The Middle East has been the focus of lessons. Ideas about religious groups are firmly fixed in the minds of those in the class and it is a struggle to challenge ideas rooted in prejudice. Perhaps it would have useful to have given them photocopies of a page from Des Ekin’s book The Stolen Village.
The Stolen Village tells of a raid on Baltimore, Co Cork in 1631, a raid in which 107 people were taken away as slaves by the corsairs. Some of those captured in 1631 may have …
We continue with global issues in the geography lesson tomorrow. Population distribution and urbanisation have been among the issues we have addressed. Students living in a seaside town wondered why people would want to live in vast cities. They would presumably have enjoyed Local Hero.
Local Hero was an iconic film of the 1980s. Set in the Western Isles of Scotland, it suggests there is something idyllic in the isolation. The plans to bring industry and change to the place are blocked by the man who owns the beach; …
Our topic yesterday was Passover. The range of knowledge among Year 7 students is immense. One was able to tell the entire story, with every detail, others had never heard of Moses. At the end of the lesson, we asked the question why such remembering was important to the identity of people. One student said he thought that remembering was even more important after the way Jewish people had been treated in the Twentieth Century.
The inevitable question came, a boy in the front row who always offers thoughtful and …
Reading Terry Pratchett’s 2008 novel, Guards! Guards! over recent evenings, there have been moments when I have laughed out loud. The demise of Lupin Wonse, the man responsible for bringing terror and death to the city of Ankh-Morpork through summoning a dragon, is a moment of dry humour. Captain Vimes of the city guard orders one of his men to arrest Wonse, to apply the full force of the law. Constable Carrot takes the order literally:
…“That’s it, then,” he said, and turned away. “Throw the book at him, Carrot.”
Growing up in times when our primary school teacher taught with enthusiasm the stories of British inventions in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, there was a confidence that there would always be new and exciting things, that while we sat at our desks reading the words on the blackboard, there were white-coated men in laboratories and workshops refining the latest pieces of technology. Gadgetry seemed part of the spirit of the times, as television sets became polychrome and radios were transistorised and refrigerators and electric cookers became evermore commonplace, there …
Each day, the number of the days until the first GCSE examination is written at the right hand side of the board – the number of actual days and the number of teaching days. Each day, the teacher urges the Year 11 students to make the most of the time remain, to take every opportunity to go over notes and to check revision guides. Among the female students, there is a good response. Male students seem divided among those who are motivated to seek good examination results and those who …
