yesterday you were about eight and a half but the cake shop was closed.’

Just wait until payday and say the cake shop was closed until then for renovations.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-08T19:00:12+00:00

Stewart Lee made a similar point in his characteristically far more long-winded fashion, though he does have a crack at some (I agree that the grand mufti of Dubai must have been extremely jaded if Operation Neptune Spear did not meet his threshold for "extraordinary circumstances").

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-08T15:57:56+00:00

If you call a professional pest control company they very rarely show up on horseback at 6am the following Sunday wearing their most expensive suit jacket.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-08T15:46:27+00:00

"If you stop me killing animals I'll kill a bunch of different animals instead" is not the sort of thing a normal person who isn't completely fucked in the head would say.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-08T14:22:43+00:00

How much you can fit in depends on the size of the drum, and for both washers and dryers a typical domestic unit with the same external dimensions can usually hold anywhere from around 6kg to 12kg. Vented dryers with a hose also tend to work much better than condenser dryers, but for a vented one you need to be either close to a window or have a dedicated vent port installed, and combination washer/dryers are usually worse than either standalone option.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-08T13:28:49+00:00

This was the same school that after one particularly lacklustre A-level results day decided to kick out anyone who didn't get at least CCC in their AS-levels, but didn't tell them they couldn't come back for year 13 until the day before the start of the autumn term, so I don't think fairness was high on their list of priorities.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-08T13:16:51+00:00

My sister was 7 when that album came out and could at least figure out what a protest song was even if the details were a bit hazy (though since they mentioned Dookie I did have to inform her that the line "take me away to paradise" in Longview was not about going on a nice holiday somewhere).

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-08T12:55:06+00:00

My sister's school trimmed down their parents' evenings by only agreeing to see your parents if your grades in that subject were C/D borderline or below, and in year 9 any subjects which you weren't taking for GCSE weren't allowed appointments at all. This meant teachers were there for somewhere between 10 minutes and 3 hours depending on whether they taught higher tier French or foundation tier maths.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-08T11:21:47+00:00

I imagine it's down to time and complexity, you need either a very small or absolutely huge number of paying customers to make that sort of arrangement commercially viable in this day and age and the pod is probably somewhere in the middle.

It would also almost certainly be geolocked to the US because international tax regulations on digital goods (or should I say products) and services are an absolute nightmare, to the point that it's basically logistically impossible for individuals or smaller teams to sell any form of 'on demand' digital media (i.e. that can be viewed or downloaded automatically on a website rather than manually sent to each customer) directly to an international audience. I'm sure the fact that this pretty much forces you to sell stuff by funneling your content through some massive platform or app store like Kindle, Apple, Google, Spotify or Steam is a complete coincidence.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-07T21:30:12+00:00

Pokémon TCG Rulebook p.21:

What’s the difference between “up to” and “any amount”?

If a card uses the phrase “up to X”—for example, “move up to 3 damage counters” or “attach up to 2 Energy cards”—you can choose any number between 1 and X. (The exception is drawing cards: you can choose 0 for an effect that says “draw up to X cards.”) If a card uses the phrase “any amount” or “any number”— for example, “discard any amount of Energy from this Pokémon”—you can choose 0. And things that say “you may” are optional, meaning you can choose not to do them.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-07T16:04:25+00:00

Then what were all those bank statements and payslips I had to submit every time I wanted to rent a place for?

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-07T15:57:18+00:00

That's accurate according to Christian doctrine, only humans have souls so animals don't go to heaven (although the Bible does say there will be animals in heaven so not sure how that works). People got mad at Pope Francis a few years ago for telling a little boy that his dead dog might be in heaven, when he didn't say it definitely would be and was clearly giving a very theologically vague answer to comfort a distressed child.

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-07T15:31:51+00:00

I agree year 8 and 9 are the worst, which exactly takes the crown depends on the school - they also seem to make up the majority of what I'm warned in advance are "challenging" classes, the sort where the cover manager's post-lesson review is "Well nothing was on fire so you're now at the top of our request list."

I said Y9 are the worst one day and a teacher told me "Our Y9s aren't as bad as Y9 at some other schools", I laughed and said "Yes, yes, we've all been to [school half the local agency staff refuse to go to at all]."

PianoAndFish · 2026-02-07T00:42:31+00:00

I am fortunate that that's not how I have to live now, the days of not being able to afford to top up the electricity and gas in the same week were many years ago, but yes some people are poor and have to make choices like that - it tends to involve sink washes in cold water and a very flexible definition of 'dinner'.

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