BBC NEWS | England | Wiltshire | Schoolboy told Pc he was ‘scum’
More on this hilarious case, which I have mentioned before. I wonder if the father has ever stopped to think what he can possibly achieve? In the highly unlikely event of a successful prosecution, is he really going to send his son back to this apparently appalling school which has had the gall to expel his son? Apparently, he feels that raising the matter of his son’s public drunken and abusive behaviour aged 13 is fighting dirty – see here
As the secretary of the Independent Schools Council says: “”What you have is a boy who has 200 disciplinary offences in the last year. That’s one a day. So on a daily basis, to be blunt about it, he’s putting two fingers up to the school. And his father, instead of saying to his son, ‘Look, you’ve got to abide by school rules,’ is saying to the school, ‘You’ve got to put up with my son’s behaviour.” I’m sure many state schools are very jealous of the ability public schools such as Marlborough have to expel any pupil who doesn’t conform. The policy in state schools is to punish financially schools who expel disruptive pupils. Of course, if Mr Tony really was serious about education, education, education, he’d implement the long standing Labour pledge to abolish private schools, thus ensuring that the state system had an injection of well-motivated middle and upper class pupils. But don’t get me started on the school system. Instead, just check out this report on a school in Finland, and reflect that they have no national curriculum…
Update: the judge threw the case out today, Thursday, in a widely anticipated outcome. So sonny boy will have to be inflicted on another school. I’m sure the lawyers are watching with interest.
Chez Topsyturvydom, the evening meal normally takes place around 8. We tend to be accompanied by our newish digital radio (about three years’ worth of Nectar points since you ask) which is great unless it’s a Tuesday and Radio 2 has “The Organist Entertains”. If Radio 3 has what we musical boffins call “plinky plonky” music, then we turn to The Arrow. This is a digital station, and, at the times we listen anyway, sends you into a timewarp. There’s hardly any advertising, and hardly any dee-jay chattter, so I feel like I have walked into a teenage party circa 1972. Lots of Rod Stewart, David Bowie, Van Morrison, various hairy blues bands, some 60s stuff – Kinks, Beatles – a few obscurities – it’s the soundtrack to every party I attended between 1970 and 1974. Apart from a worrying predilection for Jeff Lynne era ELO, virtually every track will be very evocative for those of us just beginning to receive Saga brochures. The station announcements are always made in that portentous (and needlessly American) film trailer voice, which is somewhat incongruous for such a definitively British product, but I can put up with that, as I muse “Ou sont les neiges d’antan?” whilst trying to anticipate the lyrics to “Cindy Incidentally”…
Tagged by Kat – I’ll have to find a better hiding place. OK:
7 things I plan to do before I die:
1) Live a lot longer
2) Get fitter
3) Visit New Zealand
4) Experience Il Carnevale in Venice
5) Write a novel
6) Dance
7) Discover how to sleep comfortably with two cats on the bed
7 things I can do:
1) Cook a decent veggie meal (Current signature dish: tagliatelle in gorgonzola sauce – bit of a cholesterol bomb, actually)
2) Look over my glasses in a withering fashion
3) Form an opinion on a book without having read it (and, in the case of A level Literature circa 1981, teach a book without having read it…)
4) Throw sticks for dogs much further than you’d think
5) Remember obscure details of records from 1971.
6) Read newspapers for hours
7) Eat burnt toast
7 things I cannot do:
1) Text messages. Sorry, I meant txt msgs
2) Pass a cat without attempting to stroke it
3) Wait in stationary traffic
4) Allow meaningless mumbo-jumbo to pass unchallenged.
5) Play a musical instrument
6) Use the verb “deliver” to mean “teach”
7) Speak in tongues
7 things that attract me to another person:
I can’t actually think of seven things – how do you know what it is? That’s the mystery isn’t it?
7 things that I say most often:
1) Ludicrous!
2) Howzat? (at least, I’ve been saying that a lot during the Ashes)
3) onward and upward
4) Boris!
5) What’s for tea?
6) You might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment
7) Yays (a la Ray McCooney in Little Britain)
7 celebrity crushes:
This touches a nerve. I’m not allowed to say any woman on TV/film is good looking, or ‘er indoors will thereafter refer to said woman as “your girlfriend”. Those who have filled this role range from Julie Andrews (I know…) to Courtney Cox to Cherie Lunghi…
I found this a rather unsettling exercise – and I don’t know why, it’s just a bit of fun, eh?- so I won’t tag anyone else.
Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | In memory of solipsismThis article by the combative Muriel Gray caused something of a backlash in the letters pages this week, but, aside from her somewhat gratuitously offensive conclusion, I’m with her. I live a fair distance from my place of work, about 30 miles, but, depending on my route, I will pass seven or eight makeshift memorials in that journey. If that is true throughout the country, then every five miles or so one is likely to encounter a windblown cellophane-wrapped bunch of faded flowers wrapped round a lampost. I know of one memorial which is actually on a motorway, so presumably the family of the dead person are driving there, stopping illegally and dangerously on the hard shoulder and tying their bunch of flowers to the base of a sign.
I suppose people will say it makes them feel better, and that it’s harmless. Actually, it could be harmful, if the related practice of building cairns is allowed to continue, as this letter by Ron Graves shows – and the previous letter gives the opposing view, but misses the point, I feel.
This all seems to have gathered speed following Diana’s death. The transformation in the British psyche now seems complete. We must emote, and we must do it publicly. There are times when the stiff upper lip would be welcome. Grieve, yes – but why make it a public spectacle? And aren’t graves rather than traffic lights at busy road junctions the best places for floral tributes?
Bee Docs’ Timeline – Featured Users I came across this interview via a link on John Naughton‘s blog. MB is one of the few reasons why a paid up liberal softie like moi would desert the Grauniad for the Indy, and this is a fascinating account of someone who straddles academia and journalism successfully. Not many do – John Sutherland is the only other in the field of Literature who springs to mind. Bywater makes a point that has occurred to me – that classicists have made much more of the web than modern literature folk. I’m not sure why that should be, but I do think there’s a lot of possibilities yet to be exploited by those of us in the field of modern and contemporary literature.
A sort of supplement to the previous post. I spent much of today doing introductory sessions to new undergraduates. I was in the middle of telling a group the details of the English Literature course they had signed up for. One student said – ” So, do we like read these books ?” Collapse of stout party, etc.
Guardian Unlimited | Columnists | It isn’t philistinism to give students value for money
There’s a lot I would agree with here. Certainly Polly Toynbee is right to say that many students are treating their degree studies as a part time occupation. Where I would take issue with her is where she suggests that this means they could do their degrees much more quickly if they put in more hours in the classroom. In a subject such as English Literature, a major proportion of a student’s time needs to be taken up with reading. Yes, I know, that’s a statement of the bleeding obvious. But actually, a surprisingly high number of students don’t seem to be able to grasp that simple fact. They have a model of education (and I couldn’t possibly comment on where they got it from) in which information is transmitted from a tutor to the student without passing through the student’s brain. At its worst, this manifests itself as a kind of weary passivity: I had a student once (on a teacher-training course, no less) who said to me, “Why can’t you just tell us what to write and we’ll write it?” Thankfully, I don’t get many students as intellectually bankrupt as that one. I do, though, get some who ask why is that they have to read lots of books, and how come the books are so long, and, like, old? The requirement to read eats in to their social and working life, but pace Polly, the courses they are on are designed to operate on the basis that they will use their copious non-contact time to read, reflect, write, plan, engage with the material of their study. Cutting down on the amount of time they have outside the classroom won’t improve that situation. They need to understand that doing a degree properly (and not as a bit of time-filling between clubbing excursions and stacking shelves at Tesco) involves a lot of commitment, dedication, and, yes, hard work, often self-motivated.
Polly also seems to feel that it’s important that “hard” subjects – which always means the sciences – are taken up by lots of students. I wouldn’t argue with that, but I would suggest that virtually any subject, studied with sufficient rigour, is worthy of a place in university life. I think we fetishize the work-related aspect of study too much. This is currently manifested in the government’s and the funding council’s emphasis on work placements as part of all degrees – sensible enough if you are studying architecture, but a bit difficult if your subject is medieval theology. On the one hand, we have, throughout education, an emphasis on the acquisition of “skills” which, we are told, will equip people for the fast-changing working lives they will lead, in a world where no-one’s job will be for life, where people will have a portfolio of different work experiences and so on. OK – so why seek to link particular subjects with particular work, often in a ludicrously artificial way? Why not insist instead on high standards of academic rigour in the teaching and learning of subjects, a policy which will deliver transferable skills to equip students for the fast changing work environment of the 21st century? As a big noise from IBM said to a colleague of mine recently -“We’re interested in intelligent, lively, communicative graduates. We don’t care what subject their degree is – we can teach them all they need to know about computing in the first six months. We need people who can work individually and as a team, who have initiative, who can write literate reports, who can communicate…”
I don’t think Polly’s image of the tweedy research-based academic has much basis in the reality of modern mass higher education. I expect there are a few of these dinosaurs still about, but the rest of us have had to adapt to a very different landscape than one dominated by ivory towers.
Guardian Unlimited | Life | Don’t dumb me down
I love Ben Goldacre’s pieces in the Grauniad. Here he summarises what he’s been doing in his Bad Science column for the last couple of years. Always entertaining and, curiously, reassuring – as one of the Humanities graduates he mentions in the article, I would otherwise be taken in by the daily more barmy claims of breakthroughs, miracle cures etc which he so effectively rubbishes every week. More power to his elbow, I say!
(and why is it the elbow that we wish more power to?)
Guardian Unlimited | Cartoons | 07.09.05: The Bush family and Hurricane Katrina
As usual, Steve Bell gets to the point. This is after Barbara Bush’s brilliant insight that the people evacuated to Texas have actually been lucky: “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle)–this is working very well for them.” Hat tip – Kat
I’ve been tagged, from the film of the same name, to answer these questions. Here goes:
1. Number of books I have owned: I really don’t know. In the room where I sit now, I estimate there are about 500 books. In the rest of the house posibly another 2000 or so. In my office, maybe another 1000. Joint ownership with ‘er indoors, of course.
2. Last book I bought – Andrew Sinclair, The Breaking of Bumbo. I was keen on Sinclair as a youth, and have rediscovered him recently. I recommend Gog particularly. He has recently written a book dealing with all that da Vinci code (and why wasn’t it Leonardo code?) material, aiming at a readership with more than half a brain cell. It’s called Rosslyn
3. Last book I completed – I really don’t know. I’ve got several on the go at the moment: A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower, Andrew Crumey’s Mobius Dick and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.
4. Five books that mean a lot to me – what, only five? Blimey, that’s tough. This would be my choice today – probably a different five tomorrow:
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Anthony Burgess, Any Old Iron
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
A.S. Byatt, Possession
Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton
5. Five bloggers to tag – I don’t know if I should presume, but if they want, I wouldn’t mind knowing about the following bloggers’ tastes:
Morning Loves It
The Gray Monk
Guido Fawkes
Francessa of Francessa’s Thinking
Englishman in New York