5-Year Olds To Start School With Assessment

To see if they're ready. And if they're not the school will wait for them to be ready. That's what the Minister of Education told a radio station she plans of doing soon. There are at least two problems with this idea. One is how long is the school going to wait? And two parents -- knowing that there is an evaluation -- will start preparing their children for it. Probably a good one to one-and-half years before the test. So we're looking at toddlers taking private tuition.

Not good. Because our school system already takes away way too much of the light that each person is born with. And produces way too many obese parrots.

Inpe Zafer Ki Totalman Inprevizib

1. Guvernman pu fer 7,500 a 9,000 zelev fel zot legzame CPE ankor en fwa byinto. Eh wi, sa li pu en mari sirpriz sa. Nu pu totalman etone. Anfin, ziska mem kantite zelev fel lane prosen.
2. 11 dimun mor dan inondasion le 30 mars. Non, u pe fer erer: zame u ti truv en PPS bloke dan so loto divan la rad le 13 fevrier. Aret reve kamarad!
3. 11 dimun mor dan en bis CNT. En kut fluk sa papao. Aksidan Montebello 2009? En deziem kut fluk sa do matlo.
4. Kupir dilo rekumanse ankor. Pa fot guvernman sa. Se u fot. U pa pe priye bondie ase pu fer lapli tonbe. Se usi inpe so fot: li pa kon viz kuma dimun. Nu dan guvernman nu pu kontinie ogmant pri dilo ziska u aret servi dilo uswa ziska u la priyer marse.
5. Lekonomi pan rebondi kan lekonomi mondial fin sort dan resesion an 2009. Kifer u prese kumsa, ein? Fin gayn zis kat an depi resesion mondial fin fini. Li pu bizin rebondi dan prosen sinkant banane. E pa bliye ki se akoz ban kondision extern ki nu dan fatak. Apre aret plinye. Nu dan byin isi gras a reform. Pena bomb be tom lor u latet ek anplis nu pe travay dir pu polision vin kuma dan lasin. 
6. Flat tax fin zet 22,000 dimun dan lamizer. Phiu, en kwinsidans sa mo burzwa. Sat mao pu may lera vit vit la. Pa trakase.
7. Buku milyar FDI pa fin redwir somaz mem. Get sa, pa akoz u ena en degre liniversite ki u pa pu kapav vin enn bon zardinie dan en proze IRS. Wena bel swa: u kav netway pisin usi. Apre ler u rant lakaz pa bliye ekut nuvel pu apran listwar u pei kuma bizin.

2012: The Year in Review (Q4)

October: PRB report published. Big B turns 70. Felix goes supersonic. Biden-Ryan debate felt more presidential. Apple launches the iPad mini. Gotham prepares for Sandy's visit.

November: Boolell explains Romney's defeat. Zlatan christens stadium with wonder goal. 44% of poll see sweep for Remake. Jimi turns 70. How you know a politician is a socialist. Killer to strike again. Hard-earned anti-inflation credibility at risk.

December: PM claims large victory in village elections. A good reason for men to quit smoking. Municipal voters send multiple signals. Sitar genius dead at 92. State fails more than 9,000 CPE students. Obama reacts to Connecticut tragedy. Kozelidir Person of the Year 2012 attributed to the CPE student for putting up with a badly designed learning process.
     
Read the review for Q1, Q2, Q3.

State Fails More Than 9,000 CPE Students

Have a look at the statistics published by the MES: 25,314 candidates (22,914 first and second sitting plus 2,400 private candidates) were set to take the exam. Of these only 16,294 passed (15,613 first and second sitting plus 681 private candidates). The rest, 9,020, failed. This translates into a failure rate of 35.63%. This is more than a third in case you're wondering. But it gets uglier. Of the 9,020 that the state failed 2,962 were failed a second time. Do we need to wonder what this does to the creativity of those kids?

What are we waiting for automatic promotion? Godot? Is it too costly? Can't be when you look at how we've been wasting our tax billions for the past few years.

But there may be a drawback in bringing a few grams of common sense to this national problem: a stampede to kiss a minister's feet may become a thing of the past when the latter shows up with a box of macaroni.

Zlatan Christens Stadium With Wonder Goal

That was during the friendly against England. He also scored the other three goals. Gerrard who earned his 100th cap on the same night declared that bicycle kick the best he ever seen.

Here too we could groom our own little Zlatans if they spent a lot more time on the football pitch in primary school.

Do You Know What A Priority is?

We have 161 days left to indicate to the Human Rights Committee what we intend to do to comply with their views. If it's easier for you that means we can send our response by February 27, 2013. That's a lot of time. The CPE exams begins on October 16. In 27 days. And if we don't do anything bold we will still fail about 1/3 of these kids.

We've been going nowhere for the past many years. So I would suggest we make a slight and temporary retreat on the BLS. At least until we fix the CPE exam disaster.

Our Future is Still in Our Hands

Anybody with two and a half grams of intelligence knows that we are in the current mess because of the reforms that were implemented by Rama Sithanen and Ali Mansoor. Navin Ramgoolam has to take a lot of the blame for allowing the toxic policies to inflict a lot of damage on the livelihood of Mauritians. He should have better surrounded himself to include enough dissent in the decision-making process -- an important ingredient for increasing the odds of leaving a legacy that will not be sneezed at. Although that would have been easy to do given the number of smart people around it will not change the past. But we can still invent a better future.

We could for example start with the lowest hanging fruit: the CPE. Just add enough chairs in post-primary classes so that we fail 3,500 less kids this year. Repeat the same process next year and we would have stopped the senseless practice of making thousands of children pay for a badly designed learning process. Who knows? Maybe this will help produce another Steve Jobs ready to dent the universe. One more time.

Ki Servis Piblik u Truv Korek?

Mwa mo bien kontan (mont bisiklet?) Passport Office. Sa desantralizasyon ek simplifaksyon bann form la finn kontribye pu fer enn ti-mirak: u gagn u paspor andan enn semen. La pos usi finn ameliore buku. Plizier zot kontwar servi sa ti masin elektronik pu imprim enn tem-kolkamani ki fer travay-la al buku pli vit. Enn pake sa bann biro-la usi erkonn. Donk li pa mal agreab al lapos. CEB usi ena bann kontwar ki furni mem nivo servis.

Mauritius Telecom so servis ti kav buku pli bon si nu kontinye kuma avan. Sa servis MyT la dapre lord pa enn cheetah kinn diizign sa. Nu servis ledikasyon piblik dan dife net: 30% zelev CPE pa pase sak lane.

Ale u tur aster. Ki u kontan, ki u pa like?

State in A Hurry To Spoil School Holidays

At least for those kids from Standard IV and V who will take part in the Summer School Programme which begins November 24. This is our Government's response to the high failure rate at the CPE exams. I don't think this will really work because almost everybody knows that the problem is not with our kids but with the curriculum which needs to be redesigned to make learning more playful and relevant. Besides there is a much easier way to dramatically reduce the end of primary education failure rate: bell curve the results to allow a few thousands more children in Form 1 in January 2012.

For sure we can learn from Finland where kids begin school only when they're 7, spend the least amount of time in classrooms and yet are at the top of the PISA rankings. By the way, I am hoping Mauritius will start participating in this serious survey in the next few hundred years. Once we get tired of gazing at our navels that is.

Finally, there is another reason why we don't want to go ahead with the summer school programme. And that's because we know that kids now are not as physically strong as they were before. So the last thing we want is to have them spending still more time behind their desks slowly morphing into obese parrots. Nope. We better have them enrolled in a Summer Football Programme.

Eski Leta Gagn Drwa Interdir Leson?

Enn gran deba pe deroule la: Minis Bunwaree inn vinn ek enn zistwar ki apel Enhancement Programme. Sindikalis Vinod Seegum pa dakor ek sa program la. Li pe usi dir ki Bunwaree ti bizin kumans par sanz kurikulum ek enkadreman. Mo entierman dakor lor sa dernye pwin la.

Ki u ena pu dir lor la?

What Bunwaree Should Do Now

Allow as many students who didn't make it through the ridiculously tough CPE exams last December and who didn't even get a seat in a vocational school to join their friends in Form 1. That is enable 2,500(?) of these 3,500 kids to move ahead in life immediately by adding a few chairs in each Form 1 classroom.

This should save us a lot of problems down the road.

How Bunwaree Can Be Bold In the Next Few Days

By deciding to add a few chairs on average to each Form 1 classroom in January so that the impending CPE results don't condemn several thousands kids to one more year of boredom studying a grossly ill-designed curriculum. In the process he will make some real progress on his strategic goal to make our school system more efficient.

Kozelidir's Free Guide To Abolition of Private Tuition

Given that primary teachers are saying that the raison-d'etre for private tuition is a heavy curriculum kids can spend their afternoon doing all kinds of fun stuff if we lighten what they have to be taught. This can be done in two ways:

1. Get the grown-ups who design the curriculum to chop off enough material that will set our kids free after 14h30. We may be told that this is a complicated process that will take years and that teachers cannot possibly work faster than Prime Ministers promising more decent electricity prices. Fair enough. That's why we have an alternative solution.

2. Get a bunch of down-to-earth kids to tear off material they found absolutely boring in their preceding school year. That shouldn't take more than a couple of days.

Please make sure to check our other guides here including the very popular Kozelidir's Free Guide to a Successful Ministerial Resignation.

Teachers Saying Syllabus Too Heavy

Those of the Government Teachers Union (GTU) to be more precise. They were in the streets today saying that they are against abolishing private tuition to standard IV pupils (9-year-olds) because they need the extra time to try to complete the curriculum. I agree with them. And that's easy to solve. We just need to rewrite the syllabus so that they can complete it within class hours (we also need to rewrite it to make it more interesting and so that our kids don't end up as bean-counters when they grow up).

But they are probably thinking more about the extra money they make out of private tuition which for some is more than what they make as government employees. Maybe they are underpaid. Maybe they aren't the only ones. But that's not too difficult to find out either.

By the way, it's not the only post we've written on this topic. What do you think would happen if you hit the CPE label?

How Really Difficult Was the CPE Maths Paper?

Some are saying that it was at a difficulty level not seen in years. Others don't agree. To find out we should send the math papers of the last few years to psychometricians.

These professionals who are trained to sort out issues like the difficulty of tests could also shed some historical light on when the so-called CPE fever started rearing its ugly head if we submitted end-of-primary exam papers of the last 35 years or so to them.

Top 10 Reasons Why Solutions to 95% of Our Problems Are Not Domestic

No. 10. More reasonable electricity prices have been promised by Navin Ramgoolam for more than a year now. You should blame Mick Jagger if you've been waiting for Godot.

No. 9. Oil prices at the pumps remain high and are killing our economy to finance the reverse Robinhoodness of the flat-tax duet. Not really. It's Deepika Padukone's fault.

No. 8. More than a third of the students who fail the CPE do so because the exam is way too difficult. That of course is U2's Bono's fault who's been dishing out one great song after the other and disturbing our kids.

No. 7. Record FDI pouring into the country since 2006 should have made everybody richer through an appreciating currency had our national bean-counter along with the then Governor not been in a hurry to create double-digit inflation. Just kidding. If our currency crashed in the second half of 2006 it's because Scorpion Queen Khun Kanchana didn't hold the little darlings in her mouth long enough.

No. 6. The controversial reintroduction of the daylight saving time was imposed on us by Bernard Madoff.

No. 5. We have to blame Aung San Suu Kyi for staying too long at home if Sithanen did not anchor our inflation expectations by not providing the Bank of Mauritius and hence the country with a target range for inflation as required by the law between 2005 and 2010.

No. 4. Navin Ramgoolam has been PM for close to 9 years and our traffic problems haven't improved. Far from that. Nah, it's because Paris Hilton hasn't been partying hard enough!

No. 3. If Air Mauritius is technically bankrupt it's not because we have an incompetent bunch managing it. No way. It's because Hillary didn't win the Democratic Party's ticket in the last US President election.

No. 2. It is very easy to establish a link between the fact that we don't have a sufficiently comfortable public transportation system and the number of Asian lions that were born in 1859.

And the No. 1 reason why solutions to 95% of our problems are not domestic is

No. 1. People lost their lives in flash floods in the same week that water stoppages were in force in 2008. That of course is because the snow atop Mt. Kilimanjaro melted earlier than usual.

Less Than 60% Effectively Passed the CPE this Year

How I got that number? Easy, I included the number of students that the press told us back in October were going to take part in these exams, 26,689, instead of the number of students who actually took the exam, 23,664. So that some 3,025 kids did not take the exam which works out to a little over 11%.

They didn't show up for probably some of the same reasons that 30% grown ups don't show up at their CFA Level I Exam. One such reason is fear. Which kind of makes the case to lower the difficulty of the CPE. Of course you realise that overlooking little details like this will make us a lesser nation than we ought to have been.

7,707 Failed the CPE Because The Exam is Too Difficult

And the Minister of Education should simply have bell-curved the results to make 5,340 more students pass. This would have brought the pass rate to 90% which is probably a more reasonable number. The other 10% could have been offered a seat in a vocational school to become great manual workers as I suppose we would like great plumbing jobs to become standard in Mauritius in the future.

And students should be given many opportunities to switch streams throughout their lives. In the meantime it's a good idea to have psychometricians start working immediately to bring the exam to the right level.