Science teachers against science
This may be misleading quotation by the Australian, but this seems like a remarkably dumb way to defend science:
Perth-based senior science teacher Marko Vojkovic said the foundations of science were not being properly laid in many secondary schools.
“Last time I checked, Newton’s theories of motion hadn’t changed, the periodic table hasn’t changed, the basic atomic theory hasn’t changed and I don’t think it’s going to either,” he said.
A “senior science teacher” whose knowledge of science appears to stop slightly short of the science that is taught in schools. His three unchanging truths were questioned by the very basic relativity, inorganic chemistry and quantum mechanics, respectively, that I learned at school.
strangely Lacanian
someone i know has bought a gift for a friend’s baby toddler: “toe-tappers rocket-star booties.” these, apparently, are shoes for a kid, but no ordinary shoes. besides being shaped like rockets, these are moreover lacanian shoes.
evidently, “the crinkle paper encourages self-discovery.” is this some sort of warped lacanian mirror-stage, where the child identifies itself in the crinkle paper? what kind of kid identifies with crinkle-paper, rather than a statue, standing tall, which belies her own lack of motor skills? the crinkle paper says little about the child’s capacities, and i fail to see where the identification comes in.
incidentally, a web site sheds some light on the question, though not in a particularly encouraging way: it apparently has something to do with babies “discovering their feet.”
can a vegan…
… enter, in good conscience, into a “touch and see mammals” room? if so, are they permitted to “touch” or only to “see”? if they, say, ride a huge stuffed bear, or play with a buffalo skull, is this a sin?
this and other difficult questions (see below) await us on the way to the communist future.
Chris Woodhead is a reactionary idiot
Well, we all knew that; what’s depressing is how unimaginative a reactionary he is. On Today this morning (RealAudio), he said that the only two options are entirely privatised education (funded by vouchers — his preffered scheme), or central government micromanagement of every aspect of education. Well, no — what about local democratic control of schools by teachers, children and parents? Once again, ‘choice’ is presented as the entire spectrum of political possibility.
The actual subject that Woodhead was supposed to be talking about was teaching reading, in particular, the ’synthetic phonics’ method (reading by building up words from letter sounds, rather than recognising the words as a whole). I don’t really know anything about the empirical research that supports phonics, or otherwise, but it was interesting that Woodhead (an anti-intellectual par excellence, of course) argued for the method only by claiming it ‘obvious’ that we read words letter-by-letter. Obvious it may be, but it’s also false. It’s unfortunate that synthetic phonics has been taken up as a cause by paranoid reactionary nutters (check their links section, where you’ll find an article claiming that opponents of phonics specifically want the population to be unable to read, for dark reasons of their own), as their monopolisation of the case for it with silly arguments and rants about progressive education make it hard to discover how valuable it actually is.
Forcing the long overdue creation of a science category
The Feynman lectures on the internet as PDF and MP3. In case I ever run out of things to read…