Modelo 1 · C1 Advanced: Reading completo (partes 5 a 8)

The town that took down its signs

In 2003 the Dutch town of Drachten removed most of the traffic signs, road markings and lights from its centre. The scheme was the work of Hans Monderman, a traffic engineer who had spent years arguing that the safest road is one that looks slightly dangerous. Journalists arrived expecting carnage. They did not get it: collisions at the town’s busiest junction fell, and have stayed low.

The reasoning behind shared space, as the idea came to be called, is not that rules are bad. It is that a driver who is being told what to do stops deciding. A light that says go is an instruction, and instructions are obeyed without looking. Remove the light and the driver has no choice but to make eye contact with whoever else is there, and eye contact, Monderman liked to say, is the oldest traffic system we have.

The evidence is better than the sceptics claimed and weaker than the enthusiasts pretended. Speeds fall reliably; that much is not in dispute, and it is most of the safety benefit, since a pedestrian struck at twenty miles an hour usually survives and one struck at forty usually does not. Casualty figures, though, are small numbers in small places, and small numbers move about for reasons that have nothing to do with design. Several of the most quoted schemes were also resurfaced, narrowed and planted at the same time, so the removal of the signs cannot be separated from everything else that was done.

The strongest objection has nothing to do with statistics. A system that depends on negotiation works well for people who are in a position to negotiate. Blind and partially sighted pedestrians rely on the kerb to tell them where the road begins and on the crossing to tell them when to walk; a surface that treats all users as equals in practice hands the advantage to the user inside the heavy, fast object. Campaigners made this argument early and were, for a decade, largely ignored. They are not ignored now, and several British schemes have had their crossings and kerbs put back.

What survives, then, is narrower than the original claim but more useful. Nobody serious now proposes taking the signs off a main road. What has entered ordinary practice is the smaller insight: that the design of a street tells drivers how to behave far more effectively than any sign does, and that a street which looks like a room is driven through more slowly than a street which looks like a road.

Four commentators on homework in primary schools

A
The research on primary homework is unusually clear: the measurable effect on attainment is close to nothing. That said, attainment is not the point. A short daily task teaches a child to start something without being watched, which is a habit schools are otherwise badly placed to teach. I would keep it, and keep it short.

B
On the research I have nothing to add: the effect on attainment is not there, and the studies are consistent about it. Where I part company is with the claim that homework builds independence. What it builds, in most houses, is a nightly argument, and what the child learns is that schoolwork is the thing that causes it. Primary schools should set none at all.

C
I am less impressed than most by the studies, in either direction: they average over households that have nothing whatever in common. A task that a confident parent supports in ten minutes takes an exhausted one an hour, and takes a parent who does not read the language of the school something close to forever. Homework does not measure the child. It should therefore be work that needs no adult, or it should not be set.

D
Nineteen years of teaching, and I have never met a colleague who believed primary homework raised results; the evidence has been settled for a long time. We set it because parents expect it. It is sometimes said that it teaches children to work alone; in my experience it teaches them that somebody at home will do it with them. The honest reform would be to say all this out loud and stop, but no head teacher wants to be first.

The man who counted every tree in the park

For eleven years, Sam Achebe has been counting trees. His subject is a single municipal park in Sheffield, four hundred metres by six hundred, and his method is a notebook.

(11)

The idea began as an argument. The council’s own figure, quoted in a leaflet, was around two thousand trees. Sam, who had walked the park every day for a decade, thought that was nonsense.

(12)

The first count took four months and produced 3,114. It also produced something he had not expected: a map of what was dying.

(13)

Since then the count has been repeated every spring. The notebooks now take up a shelf.

(14)

What has come out of it is not what anybody would have predicted. The park’s total has barely moved. What has moved is what the total is made of.

(15)

The council now uses his figures. This took a while.

(16)

He is sixty-eight. Asked what happens to the count when he stops, he says that two people have already offered to take it over, and that he has told them both to start their own instead.

Four adults who went back to university

A — Claudia
I signed up for evening classes at thirty-eight with the vague idea that it would be good for my career. It was not; my employer was indifferent, and the promotion I eventually got had nothing to do with it. What it did change was the way I read. I had spent fifteen years skimming and had forgotten that some things reward being read twice. The hardest part was not the work but the company: I was the only person in my seminar group who had to leave at nine to relieve a babysitter, and for a whole term I assumed that made me a visitor rather than a student.

B — Ramón
I left a job in insurance at forty-five to study composition, which everybody I know described, to my face, as brave. Brave is what people say when they mean reckless. I had eleven years of savings and I have spent seven of them. Was it worth it? Professionally, no: I earn a third of what I used to, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Personally it is not even close. The thing nobody warned me about was how much of the first year goes on unlearning. I arrived with thirty years of listening and a great many confident opinions, and almost all of the opinions had to go.

C — Inés
I studied at a distance, which everybody assumes is the easy option and is not. There is no room you have to be in, and therefore no evening on which anything at all forces you to begin. I set an alarm for five in the morning for four years, and I would not recommend that to anybody whose children still wake in the night. The advantage, and it is a real one, is that I never once had to choose between an essay and the school run. I finished in the same year my eldest started secondary school, which was not planned and which I now find very funny.

D — Paulo
I started a degree at twenty and left after a year; started again at thirty-one and left after two. What was different at fifty-two was not how much I wanted it, because I had wanted it the other two times as well. It was that I asked for help in the first month instead of the seventh. I had always treated needing an extension as proof that I did not belong there. The tutor I had this time told me, in the first week, that three quarters of her students ask for one, and I think that single sentence is the reason I have a degree.