Paedophile PANIC!

Another example of how barmy life is becoming in the UK. Why do people accept this crap? There are a large group of people who love rules and regulations and follow them to the letter because they haven't the brains to see what they are doing, or they enjoy the control over people.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/5560978/Parents-banned-from-taking-pictures-of-their-own-children-at-sports-day.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5732821/Parents-banned-from-sports-day-over-paedophile-fears.html

Get a grip! It's gone too far.

Dentists

Thank God for dentists (AND ANAESTHETIC)

I recently had a deep infection in a molar right down to the root. My jaw swelled up like a football. The molar had a very old amalgam filling and the infection had got underneath it somehow. The dentist opened it up and my mouth was filled with the most awful taste and smell. A course of antibiotics and I was back a week later to have the root canals cleaned and a temporary filling put in. The tooth is saved and I am off the pain killers.

The past is history,
The future is a mystery
But the present is a gift.
That is why it is called the present.

Quote from the film "Kung-fu Panda"

Are your learners achieving their full potential? Have you identified all the learning objectives? Are your lessons outstanding? Is jargon getting you down?

Why is there a plethora of jargon in the teaching profession? My suspicion is that jargon proliferates when people don't know what the hell they are talking about.

More examples:

"Advanced skills teachers"

"Mission statement" (what the hell is a mission statement anyway?)

"Key skills"

"Excellence"

"In-service education and training"

The teaching profession is perhaps the only profession where you can have two degrees (most have a BSc / BA + PGCE) and still be told by some idiot in management that you have to plan every lesson that you do according to some absurdly complex minute-by-minute breakdown, listing every single "learning objective" and "outcome". There are people who make a living out of making our lives a misery by running stupid courses and introducing the latest "initiative" (which by the way has to have a three letter acronym like AFL).

Then the management of a school decides to introduce (usually on a whim) this latest initiative without any explanation or training to say what it is. This happened in my school - with this thing called AFL. We are supposed to be "implementing" it and we are having an inspection soon. It is supposed to be in our schemes of work - but get this - we have not been given the long-promised school policy on AFL (which stands for assessment for learning - well what else is assessment supposed to be for ????).

Oh well.

Ignorance of Science of Prime Significance in Understanding Society

I am reminded time and again of the incredible ignorance of the majority of the scientific method, the dependence of our society on science and technology, the extent to which our lives would be affected without it, and the ignorance of those who decide educational policy. I think this problem is critical in understanding society today. It explains how schools, businesses and government are awash with the "Power Point" mentality, and daft meaningless 'brainstormings' and so forth. There is the obsession in the education system with planning lessons, controlling, observing, categorising, when it is all a load of bunk. Those in control from the Department for Children, Schools and Families (or whatever they call themselves these days) down to Principals think that we need to plan our lessons down to the nearest minute according to 'learning objectives' so that the 'learners' can 'achieve their full potential'. There is a heavy use of jargon and it is all invented and pointless. My suspicion is that those who get into management feel insecure in the classroom and want to lord it over the rest of us. Perhaps as a result of this insecurity, they feel the need to plan obsessively and spread the misery.

Any halfwit knows that if you teach three subjects, are a form tutor, teach years 7, 8 9, and both IB classes, there is no way on God's earth that you can find time to plan every lesson, write your schemes of work, answer emails, do duties, do the marking, mark exam papers, plan experiments, order text books, write reports, meet parents and keep your records up to date.

Dr David Timms

I knew David Timms (on the right) from when he was doing his postdoctoral studies at Warwick University. He was about four years older than me. He had just completed his physics PhD and I was an undergraduate. When I started my PhD in 1989, he was a colleague in the same small research group and I worked with him until I had a career change in 1996. He was originally from South Wales and came to Warwick as an undergraduate.

He was generous with his time, not just on scientific matters. He often helped me out searching for second hand cars or repairing small problems. He was an all-rounder, very capable at everything he set his hand to. He was at home in the machine room in the physics department operating a lathe as he was at programming a computer.

He loved to talk to people and was full of interesting stories. I knew he was mad about fishing and he told me the story about the 30kg cat fish he caught at Chernobyl when I met him last in 2004. Here is a picture of it.

When I knew him, he was working as a Radiation Physicist at Portsmouth University. He specialised in environmental physics, doing acoustic surveys for example and taught coastal navigation, environmental chemistry, physics and mathematics for environmental scientists amongst others. It was as an environmental physicist that he went to Chernobyl. See this article here.

I tried to email Dave about a year ago and then discovered that he was no longer working at Portsmouth. I never suspected that Dave had died. I tried again this week to find out what had happened to him when I found a picture of him on an Irish angling forum with a comment that he had died after a brief illness. I thought it had to be a different person, but there was a picture of him on the same page.

He was a very private guy – I wonder whether his friends in the angling world knew of his scientific background. He has many publications in peer reviewed journals. A quick count shows 21 publications in pure and applied physics. He was full of anecdotes and was truly an interesting, clever, well-respected and well-liked guy.

Where I went to school

This view used to fill me with dread every school day from April 1979 to June 1983. It is Lewes "Old" Grammar School in the south east of England. At the time, the headmaster was a despot named Mr. Mead. He once chased a fifth former up the high street after this boy notably told him to f*** off. That was after his pacemaker operation. Not particularly happy memories overall - with a few exceptions.

Notable incidents were:

Saturday detention for all who got less than 7/10 in a second year spelling test (year 8)

Detentions without any notice to parents - always on the same day as given.

Having a blackboard rubber chucked at us and being called bastards by the physics teacher (see below).

Having to serve lunch to the headmaster in the dining room and wait on his table - wearing a lab coat. Very strange.

Being made to stand outside the headmaster's office for half a day because of failing to return a book to the library.

Bullying was rife.

The physics teacher, Mr. Blackwell (deceased) eyeing us up as we took showers after games and making jokes about a boy's testicles.

So bears do shit in the woods

There was shock and dismay today in the British press upon the realisation that Prince Harry is a spoilt little upper-class brat with racist and homophobic tendencies. For anyone who has a clue about the kind of educational establishments he has been to, this should come as no surprise.

My father married into a particularly obnoxious family about twenty years ago. At the time I fooled myself that I could be accepted by them, as I was at the time a teenager / young man in need of reassurance. The new wife was and is a very self-righteous and opinionated woman, and an arch-manipulator. Her four sons are typical of the product of upper class British society - over-privileged, arrogant, self-centred and self-obsessed and assured of their right to all they seek. I and my brothers are likely to be disposessed of our inheritance. I truly believe that this woman married my father for financial gain as I have hardly ever seen any affection between them, though to be fair, they do share intellectual pursuits.

I got to know my step-brothers and spent a lot of time with the two younger ones, nearer my own age. But I could never truly be accepted. The kind of remarks uttered by Prince Harry ring true as being the sort of things some of my step-brother's public school chums would say. Prince Harry's foolishness is no doubt his normal behaviour and what he considers to be reasonable behaviour with his peers.

Russia and Ukraine battle it out

Those of you who do more than just glance at the headlines will be aware of the attempt on the life of the Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko by poisoning. Number one suspect was Russia, who strongly opposed his election. After all, Yushchenko has been strongly in favour of Ukraine joining Nato. It is well known how opposed to this Putin is.

It is highly likely therefore, that the current tussle between Russia and Ukraine is not about gas. It is also very well-known that Russia completely disregards the rule of law and deals with such issues by using threats, intimidation and underhand tactics. Look at what they did in Chechnya. They even bombed their own civilians in the first war in 1994 and 1995.

Russia has just reneged on a recently signed deal between itself and Ukraine that would have had European monitors ensuring that Ukraine was in fact pumping gas through its pipelines and not siphoning off any it had not paid for. Slovakia has just said it would restart an aged nuclear reactor using old Soviet technology - in contravention to a deal signed with the European Union. It seems anyone can do what they feel like these days.

By re-launching a reactor that it recently shut down, Slovakia has violated a pledge to the EU to decommission its Soviet-designed nuclear plants. Austria has urged the EU to take action against its neighbor.

Israel shelled Gaza Palestinians after evacuating them, UN says

Israeli terrorism

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1566

"criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act."