Reads of the Week #64

My thinking and doing are dominated these days by curricular change and reform, and reading about education on the one hand and trying to take of my wellbeing by having other things to distract me, entertain me, inform me.

On the nose for curricular change, this piece by Mags Amond on pushing our boundaries on CPD is right up my street. It’s about the ‘desire line’ that ‘you make the road as you go’ and it manages to be illuminating, brief and spirit raising all at the same time.

This brief quotation from this post from Mark Priestley says more than I could about the direction reform should take 

the question we should ask is not ‘what subjects do we teach?’, but instead ‘what does an educated person look like, what knowledge do they need to develop, and what means (including subjects-based provision) are best suited to achieving this?’

New breed of teachers; old breed of reaction.

An old friend of my reads of the week Anthony Wilson, writes here about the return to school:

I pass a colleague on the stairs, briefly stopping to say how my summer went, already feeling it recede at the speed of light. One more flight. My own office door. If the door is closed I am teaching or out, a notice on it says. If it is open, please feel free to come and say hello. It’s next to a poster of a poem I once wrote about my children, ‘I Try Not to Shout at Them’. Somewhere between my poem and the note next to it is my life. I turn the key and go in. Another year.

It almost made me want to go back…
Bob Vulfov wrote this piece which manages to be about history and be hilarious. How I wish I had this skill. The title says it all: As Your Doctor, I Am Protesting Removal of Your Tumor, I Don’t Want to Erase Your Medical History .

Podcast of the week is Second Captains: a week of  diverse interviews with Murad Mohammed, Aidan Regan and Dave Hannigan make a must listen podcast essential for both sport and politics. And every is getting Dave’s book (on an Irish childhood I also lived) for Christmas!

In that spirit, of the memories sport brings, I found myself in tears listening in the car to tributes to Jimmy Magee this week. This clip is a personal one, I know the cameraman, I was there, on a half day from school when Kelly reached Clonmel and even embarrassed myself in front of Sean at a parent teacher meeting once by trying to replay it for him from the point of view of my fourteen year old self. Thanks Jimmy.

It’s a long way to Tipperary, but it’s quicker with Sean Kelly in the saddle.

Picture of the week is Branches of an Almond Tree in Blossom by  Vincent van Gogh that I found here.

 

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Reads of the Week #63

I was very busy this week, a lot of driving, and not as much time for reading. So, luckily, a small few wonderful pieces of writing came my way.

First the least devastating, but no less moving, no less thoughtprovoking, Mosi Secret traces the lives of the first black boys to integrate the elite prep schools of the American South. Their struggles then and since are both a testament to their bravery and perseverance. (Keeping an eye Longreads always pays off.)

Now this piece by Sally-Ann Rowland on having, or not having, a baby tore me up. The honesty is so refreshing, the story is so heartbreaking, but such a rewarding read.

Kevin Toolis, like the previous piece found in the Guardian, writes about the death and wake of his father. It is so familiar to us Irish, but again here, the honest openness with which he writies is just beautiful.

‘I Saw Beckett The Other Day’ and other poems by Orfhlaith Foyle are just right to make you think and lift you up. I got them from Poethead curated by Chris Murray.

I have an amazing podcast for you to listen to this week: first Jarlath Regan spoke to JP and Brendan Byrne about their book “Don’t Hug Your Mother” and parental alienation when families fall apart. Two amazing men.

And finally, this weeks cover image is of Nastassja Kinski and the recently late, but always great Harry Dean Stanton in Paris Texas. One Perfect Shot is the source.

Reads of the Week #62

This week the divide between my old life and my new work became a little more evident. It’s quieter, nothing will beat the noise of a school though. There are fewer people in my day, and I’ve figured out how to be (somewhat) productive when working from home.

What I read this week was about History first. There are two deeply affecting pieces about the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the US on the one hand and a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb on the other. This contemporary article from Benjamin Fine for the New York Times on the Little Rock Nine, who were just trying to go to school, still has the capacity to shock, 60 years on, to the week. Sumiteru Taniguchi, who survived Nagasaki to become a peace activist, died in the last few days at 88. ‘Every year on the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing, as well as any time a country conducted a nuclear test, he would attend a sit-in at the Peace Park in that city. According to the Nagasaki Shimbun, he appeared at 396 protests.’ The obit is by Motoko Rich. Both articles are examples of survival, perseverance and a commitment to right.

David Wong Louie wrote Eat, Memory: A life without food in Harper’s Magazine, about how his cancer treatment took away his enjoyment of food. That’s a seriously truncated description of this brutally honest and compelling writing. Again, survival is a theme here.

When we all get to school, the most valuable resource, and it is always in short supply, is time. Kenny Pieper writes in this short but insightful blogpost: imagine what we could achieve if, instead of a cupboard full of resources provided for our National courses, we were provided with the more valuable resource of Time. He’s right (again!), making the time to do the small things: commitment, energy and innovation all need time to grow in schools.

I also found something about the quirks of the German return to school by Rebecca Schuman. Suffice to say there are reasons why they don’t fret, but how also it’s getting a little out of hand!

In Ireland the place Shannon Mattern writes about in  A Stuffed History of Storage Spaces, is called ‘the press’. Her writing struck me first as a hoarder, second as a language student remembering Dr Terry Dolan explaining to us about Hiberno English and where the word press came from, and third she gave me the word wunderkammern to spend two hours reading about during the week!
Podcast of the week is The Invisible College Series from BBC Radio 4, produced and presented by Cathy Fitzgerald. The care and attention, not to mention the amount of archival research done for this series is amazing, and makes it essential for anyone who writes, or needs writers to explain their process (and work in general) to them.

Picture of the week is Una and the Lion by William Bell Scott which we saw in the National Gallery of Scotland last Easter on a lovely grey Edinburgh afternoon. It is a beautiful blend of innocence and power, of danger and coexistence. That’s life, isn’t it?

Read of the Week #61

This week was about new beginnings, the image says it all: heading along a track knowing not where it is leading.

The reading week was eclectic, stretching from the circus last weekend in Las Vegas, through bereavement and on to the return to school and work for us in education. An allovertheplace week, the reading mirrors that.

 

First, here’s Dave Hannnigan writing about where Conor McGregor, not the the ‘mean streets of Dublin’, but the kind of world McGregor epitomises.

 

I don’t want to say too much about John Tomsett‘s beautiful piece in honour of his sister Beverley, you should just read it. I know where he is, I am there too.

 

Two articles now to get your newly returned teaching brain buzzing. First from George Couros, 5 Characteristics of a Change Agent. This is what we should be bringing to our classrooms, it won’t happen every day, but it is something to strive towards.

Secondly, Alex Quigley on painting the big picture for students in our subject area if we want them to develop an expertise. Here’s a paragraph that really struck me:

In education we can too often be beguiled by the notion of the ‘natural’ expert… but we can cultivate expertise in education more commonly by helping students seeing the ‘big picture’ of the subject domain, then breaking it down into a framework that can be learned and understood over time in the classroom.

Podcast of the Week is from 99% Invisible is on the town of Colma, California where the dead outnumber the living by a thousand to one. The Modern Necropolis.

The image of the week is from Kültür Tava, I called it The Road Ahead. Keep your eyes on the horizon.

Reads of the Week #60

What links these articles, pictures and podcasts? Every week I look at what I’ve read, and more recently seen and heard, to find a group of recommendations that are tied together somehow. It’s hard to ignore that this selection, one way or another, is about History. I’m moving into new role in the coming week, seconded to the JCT to work on the new Junior Cycle History. New beginnings. No looking back now!

First, on the 90th anniversary of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, this is a classic from the time: Felix Frankfurter’s famous takedown in The Atlantic of a system that refused to work

Dylann Roof walked into Charleston’s Mother Emanuel Church on June 17, 2015, armed with a Glock handgun and 88 bullets and shot dead nine members of a local prayer group. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah went in search of the reasons why. This is a powerful piece of journalism.

ICYMI:
A Door Into The Dark by James Murphy is a challenging piece about how dialogue has been replaced by dominance, how all shade has been removed from public discourse and how this polarisation serves only the few. It applies to education too: it’s easy to be anti- but what are we for?

Two podcasts this week. One of the interesting bonuses of subscribing to the Second Captains podcast is that Ken Early has developed a brilliant series in political exploration. In this episode, building on previous ones on Northern Ireland, feminism and Brexit, Ken talks to Mark Jones here about Nazism, Weimar Germany and Trump. Any podcast that gets into a discussion of the Freikorps in 1920s Germany, is okay with me.

The second podcast is also a reminder of the power of a historical memory. From BBC Radio 4 Soul Music series, this episode is about Strange Fruit, an anthem of the CivIl Rights era in the US, written by a Jewish man in the 1930s.
Finally, back to William Orpen’s Portrait of Gertrude Sanford, which is a beautiful picture, but doesn’t the sitter’s whole story: a daughter of the political class, she inspired a character played by Katharine Hepburn, became a big game hunter, a WWII spy and latterly an environmentalist. I think you can see a bit of all this in her steely gaze.

 

Happy reading!

 

Reads of the Week #58

This week I was reading about cause and effect: an athlete who cleaned up his life and won gold at the World Championships; the neglect of good government in Trump’s US and how it’s not all just surface stupidity, it runs deep: the long road to being an astronaut and the hassle if you’re of Iranian descent: the legacy of insular leadership in Albania; a heartbreaking podcast and a painting from another place in time. Good week.

Donald McRae is one of the great sportswriters of this generation. His book, A Man’s World is a classic examination of the dangerous tightrope sportspeople walk between a public and private life. This piece on Luvo Manyonga former crystal meth addict and now World Champion Long Jumper is from last December but it is so engrossing and rewarding it more than deserves a recommendation. And the story of the Irishman who helped Manyonga is another reason to read on.

Michael Lewis wrote this piece on the US Department of Energy for Vanity Fair. This is the week of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki anniversaries, something that seems to have passed the President by. The article is an examination of how the $30 billion agency, which oversees everything from the US nuclear arsenal to the electrical grid is being run into the ground by proposed budget cuts, mismanagement and just plain ignorance. It reminds us that Trump is not a joke, that his amateurism is deadly dangerous.

Robin Wright in the New Yorker details the career of  Jasmin Moghbeli, whose Iranian parents fled to Germany after the Revolution in 1979, where she was born. They subsequently moved on to the US and now she’s an Astronaut. The bit inbetween is very interesting.

Dave Hazzan, writing for Roads and Kingdoms, has found one of oddities of History, the bunkers, built in the 1970s and 80s that litter Albania. This essay on what they are used for, and what they mean is fascinating.

Podcast of the week in an episode of Human/Ordinary I first heard through a rebroadcast from the Strangers Podcast. I don’t want to spoil it but it has the power to break your heart and heal you all in one listen.

And picture of the week is a painting by William Orpen that I used in school a few years back. It’s of Mrs Oscar Lewisohn, who has an interesting story of her own, which places her all the way to the right of the canvas. It makes her the object of our gaze, but peripheral, and the pensive look on her face say only loneliness to me. This is a review of the painting from Vanity Fair in 1915.

Reads of the Week #57

August has arrived and with it the countdown for the return to school begins. An interesting year awaits and I seem to be drawn this week to writing about goodbyes, reflections, competence and incompetence, and reality dawning.

First, on his goodbye from Morning Ireland, Here's Cathal MacCoille on leaving RTÉ, how early morning radio works and, or course, getting up in the middle of the night.

This piece by Amber Leventry is about a boy in her daughter's school who triggered a recollection of where she herself came from. Powerful. The Boy With the Coin-Filled Cellophane Cigarette Wrapper, and Me.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect, the illusion of competence, will be familiar to many readers, even if the label wasn't in your vocabulary. Here's Kate Fehlhaber for Aeon.

This piece, and pictorial on the Ghost Villages of Newfoundland describes how a government resettlement program cleared fishing villages over the decades after WWII. Reminded me of a trip to the Blasket Centre a couple of years ago. It's by Luke Spencer for Atlas Obscura.

This is a great topic for a podcast: The Irish Passport explores the difference between what people think they know about Ireland and where the truth lies. This series is my podcast find of the summer.

This weeks picture is A View of the Square in the Kastel Looking Towards the Ramparts by Christen Købke which we saw in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh last Easter. Beautiful understatement rewards close inspecting.