Jean and Gordon have a fridge magnet that reads 'let's grow old together, the best is yet to come.' How cute is that?
Wednesday I made the most of my warm, comfortable bed and had a lie in. I hit the road around 11am and made my way to see some Maori cave paintings in Duntroon, a very Maori sounding name, not. The paintings span centuries as can be demonstrated by pictures of the extinct birds and introduction of European ships. All the blurb was very mysterious 'why are they here? Was it a spiritual and cultural centre? An ancient art gallery? Will we ever know for sure?'
Seriously? Are you kidding? I'm no anthropologist but I reckon I've sussed the conundrum. The paintings were done by your average Joe normal who was killing time whilst sheltering from the rain. How do I know? They look like they were drawn by a fooking 5 year old! I'm guessing if it was anything more significant the Maoris would have put their most talented artists on the job. My photos didn't come out but here are some screenshots just to prove my point.
Fishes...
Then it was on to Oamaru home to Steam Punk HQ. All very HG Wells meets the Borg, as you can probably guess I'm loving that.
Here are the pics, don't have nightmares lol!
Oamaru has a really touristic 'Victorian' section and I was really digging that too. Everything was really quirky and strange, I'd happily go back and spend a day pottering around the crazy shops, galleries and cafes.
After Oamaru it was off to Moeraki Boulders. These huge, spherical rocks have formed naturally although they look as though they have been carved. I did try and get my head around the geology but it was very complicated; you will just have to take Adilady at her word or look it up on Wikipedia.
This is what they look like on the inside.
So then it was back to Jean and Gordon's pad for a good feed and an early night with bookage. What amazing things did I learn? Well I learnt about the law of small numbers. Researchers and scientists frequently reach conclusions prematurely or draw the wrong conclusions because they don't use a big enough sample size to make their results statistically meaningful. They use their intuition instead of maths to decide the required sample size (arrogant or naïve?) However our brains are evolutionary programmed to see patterns even though statistically speaking events are more likely to be random. Why am I telling you this? Because as an educationalist the example made me laugh out loud. Research in America showed that pupils in smaller schools performed better than in larger ones. Millions of dollars were spent finding the characteristics of successful small schools so that they could be reproduced. The concept of 'schools within schools' made it over to blighty right in the middle of the 'building schools for the future' programme and many designs were influenced by the concept. I had the privilege of visiting the U S of A to see 'human scale schooling' and 'schools within schools' in practice. I still like the idea but it would never work in the UK due to the restraints of the exam system and National Curriculum. Anyway the experimental research was repeated and guess what? It indicated that smaller schools actually perform worse. Why? The law of small numbers dummy. Small schools are neither better or worse, just statistically more variable. Just think, educational policy being driven by a random event ha ha. I wonder how many other government policies have spent gzillions of pounds on mere randomness?
Anyways enough shop talk, Thursday I left Jean and Gordon's and headed to Dunedin, New Zealand's first city; more of that in next bloggingtons. I board a plane homeward bound in exactly 4 weeks! Can't wait to see y'all my lovely friends and famille. This is Adilady sending her love and saying over and out xxxx
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