Once long, long ago I worked in the St Andrews Castle visitor centre. This forms part of the exhibition. It is supposed to be someone pulling down the Saints’ statues in the cathedral in response to John Knox. Knox, standing at the lectern, his finger raised, had a movement activated tape that shouted “Cast them oot, I say” every single time someone walked past.
After a while he stopped being irritating, especially once we’d decided he was actually saying “Pass the Lucozade” 
My favourite spider is visiting Paris and I’m just testing blogging straight from Flickr to this blog. Andy was kind enough to sort out a work around as the hosting here doesn’t make it as easy as on my other blogs.
But this colourful heart on a monochrome day just made me smile The person who took the photo says:
During today’s snowstorm, the world has really been that colorless. But, some four-year-olds did something about it!
Happy Thursday folks
Happy Millenium - if you happen to be Ethiopian the new millenium starts at midnight. Ethiopia alone retains a different dating for the birth of Christ, that was agreed in the 4th Century. Just about everyone else concerned agreed a revised date in the 6th Century CE.
Interesting stuff about dyslexics and analytical processing. There’s a great MRI scan on the blog too. Well worth having a look.
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Thinking More in Dyslexia
Thinking More in Dyslexia
It’s nice to see more data about non-reading differences and dyslexia. At right, MIT researchers found that dyslexic groups didn’t just have less active signals in the posterior pathways important for sound-letter correlations; they also had more activation in prefrontal cortex. And these differences were seen even if dyslexic and non-dyslexic subjects were matched for reading ability.
One possibility is that the extra prefrontal cortex reflects the extra effort (e.g. working memory) required to read to a certain level of proficiency; it’s also possible more activation is because dyslexics are using more analytical skills in the reading process.
Knowsley Council is going to close down all of its 11 Secondary schools and replace them with 8 Learning Centres. These will be open longer hours and offer more flexible, personalised learning pathways for all learners in the borough whatever their age. It forms part of the Building Schools for the Future programme. Personalised learning has been a huge theme in Knowsley for a long time, I even attended a keynote speech on the subject at a Network Learning Conference back in 2004. However it seems to suddenly be in the news.
Earlier in the month Stephen Downes’ Old Daily picked up this post from Graham Attwell’s Wales Wide Web. He sees this as
the first big crack in the present model of schooling which dates from the first industrial revolution. And it won’t be the last.
Attwell then goes on to quote from an article in the Independent on May 14th which called this a “dramatic step” and reported in some depth the proposed changes to the Learning Centre day.
The style of learning will be completely different. The new centres will open from 7am until 10pm in both term-time and what used to be known as the school holidays. At weekends, they will open from 9am to 8pm.
Youngsters will not be taught in formal classes, nor will they stick to a rigid timetable; instead they will work online at their own speeds on programmes that are tailor-made to match their interests.
Children will be able to study haircare, beauty therapy, leisure and tourism, and engineering as well as the more traditional academic subjects.
A pdf document from 2006 available from the Knowsley Council web site clearly states that the proposals were first made in 2004;
In the Statement of Implementation(2004) Knowsley set out its plans to replace all 11 existing secondary schools with 8 new learning centres. These are being carried forward through Building Schools for the Future.
Mr Read sounds a cautious note about Microsoft’s involvement with the plans and I must admit what jumped out at me was that the bit about working their way through “tailor- made programmes”. I do hope they get the chance to work on something like Extreme Learning and not end up slogging their way through something like CLAIT . (Groans at the memory - oh, how I loathed CLAIT!)
It’s an amazing chance to re-invent the experience of secondary education for the teenagers of Knowlsey. I wonder what they’ll make of it…….
I’ve always been interested in the origins of children’s rhymes ever since I first bought a copy of the Opie’s Lore and Language of Schoolchildren
Some sources claim the King of Spain’s daughter in question to have been Joanna of Castile who was shipwrecked in England in 1506 and visited the court of Henry VII. She’s an unlikely candidate though as she had her husband, to whom she was obsessively devoted, with her at the time! She went on to have an altogether tragic life (see below). So the front runner then becomes her younger sister Katherine of Aragon who was betrothed to Prince Arthur and finally became the ill fated first wife of Henry VIII. The details don’t quite fit and it seems likely that it’s an adaptation of something earlier.
I was surprised to discove the rhyme wasn’t in the Guttenberg Project version ofThe Real Mother Goose which is a great resource of copyright free nursery rhymes and illustrations. There’s an American version of Mother Goose which definitely isn’t copyright free and I decided not to link to it. I eventually found the extended version with a second verse which I’d been thinking of:
I had a little nut tree,
Nothing would it bear
But a silver nutmeg,
And a golden pear;
The King of Spain’s daughter
Came to visit me,
And all for the sake
Of my little nut tree.Her dress was made of crimson,
Jet black was her hair,
She asked me for my nut tree
And my golden pear.
I said, “So fair a princess
Never did I see,
I’ll give you all the fruit
From my little nut tree.
Joanna of Castile, who visited the court of Henry the Seventh in 1506:
Joanna was the last of the original Spanish royals; after her, all royalty on the Spanish throne was from houses that had come from abroad - though most of the future monarchs also were born in Spain. Most historians believe she suffered from schizophrenia and she was kept locked away and imprisoned. Needed to legitimize the claims of her father and son to the throne, Joanna only nominally remained queen of Castile until her death. (wikipedia)
I’ve been thinking about my dad this week and what follows is a reflection on some of my memories of him. Reflection is a useful tool but, as people in Cohort 6 will learn on their next module, one that can start to spread into all areas of your life. As for double looping……it should come with a health warning!
My Dad.
When I was a small child my Dad was an active, athletic man. He played cricket all summer, revelling in his role as wicket keeper. Saturdays were dominated by his cricket match. He never went alone and all my earliest memories of summer are set in a big green space, filled with the smell of new cut grass, the vague awareness of men in white in the distance and the sound of my father shouting “Howzat?”.
He played basketball in the long, dark winter evenings. He’d come back to our basement flat tired but elated if he’d played well. I remember the cold, rough texture of his overcoat. His cheek was cold as he kissed me goodnight.
My Dad’s favourite music was a constant soundtrack to my childhood. The record player was hardly ever off,and if it was, it was because the piano was being played. My Dad loved all sorts of music. Jazz & blues were a passion. He collected records of obscure American blues singers, some I remember like Bessie Smith, others I hear now and again and the memory floods back. He also liked Glen Miller, Gershwin, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday and Bobbie Gentry. Later he loved the Beatles. He was very open musically and enjoyed some of the music I liked as a teenager. He even liked Dory Previn!
He loved classical music & took me to the Halle Proms every year. We saw Jacqueline du Pre play Elgar’s famous Cello Concerto in E Minor at the Free Trades Hall. She looked so beautiful in her long white dress and both of us wept buckets. We also went to see opera whenever we could. He loved Puccini best of all and sang Your Tiny Hand is Frozen for weeks after we saw La Boheme.
He played the BEST honky-tonk & boogie- woogie piano. He sang with a basso profundo voice so deep it made you shiver!
He loved the Goons and any surrealist comedy. He bought me Spike Milligan’s poetry books when I was quite young and taught me to sing “Ying Tang tittdle Eye Po”. He liked the Pasadena Roof Orchestra so it was a very short step for him to join me in enjoying the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. He did a fine and hilarious version of By a Waterfall. Monty Python was a passion and whilst everyone else’s parents were baffled or hostile my Dad could recite the Dead Parrot sketch and sing “I’m A Lumberjack”!
My father loved modernist design, clean lines and “art not ornament”. Corbusier was a god! He said that living amongst the Victorian self-importance of Annan’s architecture had made him want to be an architect, if only to inject some order into it all. If pushed he’d admit that the proportions and clean lines of the Georgian flat he grew up in might just have had some influence as well.
He loved science fiction and the Hornblower stories. He gave me The Hobbit and then Lord of the Rings to read when I was about 13. When I was bored at home I read my way through his vast collection of Fantastic Tales, Analog, and Amazing Stories. By the time I’d read all that I was a fan too! I even read the Hornblower books and they weren’t that bad.
He voted Liberal & didn’t trust any of them really. He said his heart was socialist but that the Labour politicians were corrupt. Still he thought they weren’t as bad as the Tories who he thought were real crooks and better organised.
So, as ever with reflection, the next thing to do is draw out the learning. I’ll look at this in my next post.
My mother’s lentil soup was hot, comforting and friendly. She made it with a smoked ham shank when she was flush and with ham ribs when times were hard. When money things were really bad it might have been sausages. The smell and the ritual of making it always brought comfort.
Usually now I make a different lentil soup, vegetarian, with herbs, paprika, and finished with lemon juice but a chance remark yesterday made me think of my Mum’s version and it had to be made! Yum!
I just stumbled on another aspect of the long tail. Etsy is a website where all sorts of artists and craft people can sell their art work . It’s got a very nice user interface, individuals can have their own ’shop’ and it has lots of cool features like a map to locate local sellers. It’s well worth a look - almost made me think about making quilts again! But those days are definately gone. Still I liked the site very much, perhaps my daughter might put some of her stuff on there………
I blog here and at the Classroom Displays Blog I am also involved in Usefulwiki- educational resources wiki
