Had one of the best laughs at the squadron last night for a while.
The adj showed us these on sharepoint
Firstly a IBN (or should that be BIN) about waste management and how we need a licence to get rid of rubbish from the squadron. No one has said a thing in the years I’ve been here, where we take it in turns to put the highly suspicious drink cans, sweet wrappers etc in our bins at home.
Secondly some squadrons have been putting 1st Class stuff on their websites and how if anyone uses it, it is cheating. Which overlooks the open book, look on the internet, exams we can do for Leading and up, which isn’t cheating of course.
Whilst I can understand you laughing…
It was debated on here in depth previously about the waste transfer license, as far as I am concerned it’s the only pro-active thing HQAC has done in years.
As someone who needs to deal with waste licenses daily and has been stopped and checked by SEPA without that in place it could of cost me my house…
To help out the squadron to take a way a bag of rubbish it’s a high price to pay!
So I imagine you work for the LA or a waste disposal/skip hire firm?
What on squadrons would not be considered “domestic waste” and be quite legitimately in the car?
From my house I have taken furniture of all sorts broken up, all manner of old what could be considered as building materials like bricks, concrete, fencing, timber, old paint and far more in the way of chopped down bushes, trees etc, and not to mention party detritus to the local tip, all of which can come from squadrons. A lot of which could be considered trade waste, if you stuck it in a van, with *** Builders/Gardeners etc on the side. There have been times I’ve been back and forth several times during the day when we’ve had a major clear out and not a question asked.
When you consider what comes out of mine and thousands of cars when I go to the local tip, this is just another piece of nonsense from some chair sitter at HQAC getting far too excited about something that squadrons have been dealing with for years and years and no one has batted an eyelid.
On a more practical note, how many from SEPA or others are around checking vehicles at anytime let alone at say 2130, when people might have a bag of squadron rubbish in their car? When you see the amount that’s fly tipped at night, I would guess none. One of our friends is an EHO and does the environment and cleaning side and he has said they can’t employ enough people to deal with fly-tippers, let alone ordinary people. His daughter is a Guide and the leaders take turns to take the rubbish home. I suppose an option is just throw it around the town and let the council deal with it.
Again a case that HQAC need to focus on the important things and not peripheral nonsense.
For this to become “a thing” who on earth said anything to someone? No doubt one lacking any common sense.
HQAC has allowed through inaction 1000s of staff to break the law. On the grans scheme of things a lot less important than gliders but if Flt Lt AN Other of 1234 Sqn or you ended up in court over this and were fined five figures I bet you would not be happy. This is something that should have been done a long time ago. They can now move on to something more important.
So how have squadrons yours included got rid of rubbish for years?
Even into my early days as staff we all took turns to take the rubbish home.
Unless it now is, I don’t ever remember an AI question being, how do you get rid of your rubbish in the last year?
Breaking the law would dumping over the fence. If you were stopped at 2130+ with a bag of day to day rubbish in the boot, which given they seem pretty powerless to do anything for those fly-tipping, and would anyone from the authorities get mildly excited. in the past we’ve taken old bits of ‘furniture’ from the squadron to the local tip and the most anyone’s been asked in proof of residence in the borough and they took an old filing cabinet into their office to use. Recycling in action. I had got these taken off the inventory which was a palaver and asked that the RAF come and take it away, which got the expected response,
Who uses this? If this has been around for while, we haven’t and I can’t see us bothering, certainly won’t.
The question is in say the last 20 years since separating household rubbish has been a thing, has anyone from the ATC
been caught with bag of squadron rubbish in their car
been prosecuted after being caught with a bag of squadron rubbish in their car
I suspect not.
As, if this had happened it would have been all over here and no doubt many emails and orders produced from HQAC.
Are you being deliberately thick or are you trolling?
What you did in the past is entirely irrelevant. You might have been breaking the law then, you might not, I don’t know when the law changed.
Are you Teflon in disguise? Because your arguments are along the same lines as his.
What I’ve done in the past is break the law. I’ve used a bin that belonged to my old TA centre which the council took, because they didn’t know any different. When I spoke to our council and asked for an extra bin and recycling containers (because I didn’t know any better), they told me we don’t pay council tax and aren’t entitled to any waste collection, and we’re a commercial producer so we need to pay someone to come and collect it. This would have cost around £400 IIRC when I got some quotes, and then you have the problem of access to the bins etc.
This is someone somewhere doing something to protect you from prosecution. Wake up and realise that.
Now all we need to fix is actually having sanitary waste bins for females and we might be in the 21st century.
No I don’t and you are a absolute muppet with your statements… what went on in the past is not even remotely similar to today’s legal positioning on waste laws so stop trying to find a problem!
I’m not seeing a problem and I fully expect we will just carry on what we are doing.
As soon as someone highlights something this creates a problem, such asking the council what can I do about my rubbish. Fortunately LAs (having worked for one) don’t seem very good a joined up thinking or that sort of question could land an awful lot of other groups in trouble.
I wonder where you would stand on something a mate of mine did, in the 80s and 90s which was collect drink cans and take them to his local scrap merchant and got a few quid for the squadron. I have to admit I’ve thought doing the same today with the little nitrous oxide bottles you see lying around.
Enough about that what about the suggestion people are cheating the first class exam?
On sharepoint it said that some squadrons had been putting first class cadet logbook answers on their websites and if people used it, it would be cheating. Which seemed to miss the irony that HQAC openly encourage open book exams for all other levels, which is in reality a form of cheating.
I know a few teachers who would love GCSEs to be open book.
You may not see it, but there is a difference between permitting access to resources and allowing people to research the topic during an exam, and posting a list of the answers to be copied verbatim.
Research?
No. Look through the limited text until you find the answer is not research. Research to me is being given a topic, looking through many different resources and writing something. A bit like what I’ve done when putting lessons together all of my time as an instructor in the ATC, look through different things and put the lesson together. Made a lot easier since the interweb.
The 1st class “exam” is the only thing we do classification wise where cadets have to be actually taught (however you decide to do it for 7 subjects ) learn, remember and regurgitate things verbatim, which is very school like. Which is what I thought we were supposed to have moved away from. The first class is not even multi-choice, but we had an m/c one left by an old member of staff. If people have taken the decision to level the playing field between that and the other levels, good on 'em.
Well that seemed to be Gordon Moulds’ assertion, make things less school like.
I’ve been waiting for the other classes to have a similar book to first class.
The comment on s/point alludes it could affect BTECs. Quite how anyone would know is interesting, given no one is likely to look at the books for 3 or 4 years after completion, if at all.
i always thought/believed that first class wasn’t included in the BTEC qualification - too low level and only from Leading upwards did the “modules” count towards the final score and certificate?
I’ve always felt that GM got it a bit backwards though - it wasn’t an occasional, 10-20 minute exam that was making things school-like and boring, but the lessons themselves.
I’m still not quite sure why we put such an emphasis on academic stuff, other than it’s what’s gone before and because it’s too hard to try and measure soft skills.
The academic side still alludes to the old notion that cadets WILL go into the RAF and what they learn might be useful if they do. The subject matter up to Leading is reasonably useful for cadet things, as is some of the piston engine stuff for later life, but the other things at Senior/MAC, very, very limited in its usefulness. But it is easy to assess and gives a standard framework.
I think we should be doing far more practical things and developing skills, that might relate to work, but more definitely home life. We attempted some model making last year and because it couldn’t be done in 5 minutes most of the cadets lost interest. Much of the problem seemed to be their fear of tools and how they might injure themselves. I’ve been looking at some small projects making things, but the first thing will be getting offcuts of wood that they can use chisels, drill, cut, nail and screw together and finding out that hitting yourself with domestic tools such as a hammer or catching yourself with saw doesn’t kill you.
You’re right that soft skills can’t be measured solely as they are too subjective to the individual doing the assessment and people do things differently, but get the same result. I used to assess Staff P2 lessons and only failed one cadet who it was plainly evident had not done any prep at all and just winged it, playing the fool, which was disrespectful to the other cadets who had put some effort in. All the others I was involved in assessing were IMO fine as they were still learning and developing their style of presenting things.
A fair few of my law exams were open book. Contract was open book, with no restrictions on the amount of notes we could take in. (The trade off was that if you took too much in you could spend too much time reading and not enough writing.)
At Bar School we were allowed to write entire paragraphs in our opinion writing textbooks and copy them verbatim if they applied to the question. However, we weren’t given the answers, that’s a very different thing.
The reality is that I do this at work every day. I don’t write every advice or draft every order from scratch, I recycle, edit and copy good paragraphs from existing orders. My job is not a memory test, I take my textbooks (well, laptop) to court and read them as I go. (Sometimes watching a trial is like watching a synchronised reading competition as both lawyers and the judge all try and work out the answer.)
Considering when at school we used razor sharp chisels, tenon and big wood saws and hammers plus drills and lathes in woodwork, I wonder how we have got here at times. I opened my thumb up on a craft knife at primary school, bled a bit, teacher put a bandage on, went home with it, dad who was a nurse looked at it and just said we’ll see how it goes, healed without a problem in a few days.
Tell that to the kids today and they’ll never believe you.