I'm actually shocked that the number is that low. I may have been affected by recall bias as I remember seeing several stories in the teaching press about GTCE professional misconduct hearings while I was a teacher. That was the best part of a decade ago, though.

As to your suggestion of cutting pay because tightening up on standards would cause strikes, I think the teaching unions would be far more likely to strike over pay cuts (as indeed they did, yesterday) than a properly implemented programme of professional standards reform. I doubt any of the current government would have the sensitive touch that would be necessary to get something done without screaming tabloid headlines pissing the teachers off and making them unwilling to work towards reform.

There is a shortage of willing, able graduates wanting to go into teaching, though - cutting pay would mean that you would continue to disincentivise these people to teach rather than working in say, engineering or law.

Interesting. You could have the option in your app for users to opt-in to a survey, collecting data which could be used to validate your hypothesis. You'd need people's contact details (from google checkout?) in order to follow up after 9 months. Maybe you'd need two versions of the app - one data-collecting, one not. Users would have to be able to log the days they had intercourse, and the date of delivery if full-term.

You'd need a fair number of users to opt in to get a big enough set to draw meaningful conclusions, especially as I suspect the data will suffer from noise and bias due to drop-outs.

Could be an interesting project. :)

I honestly think you're misrepresenting the majority of teachers. Just like any profession, there are people who are underperforming and even incompetent, but there are certainly procedures in place to deal with them. The GTC and GTCS bar several people each year for various professional misconducts, including not being bothered to do the work properly.

By reducing the wage of teachers, you reduce the incentive for talented people to enter the profession, given that people with better classes of degree can earn more in the private sector. You then enter a downward spiral, where the losers are the children whose education is damaged.

A better solution would be to tighten up on entry requirements, encourage employers to take more action against underperforming staff (the procedures are certainly there, if managers are willing to use them), and make teaching an attractive profession to go into, rather than one which is blamed for all of society's ills (at least until the bankers fucked up so spectacularly) and which people unfairly deride as being easy or full of lazy chancers who are only in it for the holidays.

Given that sex is down to whether the sperm carries an X or a Y chromosome, how does conceiving on a particular day affect the sex of the child? Ovulation is clearly periodical, sperm production not so.

Am I missing something?

Thanks for the tip about smashwords.

Do you honestly believe that primary school teaching is "glorified baby sitting"? Have you actually worked in any primary schools? If anything, the teaching is more demanding than secondary schools, where pupils are usually streamed by ability. Primary teachers have to differentiate work for a single class with a much wider range of academic and social ability than in a typical secondary subject class, often with higher class sizes and fewer resources. Primary school is where fundamental literacy and numeracy skills are learnt, where social development is at its most crucial. If teachers are not effective during this stage of a child's life, that child will have its prospects permanently damaged. Don't forget, a typical 7-year old finds learning the Year 4 curriculum just as demanding as a 14-year old finds the Year 9 curriculum. Teaching is less about subject knowledge than actual teaching ability - why else would people with a degree still need to undergo postgraduate training in order to become teachers? Good pay for primary teachers is essential. And I say this as a former secondary teacher who now works with children and adults of all ages - the younger ones are much harder to teach.

You seriously call somebody an idiot for expressing a view contrarian to your own, without offering any argument or evidence in support of your own position, nor making any attempt to explain why they might be wrong? Rude.

I agree with most of what you said, but this bit baffles me. How does Amazon releasing an Android tablet (the Kindle Fire) kill Android in the tablet arena? I expect all the forthcoming Kindle tablets will run Android as well. Seems like a good way to get Android using devices into lots of people's hands, meaning the market for Android apps that work well on tablets is bigger (even if the stock Kindle Fire is tied to Amazon's app store, nothing stopping devs releasing on there as well as Google Android Market.)

I'm pretty sure the phrase "the three Rs" started as a joke. Reading, Riting, 'rithmetic. It's been this way since at least the 1920s (according to my history lessons in primary school at least). Until today I'd never heard "Reading, Recording, Reckoning" given. Sounds like the kind of thing a humourless pedant retired colonel would write letters to the Times about.

Oh, believe me, I know how important phrasing is in comedy. "Gives her one" works very well in British English:
An attractive young women goes into a bar and asks for a double brandy. So the barman gives her one.
An attractive young women goes into a bar and asks for a pint of beer. So the barman gives her one.
An attractive young women goes into a bar and asks for a double-entendre. So the barman gives her one.

"I'd give him/her one" is a common way to express the desire for sexual congress in colloquial British English. This is why the joke is funny. Although now I've explained it, it obviously isn't any more.

Oops, buggered up the quoting in that comment. Apologies. The para starting "In terms of working hours...." should have had quote tags.

Wrong. "A newly qualified teacher will earn a minimum of £21,588 (£27,000 in inner London) but could start higher up the scale depending on previous experience."
http://www.tda.gov.uk/get-into-teaching/salary/starting-salary.aspx

In terms of working hours, secondary teachers get it harder as they have more lesson planning to do, more homework to mark and so forth but primary teachers would tend to work 8:30am - 4pm with the odd day of longer hours here and there (parents evening, setting up displays etc.).

Wrong again. Most primary teachers work at least a 50 hour week. They are often in school by 8 am and leave between 5pm and 6pm, and most bring marking home to do in the evenings (at least another hour per day at home). Secondary teachers tend to work similar hours. This is one of the reasons why I left teaching after doing it for three years.

Bullshit. Once you get above the cleaner level, ie for managerial and technical positions, public sector pay is less than the equivalent in the private sector. People accept lower pay in return for a better pension deal. This is why so many are angry now that their pensions are being cut by the current government.

Teaching offers a reasonable (not huge) salary and job security, but teachers on the whole earn less than similarly qualified peers who took up professional jobs in the private sector after graduating.

I consider myself to be a reasonable touch typist - 50wpm without looking down. All of the useful key shortcuts are on the left side of the keyboard, so if you use the mouse with your R hand then you don't need to shift your L hand at all, until you need to type to launch an application. Unless you're doing a lot of graphics work, you don't really need a mouse anyway - lots of people use Ratpoison quite happily. I can switch windows and apps, move windows into different workspaces, switch workspaces, launch new programs, look at my calendar, even log out or shutdown without lifting my hands from the keyboard, just like in Gnome 2.

I find Gnome 3 completely usable on my dual monitor desktop. I had to change certain habits, but I'm not afraid of change. I personally think most of the changes are for the better. Nobody's stopping people who don't like it from using a different DE instead. XFCE is good and old Gnome apps work in in very happily. The great thing about free software is that you have a choice.

Got to love those sales guys:

http://thewebsiteisdown.com/excel_hell.html

...except for the bit about the Gnome team doing marketing videos for Canonical's Unity project? Perhaps they were doing vids for Gnome 3, or perhaps the Canonical team were doing vids for Unity?

Gnome 3 and Unity are different projects, albeit with similar goals and some design features in common.

You don't even need to reboot to patch your kernel if you use ksplice.