.
Polly Toynbee had another excellent column in the Guardian this week, with every sentence worthy of the highlighter pen:
Labour has one last chance to catch the public mood
Anger at fat cats and tax dodgers needs a political narrative to sustain it. Brown must look to Obama and take the lead.
Are we in the midst of a radical shift in political culture? Measuring its significance or durability in the febrile moment is not easy. Is this anti-banker, anti-bonus spasm only a transitory fit that will be gone as soon as house prices start to rise again? Forces pull in both directions: governments try to re-assert their power over markets, while the masters of the universe try to carry on as if nothing much will change.
Now even a Conservative press rages at company functionaries still rewarding themselves undeserved fortunes.
See how the Telegraph and Mail follow the public mood with anti fat-cat invective these days: a year ago such talk was "class war" and "the politics of envy".
Yet how profound and long-lasting will all this be? How long before the masters of the universe assert themselves again, ride out the spasm, find new loopholes and intimidate future governments with warnings against any interference that risks the fragile recovery? After all, no sign of culture change reaches the boardrooms. GlaxoSmithKline just gave its CEO a 17.6% pay rise, bringing his salary to £1m with five times that sum in shares.
The cartel of top earners sitting on each other's boards has been blamed, along with the tiny coterie of auditors and remuneration consultants who pumped up pay and signed it off as the "market rate" they had created. Is there a sign the government dares to blow in fresh air?
It now looks as if closing tax havens will be the G20's key success. Obama campaigned on the Stop Tax Havens Act now in Congress. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel want Switzerland added to the blacklist, along with the 30 to 40 others. Brown has been latest on this issue, with an ignoble record of resisting EU attempts.
Transparency changes things. Labour has a year to lead the public mood; so far it has been dragged along behind it. With no political narrative, this chance to push back the forces of inequality will be lost. What bitter irony if loathing of Labour means the Tories take over despite the first authentic egalitarian public mood in years.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/10/brown-bankers-bonuses
-----------------------------------------------
There were well over 200 comments posted on Comment Is Free after this article. Oxzen wrote:
It’s hard to say, sometimes, whose comments are the most annoying to have to plough through in order to get to the good stuff on CIF - ignorant conservatives or rabid leftists. Polly Toynbee has been consistently a thoughtful, intelligent, left-of-centre commentator who deserves the respect and high regard of all social democrats and left-liberals, who after all make up the majority amongst the thinking classes, and indeed the masses who voted for the Labour landslide in 1997.
She's consistently criticised New Labour from a progressive position, and advocated transformational policies that are in line with what most of us want in terms of greater social justice and equality, in terms of tackling poverty, improving schools and early years provision, social services, the health service, and so on.
This latest column was a brilliant summary of how things stand politically in this country, and why Parliament, not just New Labour, must seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enact the reforms that we, the people, demand.
If Brown and New Labour can finally bring themselves to do something truly radical they could even find they have substantial support from swing voters, middle of the road conservatives and the pissed-off middle classes. And lets face it, it's only though radical action they stand any chance of winning back support from true socialists and progressives.
And if radical action doesn't improve their popularity? Too bad. After all, what's the Labour party for? It wasn’t created to provide a little trickle-down wealth, to maintain inequality or preserve dog-eat-dog unregulated capitalism.
------------------------------------------------------
Someone signed in as jgm2 wrote this wonderful comment:
Re: “However the nazis are just the most familiar example and by no means the only. It always worry me when politicians try to capture the public mood because government should be about leading, not cheer leading.”
Fred Goodwin is just Gordon 'Big Brother' Brown's equivalent of Emmanuel Goldstein. It's a cliche but it's unfortunately true. This government doesn't consider '1984' a warning. It considers it a fucking blueprint.
Rewriting history. Infallible leadership. Perpetual unwinnable wars with constantly shifting alliances. Privileged Party members and insiders all well looked after. Until they step out of line at which point they are immediately ostracised. Control of the 'media narrative'. Constant surveillance. Constant monitoring of our movements/correspondence/phone calls/e-mails. Individuals being singled out by the state for mass hate-fests.
Sod Jules Verne getting lucky predicting the yanks would pioneer space travel. Sod Leonardo Da Vinci and his drawings of 'helicopters'. George Orwell truly was a fucking genius. Every single fucking nightmare scenario he envisaged. Bang on the fucking money.
---------------------------------------------------
Children’s Services
I was listening to people talking on the radio this morning about the Sharon Shoesmith case, and the idea that local authority directors of children's services need to be offered training and support so that they can do their jobs properly. Bless. What a wonderful country we live in - we create these mega high powered jobs by insisting on merging education and social services - huge jobs that virtually no-one is able to do effectively, let alone be qualified though professional training or experience to do them - and after a couple of years we say, wouldn't it be a good idea if we give these poor incompetent underqualified sods some proper training and support? That should fix the problem. At least after that none of them will be able to claim that they didn't know what they were supposed to do and didn't really know how to do it, like they do now.
Incidentally, I’m not commenting here on the rights and wrongs of dismissing Shoesmith - I’ve already done that in previous blogs. Simon Jenkins wrote a good column about it this week:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/11/simon-jenkins-ed-balls-babyp-shoesmith
“Shoesmith's biggest mistake was not to be a bank boss.”
What I’m concerned about is the way this government has played about with bureaucratic structures with little or no consultation or preparation for the changes it drove through, and I’m livid about the way it which it maintains its command and control clunking fist policy with its targets and inspections culture that does nothing for children, and reveals little of value about the true effectiveness of local authorities.
Simon Jenkins rightly berates Mr Balls for the central part he’s played in developing and maintaining the targets culture, and for being a ludicrous lifelong professional politician with no knowledge of, or feeling for, the real world outside of Westminster.
"Balls runs one of Whitehall's worst departments: ask any teacher or social worker. When accidents happen - nobody in authority wanted Baby P to die - the charge of negligence cannot rest with local staff. In this top-heavy and hierarchical public sector, it should go to the top. Those who always claim the credit must take the blame."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/mar/12/childprotection-social-care
----------------------------------------------------------------
I hear on the grapevine about the leadership in certain local authorities running around in frenzies, convening whole-day meetings of 50 or more senior children’s services managers, looking at ‘issues’, doing ‘workshops’ in which directors of education get down on the floor (literally) with flip chart pads and marker pens, trying to map out ‘how to move forward’ with the children’s ‘wellbeing agenda’, desperately trying to think what to do about their latest Whitehall-generated set of targets or the fact that they still have so many schools being hammered by Ofsted, blah, blah, blah . . .
I hear about ‘school improvement’ managers trying to reconcile their concern about children’s wellbeing with the fact that they’ve spent several years banging on about raising SATs scores and GCSE scores to the exclusion of all else. These poor dears must in some dim way realise that they’ve been the very agents of the destruction of real education, as far as children are concerned, since these are the people who have turned schools into soulless and joyless results factories, using and abusing children and teachers for their own wellbeing in terms of career progress.
Forcing children to do ‘Big Writing’ instead of anything meaningful, to use more ‘connectives’ in order to create longer and more middle-class-sounding sentences in their writing (extra marks in tests!!), to use more ‘Wow Words’ (flowery and usually inappropriate terminology - extra marks in tests!!), and forcing children to do less of the things they actually enjoy doing and more of the stuff they hate doing in order to jack up the schools’ test results - all of this amounts to the abuse of children, though no-one wants to admit it.
And of course they’ll all continue to deny what’s happened and insist that they did things they thought were right for children - as if getting a low Level 4 compared with a high Level 3 at the age of 11 really means a damn in terms of ‘access to the curriculum’ at secondary school. As if stressing children, boring them and denying them their human rights (for example to a broad, balanced and interesting curriculum) is better for them in the long run than helping children to see that learning can be enjoyable for its own sake, whatever your current level of literacy. Never mind a creative and active style of learning that’s bound to make children more enthusiastic about school than a dull life of drudgery in the education workhouse.
---------------------------------------------------
This is a good column in today’s paper, by Seamoose Milne, especially for political anoraks:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/12/miners-strike
The miners' strike of 1984-5, which officially kicked off 25 years ago today, was . . . a social and political tipping point that has had no real parallel anywhere else in the world. And now that the free-market fundamentalism unleashed by Margaret Thatcher in the strike's aftermath is being so comprehensively discredited by the crisis of deregulated capitalism she championed, it should be a good time to reassess the most determined bid to resist it in the first place.
The full costs of the war against the miners - including the strike, closures, redundancies and economic and welfare costs - are well over £30bn at current prices and far exceed those of the more rational energy policy the Tories rejected to crush the core of organised labour.
A generation later, these debates about the strike can seem arcane. But its outcome could not matter more for the country we have inherited. It's not just the wreckage of mining communities, but the entire political and economic direction has been shaped by the fallout from that convulsive dispute. The enfeeblement of unions, the explosion of inequality, social atomisation, the collapse of confidence in a political alternative and Britain's harsh brand of neoliberalism all flow from its aftermath. Success for the miners would, by contrast, have at least seriously weakened Thatcher, reined in the government's worst excesses and halted Labour's headlong rush for the third way.
The strike was a fight for jobs, but it was also a challenge to the market-driven restructuring of economic and social life already under way. It raised the alternative of a different Britain from the greed and individualism of the Thatcher years, rooted in solidarity and collective action. As the neoliberal order that Thatcher helped to build crumbles before us, that is a message that speaks to our times.
.
Showing posts with label academic tests. Show all posts
Showing posts with label academic tests. Show all posts
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Layer 65 Long Strange Trips and Seeking Enlightenment.
.
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.
---------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------
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
--------------------------------------------
I’ve invented a new word for teachers who are responsible for their school’s personal, social, emotional and spiritual development. Zenco.
-------------------------------------------
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.
.
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.
---------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------
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
--------------------------------------------
I’ve invented a new word for teachers who are responsible for their school’s personal, social, emotional and spiritual development. Zenco.
-------------------------------------------
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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