Training Shmaining

My posting on here has been erratic this week--I've posted the posts I would have, but they've not really been one-a-day like usual.

The reason for that is because I have been working on a training course. And it's not been a whole lot of fun.

The idea is that one of the companies we do work for wants to get a better idea of how the work we do works... er, if you can unpick that sentence, more power to you :/. The training started off as a bit of a weird thing in the proposal we responded to. It was aimed at them essentially receiving enough training to do the work we do themselves.

That seemed like a very dumb idea to us. One of the fundamental points it ignores is that if you're not the sort of person who is adept at stats, then you're just never going to 'get it'.

I know in these ages of equality and stuff we're not supposed to say stuff like this, but the fundamental truth is that different people's brains are wired in different ways. And that means that some people will never be any good at some things. Sure, they might be able to work hard and gain some competency, but there's a huge gap between that and having a natural ability at something.

Anyway, it never quite panned out that way and so instead, we've given a mini "introductory" session. It's been hell putting it together--balancing elements of what the person will be able to grasp and actually covering some useful stuff.

And there were some worrying signs--asking of questions we'd actually answered in material we'd already covered, for example. But I think some of it sunk in.

It definitely put paid to any possible notion of me becoming a teacher. Not that I've ever wanted to be a teacher, but this confirmed it's definitely not something I have a natural affinity for.

And this joyous week of work has been capped off with me having to put myself forward for some SPSS seminar rubbish.

Basically, they're just a massive hard-sell for SPSS add-ons, but the boss seems to think it's going to be useful. Really I wanted to say 'no' to going, but I always worry about--being overly negative, not wanting to "advance" myself. Better to just grit my teeth and bear it and then say it was useless afterwards, I think.

Plus it's on a Friday, so it's not a bad day out of the office to have.