Learning to speak a language – and be tested on it

I remember when GCSEs were first introduced – I myself was in the first year to take them for mathematics, and the second year for other subjects such as languages. The idea was to put more emphasis on being able to do something, than being able to be tested on it.

So in languages more effort was put in being able to speak a language and make yourself understood, and a little bit less was put into writing it and the grammar – something that my university would later complain about.

So the idea that pupils should no longer have oral examinations on these subjects is a bit worrying – for me it seems like another step back from leaning the language thoroughly.

I don’t remember that much about my GCSE oral exams, but I remember that certain situations had to be prepared and you learnt a lot of set phrases at the time. I do, however, clearly remember my A-level German oral exam (which I got an ‘A’ in 🙂 and it was maybe stressful, but it was a positive experience to come out of the exam and to be able to say that I had managed to keep going in German for the entire duration.

So why get rid of this part of the exam process?

There is nothing to be gained in my opinion from only having the spoken skills assessed – as at the first opportunity in the workplace these skills may really be tested.

I used to interview students coming to Germany for placements here – and I carried out the interviews in German.

Of course, having been through the system myself, I had an advantage over a native speaker in that I knew what vocabulary a student would or would not know, and could as such make the interview easy or difficult.

In fact, it was not only important to be able to speak German, but to have the confidence to do it!

I gained a lot of confidence in my A-level oral exam – and a lot more on subsequent trips to Germany when I sometimes had no alternative but to explain myself in German.

Please don’t take this confidence booster away from today’s schoolchildren!

Speedcabling

Here’s a fun sport to try out: Speedcabling.

The idea is that you try to untangle a jumbled up mix of computer wires, and do this against the clock.  The first competition of this kind has been held in Los Angles, the article reports.

It’s the sort of thing that I often do for my customers – labelling all the cables and them removing them all, only to replace them with a much neater arrangement, preferably using new, colour-coded cables.

But once I remember doing this in the server room of a company with about 50 employees.  I spent an entire Saturday morning re-wiring all the patch fields to make the system more presentable and understandable.

Another time I had to remove old network cable out of the ducts in the wall, and back then this was so-called BNC-cabling, where everything was joined to one big circuit – not like the structured cabling used today.

Again, I spent several hours trying to rescue as much cable as possible to be able to re-use it later.  But sometimes there was not other way than to cut through it, especially where the plugs had been attached after the cable had been put through specially-made holes in the wall.

So how would I fare in a speedcabling challenge?  I think I’d be pretty good.  When the sport makes it Europe, maybe I’ll have a got!

Why I think I'll avoid the United Arab Emirates

An interesting piece of news caught my eye this week – tourists are being warned of tough drug laws in the United Arab Emirates.
This is the only country that I have ever been to in the Middle East, and even then I only saw the airport as I was in transit between Singapore and London. I can remember how the cabin crew told us to leave our hand luggage on the plane to avoid any problems when re-boarding.
Maybe now I understand why – the article describes how people have been sentenced for having minute amounts of cannabis stuck to their shoes. Other had prescription medicines with them.
The one that really makes me shudder is the man traveller who had poppy seeds on his clothes from a bread role that he had eaten and was sentenced to four years in jail!
It all makes me want to stay away from that country.  But wait – only today I read that Germany has a similar situation.  Apparently eating three pieces of poppy seed cake is sufficient to fail a roadside drugs test, resulting in the loss of your driving license.
I think I’ll stick to cheese cake!

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