education
Music and creativity – an escape
In various talks and books, Ken Robinson speaks passionately of how Gillian Lynne, the famous ballerina, might nearly have been diagnosed with something like ADHD (had it been an “available condition” in the 1930s, he quips) was it not for one psychiatrist who saw what she really had: a talent and a desire to dance – one that just couldn’t …
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The Class reminds me what I hate(d) about school
The combination of feeling let down by my own state education, working for an education researcher, and having gone back to school myself last year affords me a number of insights into the education system. Certainly I spend a lot of time thinking about it. The Class, which is all about a French langauge teacher’s struggle to keep his pupils …
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Educational experiment
With a heavy sigh of relief, I’m pleased to declare that my experiment paid off. I spent every Wednesday of the last academic year attending a fast track English A level course. Why? Well… to see what later-life learning is like, spy on the state of 6th form colleges in 2008, expand my mind… and — I confess — to …
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Why fiction is better than fact
‘I’ve got it now. It’s reading, isn’t it? You read a lot, don’t you, Fry? That’s where it all comes from.’ I never saw him again without a book somewhere on his person. I heard some years later that he’d got into Cambridge. Stephen Fry, Moab is My Washpot Reading is good for you, no doubt about that. The fact …
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Reunion
DAY FOUR Toby and Alicia live in a palace! Their vast house with large garden and swimming pool is in the exclusive Mosman Park district, minutes from Perth via the Fremantle train line. It’s baking hot (32 degrees and rising) but not uncomfortable. Dry heat — that’s new. Having not seen Toby since the wedding two and a bit years …
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