No truer words spoken. RIP.

George Carlin: Presuck my genital situation.

/notes the irony of the Bluetooth logo on the top bar, the iPhone implementation being a Deferred Success re: grasping the concept of “a universal interchange standard for wireless communications” if ever there was one.

Though that only flourished because, like ni**er – a word that itself would probably have died out decades ago otherwise – it was adopted by the very community it was originally used against in scorn or code and used as an internal term of affection or comradeship. Let’s hope DefSuc (hmm! now there’s a telling contraction!) doesn’t go the same way. Chav seems to be doing it, at the moment, even though unlike Gay – a somewhat affectionate, lighthearted term on the surface – and Ni…. – once purely descriptive of location and/or skin tone before becoming a term of oppression and abuse – it was derogatory from the off.

It’s a bit different though, IIRC A* for top marks then A-G for passing grades, N (near pass? near fail? not graded? basically, you didn’t pass, but ooooh so close try again in the resits) and U (unclassified, ie YOU FAIL IT HARD) at GCSE (16 yrs old high school main leavers exams). Wierdness in the system that you can usually take two tiers of exams, one easy lot grading you C-G, and a harder one grading you A*-E or something. C is normally the lowest you want to admit to having, so if your ability is borderline decent you can take a chance on flunking the hard paper, or ace the easy one…

Then A-E (pass, lowest equivalent to GCSE C) and U (vanilla fail) for A/AS-Level (17 and 18 year old upper high school/local college exams). The grades in which determine whether you satisfy the minimum ability for various university courses. Many students will take three “proper” subjects plus a general study exam and maybe a half-grade side module or two. A common course may have a BBC or BCC requirement (only counting the “proper” grades), though you could slip in with BBD/ACD/ABE if you’re smooth enough at interview and the highest mark is in the most relevant subject, as it’s more about total points in a lot of cases. Places like Oxford will have AAA requirements in a lot of subjects and you’ll STILL have to ace the interviews and written application, much like going for a job…

Most other things like vocational qualifications and the like are just pass/fail with no particular grading, unless you get told the %age (or marks out of 900 for CompTIA…), it’s good and you want to flaunt it. They’re just not “important” enough, despite often being the things (besides a good interview and reference reply) that employers are more interested in than a load of dusty general-purpose exams you may have done almost 10 years earlier by the time you escape the degree & professional training grind…

Also: b3tahaku?

I’ve learnt a lot from mistakes alone in the past couple weeks. That sense of “yep… been there…” is what makes Failblog great, sometimes.

Though othertimes it is just the cretinous downfall of people who really, really should have known better.

One thing that’s slipped the net is that you can’t call it a “suspension” or an “exclusion” any more. No… they stay out of school for a “work at home and reflection day”. You couldn’t make this shit up.

Or maybe SUCCESS DEFERRED because that scans better and is more grammaticalish.

Also, I’m going to start using this term now, as sarcastically and ironically as possible in the hope it stops it from becoming mainstream in the originally intended sense. Because it’s dumb shit like that leads to people taking their driving test 100+ times and eventually squeaking by, when common sense should surely dictate that YOU FAIL, STOP TRYING TO DRIVE, take all the money you’re blowing on lessons and tests and spend it on cab fare instead, if this is the speed at which you learn and gain experience then you’ll be deadly dangerous and/or rapidly made into dogmeat when cut adrift on real roads nowhere near as friendly or familiar (or, probably, as unchanging) as your local neighbourhood.

Sometimes being told and knowing that you’re no good at something, and can safely avoid trying to do it or being any good for the rest of your life can be an overwhelmingly freeing and positive thing. You can now stop trying to fit in with whatever societal norm you were aiming for, and concentrate on being good at other things and working around the problem instead (EG I know of someone who is both an excellent database admin and musician, but can’t drive, and no longer bothers with trying. The other work would probably suffer, as well as the people he’d run over…). You have a bona fide excuse card for whenever someone else says “why don’t you just… (xyz)?”. Obviously this also has some exceptions, such as “not murdering people, even those who REALLY deserve it”.

although I can some up my feelings.

Saying ‘you failed at that task’ is not labeling people, it’s telling the damn truth, how’s a kid going to feel once he realizes people were using light bs weasel words instead of the truth?

Also why is it so difficult to tell kids ‘you failed but you can try again’

Imagine the following scenario

“Did I pass my driver’s license test?”
“You had deferred success”
“Sweet”

Let’s keep on keeping children away from the ugly aspects of reality, so that when they go out of school they will commit suicide for a mosquito bite.