I Feel That That Would Be Time-and-a-half!

Listening to :- Guess!

How many thoughts do you have in your head which you associate with various places? I am thinking specifically of bits of music which, when heard or thought about, always bring to mind a specific place, or person. I heard many pieces of music on the radio of the bus taking us to and from school. So much of the music between 1976 and 1982 brings to mind detailed pictures of the rural landscape out of the windows. These fields to be exact.

Don’t you want me? Brings to mind a curve of the road alongside the football pitch near Welland Court. Antmusic always means the roundabout by the bridge at Upton-Upon-Severn while Starship Trooper was first heard at the stop by Shelley Cheshire’s house. All this from Wogan as his show was all the bus driver would listen to. We were desperate for a switch to Radio 1 though I am sure that Terry once played something by XTC. I am probably thinking that Radio 2 was more MOR than it actually was. It was certainly more MOR than the bus driver who took delight in scraping the vehicle along the hedges as we went. Any open windows would catch whole branches which filled the bus with twigs.

I can remember when I first made prefect. I was never the most forceful teenager, not one to be respected but the waves of younger children waiting at the stop outside school parted to let us on the bus so we could make our dignified way to the back seats untroubled by the mad scramble. I suppose we should have been overseeing this enbussing madness but no one ever died. I also suspect that we were subject to waves of unseen of Harvey Smiths which then took precedence over the swivel gesture which would be used today. There is also a poem here, about the final walk home which you may be able to decipher.

The book on Failure is currently describing the American National Spelling Bee which I have always hated because of the whole personal what-if-I-get-it-wrong? thing. It also fails in its purpose by ignoring the meaning of the difficult words, simply being a test of memory, which seems like Newspeak at its worst. It seems that each stage of the Bee from school finals upwards is prefaced with the statement that no matter what the outcome is, everyone who takes part is a winner. The author makes the same point and of course you realise that the whole thing results in only one winner. Every other participant has lost, some with stoic grace and some with tears of Alice proportions. It strikes me as a signpost towards how education is going to be taught in future. And now we have them over here. I suppose as traumas go, being knocked out of a spelling bee is not towards the top of the list but it might send someone over the edge.

In some way connected to this, The Learning Curve on Radio 4 yesterday, discussed the concept of Opening Minds, where pupils are not taught specific subjects but given wider-ranging topics which then bring in elements of other disciplines. It chimes with my view that children should be taught how to learn rather than taught specific things. Two points were picked up by the opponent of such an approach. In the introductory piece, one pupil mentioned that sometimes the teachers learn something from the pupils; in fact she mentioned only one specific example. In another section, one of the teachers discussed planets, solar systems and galaxies with a child and then went on to suggest something about aliens. The traditionalist (well proponent of the current way of doing things), said that it would not be useful for children to be forever correcting teachers and that he thought the aliens suggestion gave an impression of ‘cartoon science’. I bet any good teacher would love the idea of learning stuff they didn’t know. I also know that many serious space scientists spend much time investigating the existence of aliens. There is even that famous equation from Frank Drake that gives an estimate of the number of civilizations actually out there: very serious stuff.