The good morning, good night thread

[starktheground]

That's very sad, Geoff. I'm sorry. I've been very lucky to not have attended many funerals (knock on wood), but the formality has always struck me as odd. I guess it helps some people with their grief, though, by just going through the motions of it all.

[Missy]

Sorry to hear about your Aunt. What a horrible accident.
I felt like all I did last year was arrange and attend funerals. I was on first name terms with the undertaker. I put it down to age. It's that time of my life when the generation above me are getting older and frailer. I saw loads of my family last year. One handy thing is that one of my cousins is a vicar, he was very busy last year.

[Ed]

Difficult week ahead for me. I've had a few sleepless nights over a collection of things going on at work. I wish there was a cure for worrying -- it's a sneaky disorder. You try to put it out of your mind, but the next thing you know it's crept back into your thoughts. Doesn't matter how you try to distract yourself from thinking about it, sooner or later, there it is again, going round and round

Had a nice time yesterday, though. Took my eldest clay pigeon shooting at a local ground, had some lunch together, sat and talked. It's rare we get the chance to actually sit and talk, one to one, there's always so much else going on. He has to choose his options for school this week, and he's a bit worried by it. It is a huge wakeup call, I think. Only a couple more years of school left before he'll be looking for a job. Scary stuff. I tried to put his mind at rest as much as I could, but I think we're both losing a bit of sleep this week, like it or not.

[marc_chagall]

Been a worrying time here as well. Two family members are attempting to mend a broken relationship. I think they'll manage, but it's been horrible, with so much upset and tears.

Those school options are either the best thing to happen, as it means you can specialise a bit in the things that really interest you, or the worst, because the rules mean your two favourite subjects can't be timetabled together so you have to choose one or the other. When I was at school, because I wanted to do English, Art and Music, I couldn't do any sciences at all. The head tried to persuade me to drop one of the three, but that would have left me able to do only chemistry, when I was far more interested in physics (I'm good at maths, and it seemed to me to be more closely related) so I put my foot down and from the age of 14 never did any science of any kind. Of course, that makes me all the more chuffed to have had stories accepted for a few sci-fi anthologies. I possibly have more scientific knowledge now due to devouring 'New Scientist', watching 'The Sky at Night', etc, than many of my peers who did the O levels all those years ago. My middle daughter, stumped for what to do, chose philosophy - a pretty random subject, about which she knew nothing when she started the A level course. It worked. She ended up doing a degree in it. The point of philosophy is it teaches you to think, so enables you to tackle pretty much anything life throws at you. More schools should do it. That's what education should be about.

[LashSlash]

poor
poor
poor
poor
poor
poor
poor
poor
kids.
i
was
their
role
model

[Geoff_N]

Education, for me as a teacher for 30 years, has been about helping kids to question the cliches of both life and the subject in hand; to be curious; and to be able to adapt your views, attitudes and behaviour to new information. That truth is only the latest acceptable hypothesis, and so forth. Of course none of that is in the Naional Curriculum. I was often considered to be a maverick, a subversive. Even so, my classes did just as well, often better, than others at examinations. Ernest Hemmingway famously said about the purpose of Education that it was to make kids good crap detectors. I hope I helped.

[LashSlash]

.... I was often considered to be a maverick, a subversive. ....

....  ---  considered by whom to be a maverick, a subversive  ? parents, other teachers... by the pupils themselves?

[Russell]

Yesterday afternoon the family spent the day in glorious weather at Fontwell (horse) races.  When it comes to betting I'm small time - £1/£2 to win is the limit – so there was no danger of needing to sell up and go to the poor house, or sell up and find a country mansion. 

Anyway, before racing started they had a parade (for want of a better word) by the horse from the War Horse- the stage play not the film.  I was expecting a real live well trained horse (I don't get out much) and so was rather surprised by the human powered mechanical horse that appeared.  Whilst it really is a marvel of engineering and the operators are superb actors, the skeletal frame was just a bit spooky.  In the right light it could well be the stuff of nightmares.  (Of course the First World setting for the book/play/film is indeed the stuff of nightmares.)

If you've not seen this mechanical horse I posted a short clip on YouTube here.

Russell

[marc_chagall]

That's absolutely astonishing. Shivery good.

[Ed]

That's really weird

[Pharosian]

Wow. That horse is fantastic! The part where it swished its tail is amazingly realistic.

[delboy]

Superb! Alas,  he can't jump for toffee. I put £25 on him both-ways for the Fox-Hunters Chase at Cheltenham and he's still not arrived at the finishing post.

[Rev. Austin]

I'm back online! Please, hold your apple sauce.  Back to the vicious cycle of checking social network sites, refreshing the page, then checking again  although I'm tempted to enforce a 'no internet' rule on myself every other day, as I managed to crack back on with a novel idea recently that'd sat unloved for almost a year (it's at 50K words! Just. Need. To. Finish. It.).

And that's the NEEEEWS.

[marc_chagall]

Welcome back, Rev! 

I'm trying, really trying to get into blogging. It doesn't come naturally. I keep thinking: why am I writing this when I could be writing a poem? Perhaps I should write my blogs in free verse. Nah, that wouldn't work. Too poncy by half. BUT one has to blog if one is going to get books into the public consciousness prior to publication, so here's my latest (very short) blog on 'Serpentine'. http://bit.ly/wjZUc9 I've realised that previous blog posts of mine were terribly dull because they didn't have pictures, so this one at least has a picture - on blogger, that is. freewebs refused to entertain the idea of an illustration. I clicked the 'insert' image button over and over again to absolutely no avail. If anyone has any idea why this should be, please let me know. I suspect it's just a webs glitch. They're a bit prone to such things.

[Ed]

Welcome back, Rev -- it's been a tad quiet here without you chipping in