Which of this month’s begging letters from my almae matres more rapidly and effectively earned its place in my bin? Was it the one from Oxford University that began: Dear Mr Counsell Today the defining struggle in the world is between relentless growth and the potential for collaboration. which, if it means anything at all, is cobblers? Or was it […]
The BBC’s Paris correspondent Hugh Schofield is broadly happy with his children’s French education, but he does have one complaint: French schools have absolutely no extra-curricular activities. There are no debating societies, no orchestras, no film clubs, no sports teams, no painting classes, no school newspapers, and no drama, at least none worthy of the name. This, it […]
I hated Oxford and didn’t speak to anyone the whole first term, she says.I hated the way students used big words when plain English would do, how they laughed at things that weren’t funny, and how they spent the day in the library, then lied that they’d done no work. I also thought they’d reject […]
The guitarist in the band I’m in has a diploma in (popular) music performance and his music theory is pretty good—certainly better than mine—but he was never taught any music history and he’s only just turned twenty-one. So when, during a discussion about the scores the sax player had written1 for himself and the trumpet […]
I’ve been reading “a blog from the back room” and “Conor’s Commentary” for a few months. Now I’ve added them both to the roll here.
In the summer of 2006, a particular grim one for British sport, this blog made public the list of new events planned for the 2012 London Olympics. Following the nation’s successes in Beijing, that has been further revised to include the following, again in alphabetical order: 4x4 Hundred-School Run Aussie Baiting Chopper-, Grifter-, Strika-, and Tomahawk-Class Cycling Eton Fives Guyball […]
This morning I received an email from a community college in Canada asking permission to publish a link on its Website to the Website of Index on Censorship.
For a long time, PooterGeek’s homepage has been decorated with a school photo of me shot in, I think, 1979. I’ve taken the sensible advice of one of my readers and moved it. It’s still here, but on the “About” page where it doesn’t unbalance the new site design. The original print from which the image […]
Every year the National Union of Teachers conference can be counted on for some beyond-parody educationalist nonsense. I enjoyed this one today from the BBC News site. As part of the perennial moan that children are being tested too much an NUT delegate worried that: Even nursery-age children were being taught to spell and write […]
On Christmas Day, I posted a quick snap of my niece and nephew taken with my new freebie digital camera. I’ve just got some scans of developed film back from the lab so I can share a few steam-powered Christmas photos with you. Here’s Sam playing with one of his new remote-controlled dinosaurs: Sam and his T. Rex[click […]
I was so uncool at university that I only made it to the periphery of a gang of sad scientists. One full member of the group could play immaculate air drums. I think he might have owned a small drum kit at some point, but he wasn’t a drummer. He’d sit on a chair in […]
While I’m away, you might want to read Let’s Be Sensible’s “science” round-up and a couple of posts at Mr E’s place. This one is about a news story that highlights the absurdities of religious schools in England and Wales and this one is about the latest Conservative Party screw-up. When they do get rid of Cameron as […]
Following on from Tim’s comment, according to BBC News online: More young people would take science degrees if they were given a financial incentive, claim industry experts. […but obviously we’d rather the government came up with this financial incentive while we continue to offer those with science degrees less than they are worth, and complain about […]
Beachy Head[click image to enlarge it] I was eating breakfast in an hotel in Cambridge the Saturday morning after I shot that college ball. A tall, intense-looking man with a beard sat down at a table nearby. He pulled a hardback book out of his briefcase and began underlining paragraphs heavily with a soft pencil. […]
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Also posted in Academia, Cambridge, Englishness, Family, Friends, Life, Literature, Photography, PooterGeek, Science, UK, Work
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This has been online for so long and is so funny that it’s hard to believe that no one has sent me a link to it before. Perhaps this is because it’s a German health and safety video and, for the first minute or so, is exactly as entertaining as that description suggests. But it […]
I think I should write a script that automatically generates a post linking to Shamer’s latest review of Question Time every week.
I’m probably in a (large) minority in thinking this, but it’s a Bad Thing that we’re raising a generation of science students who won’t get this joke.
This civil engineering computer simulation [YouTube video] of one of the September 11 impacts is all the more shocking for being created without factoring in the explosions or heat damage. It also omits the fleeing spectating Jews, holographically concealed missiles, and shaped charges planted in the tower by giant lizards. Scientists and engineers, eh? They’re […]
My dad has long been associated, as a member and officer, with the largest UK teaching union, the NAS/UWT. Indeed, in classic working-class northerner style, he first had a heart attack as he arrived at a union conference. Equally typically, after it was initially misdiagnosed by a junior doctor as a digestive problem, he just […]
Jogging from the bank yesterday evening to catch Richard Brincklow’s in-store performance at Passenger’s launch of their new single [buy it now!*], I stopped to photograph this: Regulars will know that I am not an admirer of Banksy’s work, but circumstances and the shrewd planning of the staff at artrepublic temporarily turned the 2006 effort of […]
“Chippy!” is the cry of a winner in the lottery of birth losing an argument. There’s a scene near the beginning of Casino Royale in which Vesper Lynd practises some amateur psychology on 007 as they sit opposite each other on the Eurostar. She says something like: You’re Oxford, but not from money, hence that huge chip […]
My sister has done her share of lecturing and teaching in some of England and Wales’s less illustrious educational institutions. Now (as I have bragged before on her behalf) she teaches law in the sixth form of one of the best state schools in the country. The school is so good she and her family […]
Despite attending The Best School in England™, the Leader of the Opposition only managed four As, five Bs, and a C in his ‘O’ levels.
You can download a series of Glasgow University lectures about Kant on MP3.
I’m busy so, instead of writing my own stuff, I’ll just point at the efforts of some other bloggers. This at Fisking Central is a point worth making over and over again: Utopia doesn’t refer to a better world; it’s used to describe a perfect world. Belief in human perfectability—and its accompanying rejection of all that is imperfect—is […]
Germany has the lowest birthrate in Europe. Luckily, help is at hand.
Congrats to my sister, Clare, and my brother-in-law, Steve, who are, according to the schools inspectorate, teaching at one of the best of the best of the best in the country. (PooterSis versus Sky update: it’s already looking bad for Murdoch’s empire. Once the dust has cleared, I expect to be appointed Head of Programming.)
I hadn’t noticed this until I read Tom Hamilton’s post at Let’s Be Sensible, but the Devil’s Kitchen calls the Mr Eugenides essay that I blogged about “one of the finest posts ever written”. Does Eton College do refunds? Also, having read the latest post at Never Trust A Hippy, I must revise my slur on […]
GOT A TINY SPARE ROOM? EARLY-RETIRED TEACHER (MUSIC AND ENGLISH) WOULD LIKE TO LIVE IN IT IN RETURN FOR ANY COMBINATION OF THE FOLLOWING: CLEANING, SHOPPING, DOG-WALKING, COMPANIONSHIP, LIFE COACHING, LIFE COACHING FOR VEGANS, LIFE COACHING FOR CRICKETERS, PIANO OR ORGAN TUITION, ENGLISH TEACHING, HELP WITH DYSLEXIA, ETC, ETC. [FOLLOWED BY CONTACT DETAILS]