Yay this is really cool… I’ve been using a Messenger Plus! plugin to check RSS feeds for me but now I’ve been converted to the goodness of blogbot – a free add-in for Microsoft Outlook. RSS really does rock, and I’ve always wanted a nice and simple integration with email. For those of you using a simple aggregator, I hope to add an additional RSS feed of comments to this blog very soon.
Edit – for those who want it, the RSS comment feed is now online.
At the end of this week’s Enrichement session this afternoon Rishal and I volunteered to do capsizing as part of getting the One Star Award (you gotta start somewhere). The first time we were rubbish, too keen to get up for air and then ungracefully trying to undo the spray-deck sideways. And belatedly hitting the boat like you’re supposed to. The second attempt was much better – once we grasped that gravity is very useful at pulling you down and out under the water. Cheers, Newton.
Anyway – as you’d expect I was soaking wet and freezing, and thanks to certain laziness on behalf of the minibus driver had to walk all the way home carrying half the canal back in a bag of wet clothes and trainers. But it was worth it!
Katie was going to Capital City Academy‘s Open Evening tonight and I tagged along – very curious as to what lay inside that lovely new building. A little background – when I was going to Secondary School, it was known as Willesden High. A failing school, put under special measures by Ofsted, it consisted of horrible grey 60s blocks and shadowy reports of the behaviour inside.
The transformation has been incredible. It’s an absolutely amazing school inside now, growing in confidence with talent shining from the walls. Now I have issues with the ways City Academies are funded – in case something awful like this happens – but at its heart is the comprehensive ideal of a non-selective (they do select 10% at Academies but hey), high quality, mixed ability school free for everyone.
And as I’ve been arguing in the comments here the investment is needed. That school has just turned around completely, and improved countless numbers of lives. How dare the right say that the money is wasted? Maybe if they got out of their pathetic private schools and took a look around they’d see the improvements being made by this government verses the utter contempt Thatcher\Major showed towards education.
Choice in which state school you go to, choice in the type of qualifications you do, choice in individual learning styles. Meanwhile the Tories push for private schools to divide those who can afford to ‘choose’ to pay and those who can’t. They love selection by a test at 11 years old. They’re the tightwads who don’t think investing in schools is worth it, and then they crow about standards of testing when results improve.
But now the joke’s on you lot. Hahaha.
Yeah, we had an ALIS test today. (Thanks a lot, University of Durham. Don’t you have better things to do?) It’s one of those annoying IQ-type tests where you’re not given enough time to answer the questions, and even if you did have time, you have to be one of those people with spatial awareness to fold the net of a cube in your head. I may have flopped the Maths section too. Not to worry, because it’s only useful for ‘predicting your A level grades.’
Of course, the prediction could be wrong, so the easiest thing to do is ignore any predictions and just get on with the work. Which is what I’m doing this evening – as all my homework somehow built up into a little cascade tonight.
I also felt vindicated at not going to the ‘photo reading’ taster session the school ran on Friday. I strongly suspected from the start it was all a con – and from what I hear I was proved right. Hooray for sceptical thinking! And let’s try and get the words ‘con’, ‘photo reading’ and ‘Marilyn Devonish‘ into Google shall we? All together now…
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
