allsorts

Responding to sensible advice, I have withdrawn this post for now.

Thanks Don.

Rob Long is a Chartered Educational Psychologist  who brings lots of humour and commitment to his presentations. He had the audience hanging on his every word, gave away chocolate and gem stones and generally captivated us.

Things he said that I liked:

Attitude is everything

Fight fire with water

The problem is the problem not the child

Analyse, don’t personalise

I’ll try to remember all these when I have Primary 7 in front of me on Monday. I will.

Mick Waters:Making Learning Irresistible

Some of the things he said that I liked:

Events & experiences “outside” need to be brought into the classroom to be used. They are all part of learning and not “extra” curricular.

We test excessively and need to investigate alternatives, looking at the bigger picture, broadening the “curriculum”

To build a useful curriculum you have to start by deciding where you want to be in the end and work out how to get there.

We need to get the learning so that children want to have it.

Yes indeed.

It was the lively Mick Waters who used the term “binge thinking”, and I certainly feel as if I’ve been on a bit of a bender, nothing to do with the free drinks at Teachmeet. I’m so glad I went to that - partly because I learned loads, and partly because I feared I’d be out of my depth, but I wasn’t at all. The journey home took even longer than the journey there in real time but my head was so full of stuff it didn’t seem like it at all

What did I see? Mainly people. I saw big folk on the big stage like Michael Fullan, Stephen Heppell and Mick Waters. Small folk in packs effortlessly upstaging the adults, as they so often do. Friendly folk welcoming shy but keen fellow bloggers Brave folk standing up in front of their peers to share their experience and achievements. Truly motivational folk captivating their audiences.

I think it’s the 4^th time I’ve been to this event and it was the best by far!

I made a video show of our thoroughly successful trip to Thirlestane Castle at the end of last term. Here it is, thanks to James

OK I have to come clean. I now have a police record. Well, my name’s in a policeman’s notebook anyway.

The guys had been practising in our front room this week for a gig they were doing tonight here in Peebles (they’re called V&A - funny in itself because they didn’t even know it’s the name of a museum in London haha) When you see them at Wembley, you’ll know where you heard about them first. That’s my 17-year old son, and 4 other people’s sons. 2 guitars, bass, drums and a “singer”. No it’s not my style of music. In fact I wouldn’t even call some of it music, but they are serious about it, and they put a lot of effort into producing a reasonable sound together, with some quite good original stuff as well as the usual covers.

Anyhow, at about 1.30 this afternoon, yes that’s 1.30 on a Saturday afternoon, a policeman appeared at the door saying that a neighbour had complained about the noise, and they had already responded to this same neighbour when he complained last Tuesday afternoon, a fact which my son had “forgotten” to tell me about!

Now, we live in a big detached Victorian house with pretty thick walls, but the guys had been playing with the windows open on the Tuesday and when they’d said they would shut the windows and stop after an hour, the police were apparently quite happy.

Today, the neighbour was wanting an ASBO to be considered! The nice apologetic policeman said to us that wasn’t really what ASBOs were intended to deal with, however, he wrote down my name in his book and I even had to agree to go to mediation, should it be necessary!

Our guys then went round all the houses in the street explaining that their gig was tonight, they appreciated it wasn’t to everyone’s taste but that they would be stopping at 4pm. The reactions they got varied from “Kids, kids, come and see…it’s the band!” to “What’s the problem? I like your music” to “Don’t worry guys, my son was a drummer and it doesn’t bother me at all” (our 85-year-old, admittedly deaf, next door neighbour). There was only one house where they got a talking to – guess where the complaint came from? “I can hear those drums in my basement” Well yes, and the cars going past in the street, and your own dogs barking, but presumably you’re not requesting ASBOs against them.

Now why couldn’t they have come across the road and spoken to us? What sort of community spirit is that? In my view (and that of our very musical neighbour on the other side) it’s the complaining neighbours who ought to be served with an ASBO! When you think of the stuff these young guys could be up to, and aren’t, and how responsibly they reacted to the complaint….one of them, yes the one with dreadlocks, came and apologised to me for the police having come to the door…

Looking on the bright side, the acquisition of an ASBO might even be a career advantage. The rest of my family are already asking for autographs.

OK, I’ve fallen out with netvibes after it lost all my carefully gathered bookmarks. (Yes, OK, I did delete them, but normally a “close” cross doesn’t just wipe everything out without at least warning you first). I then spent some time putting them into iGoogle, only to find it has various shortcomings as well, like its bookmarks module only displays 10 bookmarks, and the reader module only shows new posts so you have to load it up separately to access blogs when you want to read them again, and clicking on a bookmark or a blog doesn’t load a new window, so when you go back to iGoogle you get “loading…” forever.

So I’m looking for advice from you guys…what’s the alternative? Do I just set up netvibes again, but use delicious more carefully for my bookmarks? In which case, I’ll have to go there and do a bit of work tidying up my tags.

Despite reading about, and even using, these fancy gadgets and widgets and applications, sometimes the internet seems to fall far short of what I actually would like it to do for me. I don’t expect it to make the tea (though that would be nice) but even this “personalisation” stuff is only within someone else’s idea of what I would like. I can see that I’m going to have to learn to DIY soon. But that’s for geeks, surely…

Today I went to the Picasso on Paper exhibition at the Dean Gallery (Worth visiting for the toilets alone).

The exhibition was fascinating, and I learned a great deal about the life and development of an artist I hadn’t really appreciated before. When I first knew my husband, he had a print of that famous Picasso nude from his Blue Period on his wall and I didn’t like it. Now some 30 years later, I can see things that I wasn’t able to then, and am drawn by its atmosphere, light and form.

One of Picasso’s famous quotes is this one.

I guess that Picasso would have been right to use the word “only” without the www. But because computers now allow us access to the web they can expand collaboration with other minds, exchange of ideas and allow the development of thought.

But I think that the essence of Picasso’s thought is right. It’s not the answers that matter, but the questions.

When I was looking at Ruby’s latest post, I also saw her last one which I’d missed.

What a relief to find that I am not a freak and a failure!

Over the last couple or three weeks I’ve been attempting to do some family history research and simultaneously to organize vertically lots of old family photos and of course all that has happened is that I have lost sight of the living room carpet, the coffee table, and the whole of one settee.

It’s not all photos and census records of course, because in that time other things have come in that wanted attention too - Road Tax reminder, music course acceptance, the Spirograph set my son got for his birthday (his 21st ), my wedding anniversary chocolates.

By chance my husband is also a horizontal organiser. So our house is full of piles of things which one day are supposedly going to be organised vertically in the study. Oh yes the study, which at the moment is full of horizontally organised building and decorating materials for both the potential study and the bathroom. Oh yes the bathroom, where because of genetics, my sons have left serially horizontally organised damp towels, so there is no real need for horizontal floor covering. You can see we’ve got this down to a fine art in our family. See here.

However, as Ruby says, now it has a name, it’s no longer a failing, it’s a syndrome upon which I can see I have capitalised (when it’s not been raining) when I’ve taken all the vertically organised weeds, and redundant external building materials and organised them horizontally in the skip.

I feel so much better about it all now.

In trying to get the front garden from this

to this

in preparation for an easier-to-maintain lawn,

we disturbed this:

The best sort of excuse for leaving part of the back garden as a wildlife sanctuary for now!