The Year 7 lesson on moral evil and natural evil asked students the question as to which they considered worst: a good intention with a bad outcome, or a bad intention with a good outcome? There was a general consensus within the class that the former was better; that something done with a good intention was always preferable to a good outcome from a bad intention.
I told the Year 7 class a story I had heard in 1998 when visiting Tanzania.
Part of the first day was spent at …
Ross and his wife and their baby son had moved into the town from a village a few miles out. They had got a house quickly because they were prepared to take one in the town’s worst estate. Within a couple of weeks they had transformed the place; cleaning, painting and repairing, the house was unrecognizable from the place they had rented the previous month.
Having turned the interior into somewhere bright and welcoming, Ross decided that he would then take on the garden. It was enclosed by a high …
The literacy programme at school presents students with a Word of the Week each Monday, a word to prompt their thoughts. Words this term have included psychoanalysis, heresy, landslide and fashionista (an Italian boy in the class helped us to pronounce it correctly). The words are chosen on the basis of anniversaries, including the death of Sigmund Freud in 1939, the arrest of Bishop Latimer in 1553, the Aberfan tragedy in 1966, and the Paris fashion show in 1914
This week, the word is “offensive.” Tomorrow is the 103rd anniversary …
The assistant head teacher invited me to join the Year 7 trip to Disneyland Paris in July. “I won’t be offended if you say ‘no’ as a number of staff would like to go.”
I said, “no.”
If the bell had not rung, I would have explained that I would have enjoyed a trip to Paris, if I did not have to go to Disneyland. The offer recalled memories of previously avoiding Disneyland and finding a moment of perfect contentment.
Walking away from the River Seine and towards the Champ …
The BBC news app seems full of alarming stories, each tale worse than the one before. “May you live in interesting times” is said to be a Chinese curse; uninteresting times mean everything is well in the world.
Finding a book by Irish writer Flann O’Brien, his character Sergeant Pluck comes to mind. Sergeant Pluck would not have liked the BBC news app, Sergeant Pluck is a man who likes the dull and routine and the uneventful. He is a policeman who is never more happy than when life is …
It was United Nations Day today. Focusing on the work of the UN, the school assembly presented a picture of an organisation that seemed at variance with the day to day reality of people’s experience of the United Nations. ,
Travelling out of Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi one Sunday morning, the full extent of the incapacity of the United Nations to effect real change had become apparent. A convoy of white buses, with black letters painted on the side proclaiming “UN,” were moving slowly.
“What are the UN buses …
