Bits of madness!

The Richard III madness continues in Leicester by all accounts. Thousands of people have been filing past his remains in Leicester cathedral. Some people queued for four hours! One woman has come from Australia. It seems that she won some kind of lottery to allow her to attend the special service in the cathedral this morning. She is overjoyed. She says it is a unique experience. A unique experience that she appears to be sharing with thousands of other people. Amazing! And when interviewed by the media, some of the people standing the queue admit to knowing nothing about Richard III. So what are they doing there? I remain totally gobsmacked!! 

I suppose listening to such stuff provides light relief from hearing tales of the shenanigans of politicians. The latest is the would-be conservative candidate who tried to persuade the English Defence League to stage a demonstration against a planned mosque in his would-be constituency. This was just so that he could then persuade them not to do so or to cancel the non-demo, if you follow my story, and so make his party of choice look really good. I suspect he has been reading too many boys' adventure stories. It's the kind of convoluted thinking William might have got up to in the Just William stories. He claimed that he had been the victim of a sting by the EDL but surely serious people don't mess with the likes of the EDL The poor chap has withdrawn his candidacy. Not at all surprised! 

Our flurry of activity continues here. We have carted stuff to the tip, built flat pack furniture (we are considering applying for a job as the fastest flat-pack sofa constructors in the region), entertained and fed our offspring's offspring while she does preparation work for her teaching placement and managed today to fit in a visit to the bank to have the meeting that they failed to diary last week. I even succeeded in inculcating some memorising techniques into our eleven year old granddaughter, resulting in a score of 10/10 in her Spanish vocabulary test! We are feeling particularly noble! 

As regards the Spanish vocabulary learning, I was quite dispirited by my conversation with the eleven year old. She had a list of weather expressions to learn. So I enquired as to how they had beenlearning the expressions so far. Had they had weather picture cards to respond to? Had they played memory games around the class? Had the teacher done spot month-related weather questions? You know the kind of thing: "What's the weather like in January/ June/ etc?" "Does it usually snow in August?" Well, no, they didn't seem to have done any fun stuff. The teacher had told them to open their books at the relevant page and copy the list of expressions down. Oh my! Such dull stuff! I know you shouldn't take a pupil's word as absolutely gospel, but the complaints are getting a little too frequent. 

Teaching first year secondary modern foreign languages should still be fun. I always used to find it fun, for the teacher as well as for the pupils. If you can't, or perhaps won't, play games with language when they are eleven going on twelve, they are going to be soooooo bored by the time they are fourteen! 

Something has clearly gone wrong in the languages classroom!