Out and about this morning I noticed a tractor with a small Union Jack flag flying at the front of it. What’s all that about? I wondered. When I was younger you rarely saw flags. Important building had flags but that was it. Nowadays cricket and bowling clubs around here all sport flags, usually a mix of the Union Jack, the English cross of St. George and the Yorkshire Rose, the last a nod towards the fact that we used to be part of Yorkshire. That’s about half a century of remembering we used to be part of Yorkshire. They have long memories around here! In recent times the English flag makes its major appearance in the week or so before St George’s Day - and of course, any time that an English sports team looks as though it might be doing well.
Union Jacks, however, are being seen more and more frequently, not so much on our streets but on our screens. Anyone who wants to express an opinion in public seems to feel the beed to do so flanked by flags demonstrating their patriotism. Here’s an article about it.
Michael Rosen has been writing an open letter to Gavin Williamson about education and its organisation. Here’s an extract that struck me:-
“You had more to say, though. I was pleased to see you think cooperation between schools is a good idea: “partnerships are … fundamental between schools. We know that schools benefit from being in a strong family of schools”, you said. These are “powerful vehicles for improving schools – by sharing expertise, working collaboratively and driving improvements”.
Yes indeed, I thought, this was the bedrock of the local authorities, with their teams of locally based advisers, calling together local teachers’ conferences, running courses, putting expertise into all the schools in their locality, producing learning materials suited to the area, all under direct local democratic control. But then I looked again, and of course you weren’t talking about this, were you? You were talking about multi-academy trusts.”
I remember schools working together. Back in the 1970s we used to have subject based meetings for secondary school teachers, sharing ideas and resources. One of the best things we did was organise a residential weekend for year 10 pupils ( formerly known as fourth-formers) where we took a bunch of them off to a place just up the road from where we now live and made them do everything in French: meals, activities, games, even sorting out the dormitories. The centre we stayed at is far enough away from the village for the youngsters not to walk to so they were stuck there. And, of course, this predated mobile phones by a long way. It worked like a charm - a bunch of fourteen and fifteen year olds doing their best to speak French. Simpler times! We didn’t have league tables and we got along very well,
As reports come in of a third wave sweeping through parts of Europe, the news broadcasts suggest we won’t be going on holiday abroad this summer. This is getting a little tedious now.
So here’s a bit of light relief. A restaurant in Taiwan ran a promotion event: any customer whose ID card contained “giu yu” - the Chinese characters for salmon - would be entitled to an all-you-can-eat sushi meal with five friends. This worked even better than eat-out-to-help-out and loads of people applied to change their names officially so that they included the useful characters. Names were changed to “Explosive Good Looking Salmon”, “Salmon Prince”, “Meteor Salmon King” and “Salmon Fried Rice”, all with the idea of changing back to a more normal name after eating their fill. After all, they are allowed to change their names officially three times, but officials are appealing to the public to please stop calling themselves Salmon!
I was going to say we don’t have fishy names here in the UK but of course we do have Alex Salmon(d) and Nicola Sturgeon.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
No comments:
Post a Comment