Vivat Libertas

I have a rather awesome Biology teacher. She's genuinely, almost ridiculously passionate about her subject, and about science in general. She did quite well for herself at uni and was going to continue on to a PhD...so not the kind of person whom one would expect to be a teacher, given the "if you can't do it, teach it" attitude. She openly told our class that she teaches because she genuinely likes it - she gets to talk about the subject she loves all day long, for a start, which has to be a plus in any career. Cue me telling her that more people need to talk like that - to which she said that she does give talks to people doing PGCEs. Following on from other random stuff I and many, many other people came up with , it's not good enough just  to be essentially preaching to the choir. We desperately need inspirational teachers - and to get more of them, teachers should speak to students from, say, Year 9 upwards about the benefits of becoming a teacher. I don...

I don't really talk about this much. I probably should do, since it's quite interesting. I came across this tweet from Alom Shaha , talking about how having female role models doesn't make a difference to girls' appreciation of physics. Now, this is a massive problem - the ratio of men to women in physics is still quite skewed, but I'm getting off topic. He asked for thoughts, and since I have a big mouth and fairly good typing skills here's what I came up with . It sparked off a little bit of commenting, particularly when I mentioned the role of the media in telling girls to "shut up & look nice" . Two women, @RedRubia and @Queen_Claire , told me that nobody had ever told them they couldn't do maths and that they were very proud of being presentable lady geeks who had never thought that they should shut up, in which case, more power to them. @Original_Cindy  then claimed I was wrong (but hasn't actually put any evidence forth for th...

I'm not a complete Shakespeare nut. I don't argue that he's the greatest writer ever to have lived (that spot is reserved for Tolstoy; I haven't decided on the best playwright, but my favourite is most definitely Anouilh, and my favourite poet is Dylan Thomas), and neither do I believe he should be studied to the point of excluding almost every other English writer - give us a break and let us read some Spenser or Milton ( Paradise Lost  can be pretty hard to get through if you're not well versed in the Bible, but it's worth it). However, saying that Shakespeare is bad  is on a whole other level of wrongness; Shakespeare's writing is many things to many people, but it's not bad - not even by the standards of other great literature, and not even by the standards of his contemporaries. His works have survived and etched themselves into our literary consciousness; can you say the same for, say, Marlowe? Unless you study English Literature beyond GCSE level ...

I've just been teaching my mother how to set up a Gmail account. For those of us born in the 1990s, in the developed West (including me)...well, we grew up with technology. It was like a logical, nay, even a spiritual extension of ourselves (in the sense that it just seemed to flow from mind to internet). When you have tech-savvy people around you, that effect is only intensified. With all that in the mix, it can be quite hard to look at things from the viewpoint of what are politely called the less technologically literate. I ended up having to write yet more crap in this blog because of it (I get inspired far too easily, don't I?). You see, I responded to it in ways that made me really think. I'm a really impatient and easily frustrated person, prone to random outbursts when things don't go my way - or more precisely, when I simply cannot understand why, for all my hard work, I'm not getting the results I want. I get especially frustrated when trying to explai...