You just said you got $25000 for 10 days work which included airfaires. Let’s say you made two trips to Queensland at a cost of $1000 each that means your fees were around $2300 per day, which sounds about right for a consultant like yourself.

That being the case, why did you say earlier your charged only $500 per day, a figure that is ludicrously and incredibly low?

I don’t see why you should be embarassed about being able to charge $2K per day for your services, if you can find someone who is willing to pay it. That is less than a junior to mid person at one of the big accounting firms. Top QCs make 5 times as much. Tim Flannery gets $50K for giving a talk on climatre change. Bill Clinton gets hundreds of thousands per talk, as did Margaret Thatcher before bad health stopped her.

Of course, if you got the Queensland work through political connections rather than a transparent tender that might be considered problematic, but for the Queensland government, not you.

Your little stoush is looking increasingly pointless. I’m closing this thread for now.

while I make no pretense of having studied this matter, ( of KC’s billing) there seems a certain amount of “weasel wordiness” at play :

KC

The budget was about $50,000 and I received about $25,000 for airfares and related costs.

KC again

the fact is that I only billed about $25,000 for the work I did.

Now, I may be obtuse, but

$25,000 for airfares….

plus

I only billed about $25,000 for the work

looks awfully like $50,000 dollars IN TOTAL to me ?

You originally argued that I made $50,000 related to one week’s work reviewing the Queensland Education Department – the fact is that I only billed about $25,000 for the work I did. While some argue that Western science is simply a socio-cultural construct, there are some truths – one of which is that $25,000 does not equal $50,000. Can you add and subtract?

$50,000 for a week’s work – I’d like to see that! Back then, I never charged anything more than about $500 a day. Let’s say $500 by 5 days = $2,500.

Your airfares and ‘related expenses’ are interesting to say the least. But I suppose that ‘truth’ is all relative. It seems to me that you are a post-modernist when it’s convenient. Sort of ‘dumbing down’ I suppose.

Just thought I would make the ‘truth’ part of the historical record.

For what it is worth. The job for the education department involved two companies, my own, and another called the Collins Hill Group. The budget was about $50,000 and I received about $25,000 for airfares and related costs. I worked for about 10 days on the project and never, never received more than $25,000. Put in an FOI if you don’t believe me. The ‘great’ thing about blogs is that comments like yours go on record without any proof or evidence (irony).

j-p-z
Double cream and a light dusting of heroin?

meantime, though, far graver sins have lately issued from me own sloppy pen…

“Dorothy Parker… Strunk and White…” followed in a later remark by “Wunk and Strite…”

Can you imagine?! I gave myself the rarely-seen opportunity to make the pun Poorothy Darker, and I missed it on the first pass. There are writers who can actually be sued for failure of due diligence over such a misstep.

Oh well. I plead the goodness of the french toast. (I have an evil secret in my recipe, but I’m afraid if I revealed it, anthony would come up with something a million times better in 12 seconds and make me look like an utter doofus.)

meanwhile, silly and gratuitous excerpt from what’s sitting on the desk here beside the computer, that I found while flipping around, waiting for this page to load…

PAINE’S REPUTATION: The world cracks open. Wake up!
PAINE: Oh, Christ, let me be. I want to sleep.
ALL: He wants a mistress.
REPUTATION: The Revolution is your mistress.

– Paul Foster, “Tom Paine, a Play in Two Parts”

Huh. Hunter’s luck…

I’m an MLA Handbook girl myself. Old habits die hard.

And whoops, got the Chicago manual all dyslexically confused. F U NC DR HTS, U YM B SDXLC. Oh well. Wunk and Strite do indeed have much to answer for.

– j_p_z, giving Edward the Confessor a run for his money…

Fyds would also know that the name of that hallowed publication is actually The Chicago Manual of Style.

Strunk and White have a lot to answer for.

Dr. Cat: “Good thing I said ‘from memory’, n’est-ce pas?”

While this is technically perfectly acceptable, from a style point of view it’s simply not the best choice. In the sentence, “It is” is understood (viz., “[It's a] Good thing I said…”), but in the parallel contruction at the end, “n’est-ce pas”, (literally, “is it not?”) “it’s” is technically literally present, rather than understood. This creates a cognitive dissonance in the reader’s mind; the parallel is not a proper mirror image, and therefore just a trifle ill-turned. Importantly, it’s not literally “wrong”; but, as when playing the Sicilian Defence, there are choices, and then there are just better choices. The sentence created a momentary blip of confusion in the reader’s mind, and so failed one of many tests, both as a sentence and as a wry twist. The proof is simply that the expected laugh did not materialize at the stop, as the reader would have wanted; the sitting judge in these cases is Dorothy Parker rather than Strunk and White. Writers can sometimes forget the simple truism that sometimes the best way to correct an error is not to fix it, but simply to do the whole thing a different way.

/ends pedantry, slurps remainder of mimosa, returns to a very late brunch.

And then shoots through when he finds his interlocuters to be of rather a more robust and skeptical frame of mind than whom he normally engages with in the nicely watered and carefully mown op-ed pages and inner city dinner parties where he is generally wont to take his views for a stately canter. He certainly got his head shaved and his arse painted blue at Troppo.

Online, as in real life, he’s an opportunist lurker without true bottom. Regardless of its colour.

Back on topic. You can’t possibly send a teacher into a classroom without at least some basic training in survival skills specific to their profession. I know. In my time at school, I’ve driven at least three substitute/student teachers screaming and gibbering out the door. On the other hand I will always treasure the memory of the primary school english teacher who chucked away the set text to introduce us all instead to TH White’s “The Once and Future King.” I still have his copy.

Or our secondary school physics teacher, a rather louche ex-RAF pilot and former Welsh A-grade rugby player, who had to be bailed out of jail one night by his students after getting drunk and disorderly on an overnight school excursion and then not only made a point of paying us all back in full but also made sure everyone involved got at least a passing grade no matter how boneheaded they were about the electromagnetic spectrum and thermodynamics. I learnt an awful lot from him which has stood me in good stead over the years and none of it had anything to do with physics beyond Newton’s Third Law.

When I hear about the four week program in the US part of me thinks, “That sounds good, I could give it a try and if it doesn’t work out I haven’t lost much”. Then another part thinks, “Yeah right. I’d really be willing to walk in and face 25 year nines with four whole weeks of training behind me.”

I think it’s pretty clear which is the smarter part. I’m sure with no training requirements you could recruit more maths graduates. But I doubt you’d want to.