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It’s animal madness here today. I’ve just had a squirrel leaping around all over my conservatory roof making an amazing racket, before shooting off along the fence top and into the trees.
Meanwhile White Cat has been on holiday for the past fortnight, camping in the garden in the little Ikea tent I originally put up for my granddaughter. She seems to like it a lot. I’m now thinking it needs to be her permanent quarters. It has a built in ground sheet and seems to be rainproof. It even resembles one of the tents you see refugees living in on news programmes. Being the senile idiot cat she now is, however, she’s just come in for food, and whilst I wasn’t looking did a dump in the corner of the conservatory. She spends more than 23 hours of every day outside, but of course has to shit inside. Up with this I can no longer put.
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Watching the repeat of Long Way Round last night was interesting - 3 guys on motorbikes plus two support 4x4 trucks (one of which crashed) making their way slowly across some incredibly difficult terrain through the wilds of Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia, reminded me of the insane times we had journeying back to England across practically the whole of Africa in 1973 in a two wheel drive VW, on a shoestring budget and with no support team whatsoever.
We were most definitely on our own, with just a couple of large-scale Michelin maps to guide us. It’s made me feel determined to do something with the reels of Super 8 movie film I have, and all the slides and photos I took. I really must get them all transferred to digital format and create a proper DVD with a music soundtrack, plus voice-over.
Looking back, the whole thing was pretty epic. Watching the guys on TV cracking up with the sheer effort and frustration of dealing with virtually impassable roads day after day brought back a lot of memories of exhaustion, but also exhilaration and wonderment at some of the landscape, and the kindness of people along the way.
Having done all that I should be ready to do something similar with photos and videos of a career in working in London schools. Lots of highlights and lowlights there too, and another epic trip to put on DVD.
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I suppose Oxzen should have something to say about the Jim Rose article in Education Guardian this week, and about his Primary Curriculum Review.
Peter Wilby, in his article on Jim Rose, concludes that people like Sir Jim “keep the system working”. Was this meant to be ironic? Or is it a supposed to be a genuine compliment that ‘conscientious, hard-working, undogmatic,’ etc, men and women like Jim Rose help to legitimise and prop up a system that’s driven by others who are indeed full of ‘airs and graces, flashiness and egotism’ (which Sir Jim seemingly isn‘t.)
The kind of people, in fact, who enjoy bullying others and creating an education system that’s based on ludicrous notions of academic attainment being pretty much the be all and end all, on league tables, on a culture of targets and testing, and ruthless dismissal of the efforts of conscientious teachers and heads of schools to provide a broad and balanced education that genuinely meets all the needs of children and helps develop the crucial skills and attitudes required for emotional, social and spiritual intelligence.
No doubt Sir Jim can cope as well with this faint praise as he can with the comments of those who maintain he’s basically a fence-sitting career bureaucrat who hides behind bland statements like “I don’t make policy” in order to divert attention from the fact that he’s been so willing to do the bidding of his political masters and not make any waves or offer any opinions that might contradict or challenge the prevailing New Labour orthodoxies. You see, Sir Jim, it’s like this. Very few of us actually make policy, but we can, even if we’re working within the education system, offer opinions to the policy makers that might actually give them pause for thought and cause them to make better policies.
I despise what he had to say about the teaching of reading. He’s clearly no expert on the subject, so what was he doing writing a report that supported an approach to the teaching of reading that skewed the emphasis so heavily towards ‘synthetic phonics’, whether or not learners have such a need?
All he needed to say was that it’s essential for learners to develop grapho-phonic skills, as well as onset and rime skills, and skills in identifying syllables, graphemes and phonemes, but that it’s equally essential for learners to have in their repertoire skills in using picture cues, syntactic cues and semantic cues, and to use such predictive cuing systems from the outset.
Plodding and pounding your way through text using ‘synthetic phonics’ on its own is not the best, the most efficient, the most effective or the most intelligent way of tackling text. It’s just part of everyone’s tool kit for word identification when other strategies aren’t helpful. Otherwise it just slows down and interferes with the whole process, which is a complex and sophisticated one from the very beginning, especially with English, where there are so many high frequency words that are phonically irregular.
I think that just about sums the matter up, except to say, “Once xxxx x txxx there was x . . . .” Get it, Sir Jim? This isn’t about real books versus no books. This is about approaching the teaching of reading as though we, and children, are intelligent, thoughtful, insightful, sophisticated and analytical beings, which happily most of us are. End of.
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Having said all that, it must be said that Sir Jim’s final report on the primary curriculum could well be something we’ve needed for a long time if indeed it delivers what it’s supposed to -
* greater emphasis on personal, social, emotional, physical and spiritual development
* greater emphasis on play-based and active experiential learning throughout at least the foundation stage
* greater emphasis on developing creativity and imagination
* a requirement for Primary schools to introduce foreign languages in ways that make learning them meaningful and enjoyable
But talk about the Long Way Round! This is all stuff that was meant to be happening in our schools from 1966 onwards, and frequently was, prior to the introduction of the National Curriculum, the Primary Strategies, SATs testing and league tables!
We used to be the world leaders in a form of Primary education that genuinely put children and their various developmental needs at the heart of the learning process, before we turned the clocks back, became curriculum obsessed and driven by tests and targets. We used to believe that children should first and foremost learn to love learning for its own sake and should look forward to coming to school in order to enjoy a rich variety of creative learning experiences each and every day. Ha!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/aug/05/ofsted.primaryschools
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I’ve invented a new word for teachers who are responsible for their school’s personal, social, emotional and spiritual development. Zenco.
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And speaking of Zen, there was an excellent article in G2 this week by Miranda Hodgson, “I Became A Zen Buddhist Nun”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/04/healthandwellbeing.familyandrelationships
In it she explains how she used to have “an aggressively atheistic” view of life, but “gradually became aware that there were other, non-theistic approaches to experiencing the spiritual side of life”. She started doing yoga, and was then introduced to Zen meditation by a friend.
She then goes on to say,
“Having previously lived such a goal- and achievement-oriented life, sitting in meditation and simply observing my state of being was a new experience. As I examined my ideals, particularly the validation I sought through unrelenting hard work, I found that they were empty. One by one, they dropped away. I realised there were more important things than climbing the career ladder at any cost. Although it was a liberating experience, it was incredibly frightening at times. I had to reassess my approach to life.”
“I met a Zen master (a practitioner who has received permission to teach), and under him, I made a formal commitment to follow the Zen path. Unlike in Japan, where Zen monks and nuns are supported by the state, Europeans who make this commitment continue to live and work in society as they did before. For me, the decision to ask for nun ordination came easily. It simply felt like the right thing to do; it made sense. Life was beginning to unfold naturally.”
“Because I am now a teacher, I don't shave my head and, as I wear the kolomo and kesa only for meditation, I look no different from anyone else you would see in the street.”
“When most people hear the word nun, they think of Catholic nuns. Often, their first question is why would I want to give up having sex for ever. Stated in this way, it puts sex on a par with things such as smoking or drinking: self-gratifying acts of pleasurable consumption. If one understands sex according to such a selfish, loveless definition, then I suppose that yes, I have "given it up". One of the vows I made when I was ordained pertains to sex, and it states that you should not use your sexuality in a way that harms. It is not what you do, therefore, but how you do it: using someone as a commodity for one's own satisfaction is definitely harmful if considered in that light. Shortly after my ordination, I met a man with whom I now share a relationship based on mutual trust and respect.”
“Some of my students assume I live like a puritan, and are surprised when I tell them that I do drink alcohol and I will eat meat.”
“While my status as a nun usually fosters a dialogue between me and my students, I sometimes feel it separates us. Nowadays, students think that, to be successful in life, they must strive for high scores, regardless of whether academic learning is right for them. I feel sad at how stressed my students get and, during exams, I remember words from a Zen teacher that to "be adequate" is enough in life.”
It seems to me that articles and case studies like this one ought to be central to the curriculum of all our pupils in Secondary schools - not in order to persuade them to become Zen nuns, but in order to point out some issues around atheism, belief in a God as a supreme being, the development of spiritual intelligence, the use of meditation, the purpose of life, the pursuit of academic qualifications and material success, the importance of diet, the use of alcohol, and the importance of a serious and respectful approach to sexuality that is enjoyable and affirmative at the same time as being non-exploitative and another route to satori and spiritual joy.
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