To Golriz

Hi - yeah, I get the sense you'd find my stuff appealing. As for the Proceeds of Crime stuff: I dug the line about the truancy crisis. - I quipped once that the NZ education system fails the top and bottom of the bell curve about equally. That's why I was homeschooled until intermediate: though tbh the year of rote learning I did in Italy had benefits later on, as it taught me that masochistic discipline. I mean, to learn Spanish and Chinese at school, I had to take correspondence courses, and that was a high decile school. It's strange: our economy is increasingly driven by knowledge work, yet we're not particularly great at teaching those skills. Which is why we have so many expats in the health system, and IT (among other disciplines). It's not the US here: gifted programs aren't a big focus, given how many fail the basics. With Burnside, the trick was that the music department largely paid for itself because of how often it won. I wonder how one lobbys the govt. to invest into gifted programs? 😀