Feeling the Spring in February

Assembled en masse

Matrimonially white

Announcing Spring Time

Last year, I took the same journey at about the same time. We lunched in Dunster today, just as we had done the previous year. Only this year, the weather was slightly kinder to us.

Last year, there was snow everywhere. In fact, I managed to get stuck on Dunkery Beacon, totally unable to move. It did look wonderful though.

The reason we were all up on Exmoor last year was to catch a bus into Snowdrop Valley. For a very short period each year, there is an abundance of snowdrops in a valley near the village of Wheddon Cross. Unfortunately, the road down to the valley is treacherous at the best of times. Snow covered, it is inaccessible. So the bus wasn’t even running.

Today, it was a different story altogether.

Waiting for the bus, I was beginning to get rather excited as the sun had just peeked through the clouds. Sadly by the time we were transported down into the valley, the sun had vanished but the sight of the masses of snowdrops was still awesome.

http://wheddoncross.org.uk/snowdropvalley.htm

I don’t recall ever seeing so many clusters of snowdrops in one place. I really did begin to think that Spring was on the way. It felt as though everything was waking up once more and for a minute, it seemed as though all was well with the world.

If only people could spend some time simply walking through such natural beauty. I am confident that if they did there would be far less anxiety in the world. If they then decided to spend more time doing such things then the anxiety would not merely dissipate for a short while but gradually a greater sense of calm would take precedence.

Today was a great opportunity to experiment with my new camera. As I said, the light wasn’t completely conducive to perfect pictures but it is always a pleasure to practice.

Snowdrop

Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart.
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
Move through an outer darkness
Not in their right minds,
With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.

Ted Hughes

What a Load of Koob

No sooner had I written about the desire for a proper education system where reading and writing enables free thinking and pupils to find a voice that the government comes up with their next method of madness in formalisation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12509477

Read this and weep. Or more constructively, get angry and do something about it.

According to the link, the government is now going to introduce a new “reading” test which includes non words such as “koob” and “zort”. This test is to ensure that the factory fodder of six year olds have understood the synthetic phonics to such an extent that they can interpret meaningless manufactured words. Hey, there’s some real irony here that Mr. Gove hasn’t quite managed to appreciate.

Or should I say Mr Gov. – the man from the ministry whose name, as the President of the UK Literacy Association quite rightly points out, definitely does not rhyme with “love”. So explain that one Mr. Gooooooove. Perhaps you ought to put your name on the “reading” test to see just how well your plastic phonics system is teaching our children how to read without any context whatsoever.

Another irony is the words chosen for this list as “meaningless”. I once taught someone whose surname was “Zort”. I wonder how he would feel to see that his surname is classified as a pointless word. But then again, he was not from Anglo-Saxon origin, so he doesn’t real count according to Mr. Gov.

His sidekick proclaims to know all about education despite the fact that significant academics and those who teach in schools tell him that this is not the only method that should be employed in teaching and indeed learning how to read. Mr. Gibb (he with a silent B – would children spell his surname correctly on hearing it?).

"Too many children leave primary school unable to read and write properly - we are determined to raise standards and the new phonics-based reading check for six-year-olds will ensure that children who need extra help are given it before it is too late, and then can enjoy a lifetime's love of reading."

So says Mr. Nick Gobb.

Pray, do tell me how children are going to enjoy a lifetime of reading when they have been put off by a gross lack of understanding by the time they are seven years of age.

This experiment was done many years ago with synthetic phonics. It works for some people but others are completely flummoxed by it because they quickly realise that the English Language is not constructed with due regard for phonetic consistency. In order to make a real sense of the language one needs to be able to look at the structure of words, their placing and meaning within a sentence, how they physically take shape on the page, where they fit with other words, how they give meaning to the reader.

I am fed up to the back teeth of people taking on these so-called miracle initiatives at the expense of children’s learning, at the cost of their enjoyment – all because someone somewhere has prioritised the need for mechanical learning in a language that does not comply with such regulations.

I think back to the children that I have taught to read, and there have been many, so I guess I am speaking from experience. For some of them, the phonics worked but it was mainly those who had no problems with reading or indeed mathematics. There was already a willingness to learn and possibly an already established relationship with books.

For others, the phonics system was as complicated as learning Arabic. The formulaic process passed them by. They did not comprehend the structures and then, when they were led to real books, there were simple words that did not fit with the rules they had just been taught. Can you begin to imagine how frustrating that must feel like to a child who already knows they are not achieving in the way of their peers? No wonder some of those children sought to release their frustration with inappropriate behaviour.

I used phonics with these children but never as a stand-alone mechanism at the exclusion of other reading strategies. There were times when my little ones were taken off by the Special Needs teacher to work through a laborious list of words and phonics. I am really not sure whether it made a difference, for I think their ability to read was far more down to the hours sitting down with the child and pouring over a book both at home and in school.

When I first had the dubious honour of being placed in a Year One class, I decided that I would like to have a corner of the room that was dedicated to free play; a place that was the children’s place – the Home Corner. Unfortunately, my head teacher at the time disagreed and banned me from creating this special place when SAT preparation needed to accommodate every single moment of the day. I argued that the Home Corner would develop their speaking and listening skills and that communicating and cooperating with one another was an essential element of all learning as well as language learning, but she decided that other rules needed to be adhered to.

That was bad enough but when she told me that my children could only read with me in guided reading time, I had to rebel.

She thought that it was the job of the parents to read daily with the pupils who could not read, not mine. I was there to teach CVC words (consonant, vowel, consonant). I was there to teach the “ee” sound and the “ea” sound and make the children automatically know which one was the right one to include in their writing. I was the one who should teach the letter sounds with the Letterland characters that had no meaning whatsoever to my children. I was supposed to rush them into the 250 key English Language words that they had to learn despite the fact that a handful of the kids couldn’t even write or read their own name. But what I was categorically not to do was read daily with them.

As I said, I rebelled, and the only time I had in the day, like so many of my colleagues across the country, was to take every assembly time (well, the ones where I wasn’t required), every dinner time apart from Friday, and many break times, trying to help these poor little mites who were struggling so desperately with this difficult language.

And guess what? I don’t think I ever used unreal words to get them to learn because one begs to ask – what is point?

Surely, the whole point of reading is to get meaning from the collection of letters and words on a page. Otherwise, what the hell is the point? Our language is not constructed in a clear code. There may be 44 clear phonemes but there are thousands of words that do not follow this construct and I know that my children learned to read through many different methods, such as interpretation through the picture, memory, graphemes, the works.

The thing that most upsets me about synthetic phonics is this idea that children should not look at “real” books until they have learned this formulaic approach, thus robbing children of some of the very best literature known to mankind! Is the government therefore saying that you can only read to your child if you cover up the words so that their synthetic phonics system is not diluted by the other spurious methods of learning how to read? Or is Waterstone’s and the likes now going to be full of our favourite books being syntheticised? Heaven forbid!

I make no apologies for getting angry about this because it is something that is dear to my heart. I can still see some children getting restless and frustrated as they battled with this structure that was supposed to help them but merely led them further into despondency as they just didn’t get the phonetic rules, and even if they had managed to learn in the construct of a planned programme, they could not make the transition from using this in either their reading or their writing.

It was so hard to see this, and I would sit happily for hours working time and time again, to ensure that they learned to read by my methods.

I can safely say that no child left my class without being able to read.

I would like to say that I hope the government and Mr. Gov. would reconsider their ideas about these silly words, but there is no point in wasting my breath, just as there was no point arguing for my Home Corner. My only hope is that the teaching profession refuse to administer these stupid tests and get on with really helping their children to read by creating an environment that gives meaning, purpose and enjoyment of reading both collectively and individually.

I do hope my children read for enjoyment now too.

Emergent Writing

Emergent Writing

In the olden days of pre National Curriculum, the school where I worked had two vital parts to the week. On one afternoon, the entire school would do “Writing Workshop”. For those unversed in such practice, this meant that everyone in the school was doing “free writing” simultaneously.

There were no rules to the writing. The children could write about anything that they wanted. Sometimes, we had group writing, where we might choose to write a story together. On such occasions, we had a wonderful collective think, where we composed a paragraph or two as a starting point for the children to then take the story wherever they wanted. Sometimes the collective brains working together was a good way in, especially for those children who found creative thinking a little difficult in the first instance.

The other wonderfully vital part of the week was DEAR – Drop Everything And Read. On a Thursday afternoon, for 30 minutes, you could walk around the school and hear a pin drop. Everyone, including the head teacher and the admin team would stop whatever they were doing, pick up a book or a newspaper and read, undisturbed, untested.

It was wonderful. Those children got used to the idea that reading was an individual delight and the teachers and other adults in the school became role models in reading for pleasure. Everyone cooperated with this. There was no penalisation. Everybody took part. It was never used as an excuse for catch up time or a quick 30 minutes for marking.

Everybody read.

And what peace there was. Nobody dashed madly out of school on a Thursday afternoon. Equilibrium broke forth merely down to the fact that everyone had been sitting quietly and had been transported into whatever world they were reading on the pages in front of them.

In many ways it was a sort of collective meditation; sharing and yet being totally within your own space and your own thoughts.

Many people now are advocating meditation in primary schools. The David Lynch Foundation is suggesting that this can be a wonderful way of relaxing young people, making them see sense in their learning and calming them so that they can appreciate the world around them.

Maybe back in those dim and distant times, we were beginning to see this through DEAR. We just didn’t go the extra step. We didn’t have the collective knowledge about meditation, at least not in our school.

Michael Morpurgo gave the Dimbleby Lecture this week, and in his final comments he too made reference to the need for shared reading at the end of the school day, just like the old days. Not only did we have DEAR but every half hour at the end of the day was spent doing some form of reading or another. It was a wonderful relaxing end to the day, and even the older children in the school would happily gather together on the mat to listen to a story being read to them.

Funnily enough, I can still remember my primary school teacher reading to us at the end of the day. Those books that he read are still very much at the forefront of my memory.

Precisely when and where did this practice disappear? I am pretty certain I know the answer to that one.

When SATs first came out, I was forced to disappear downstairs and become a KS1 teacher. It was completely out of my comfort zone but the head teacher felt as though it would be good experience for me, and he needed a trusted and capable teacher (so he said) to cope with the influx of testing.

In my second year, we had to test the children in English, Maths, Science, DT, History and Geography. I can still see the papers now because they were horribly etched in my mind. In history, the children had to compare and contrast a set of old irons! At the age of seven! Looking back now, it was complete madness, as indeed it was then. What on earth did those children get from this activity rather than being able to take them down to the British Museum to reflect on the colour, design and pure genius of artefacts from hundreds of years ago that were made with the most primitive of tools?

In DT, they had to design a card with all the annoying flappy bits that had not taken into consideration the fine motor skills of a child of that age. In geography, they had to design their own island. That was actually quite good fun but the fact that it was enforced upon us made it unnecessarily laborious.

However, it was the reading and the literacy that particularly saddened me, and according to the press at the time, infuriated some of our very best contemporary writers.

There we were in our Year Two classes the length and breadth of the country, inwardly digesting, separating, studying text and losing all sight of the purpose and pleasure of the books in doing so.

It was, and is sadly nearly twenty years on, sacrilegious. These incredibly gifted authors had composed brilliant books that were stories with meanings or stories for fun that someone in the Department of Education had deemed fit enough to rape into a study.

Michael Rosen, he of the wonderful “Little Rabbit Foo Foo” and “We’re going on a Bear Hunt” was incandescent with fury that his books were used in this way and levelled according to the text. He hadn’t written his books for such appalling purpose. He wanted children to enjoy reading.

Of course, his books were particularly useful to the bods in Westminster because they had fantastic repetitive text which would enhance a child’s learning and reiterate the flow and subtext of the book.

It shames me to think that as a profession we allowed this bastardisation of the purpose of reading. We should have collectively had a reading revolution there and then. As I said, twenty years later, books are still being used in this abhorrent way which is precisely what Michael Morpurgo was saying during the Dimbleby Lecture.

Although somewhat late in life, maybe that revolution ought to take place right now, led by those who understand what progressive education is really about, supported by those who could refuse to let their books be conditioned in this sort of pseudo education.

Reading and writing go hand in hand. And yet, we have crippled children in the art of free writing.

I remember sitting with some of my children who were struggling with the idea of not having a format to follow. We talked, we spent time together discussing the things that interested them that might inspire them to put pen to paper. We started with simple sentences or made rhyming couplets of nonsense. We even wrote about not being able to write so that I could prove to them that they had indeed contradicted themselves and written a perfectly good composition.

Nowadays, I fear that if I returned to the classroom and asked the children to write about anything that they wanted they may well sit there dumbfounded. The bright little sparks with plenty of imagination might have a go. The learned might start constructing their perfect sentences with appropriate connectives and well-structured sentences that have lost any sense of individuality. But I reckon that the majority are so indoctrinated into the process of writing that has been stagnantly taught to them, that they might not be able to break free of the shackles of the system to be able to even think about what to write for themselves.

Which is why it was so good to see on the news this week about a school in Lancashire who had embraced this magnificent form of writing that is the blog.

http://heathfieldcps.net/

Just brilliant. Back to the good old days of emergent writing. The funny thing is that the Deputy Head who has introduced this in his school is under the impression that he is being innovative. How sad is that?

Of course, to some extent he is. He is embracing the technology of the age to do something new, breaking free from a quarter of a century of indoctrination. If he had come to my school, he would have seen for himself that this was happening without the aid of computers a long time ago.

Do have a look at some of the writing from the children. It is wonderful. And what is also wonderful is that like all good bloggers, there are occasional typos or spelling mistakes. I am SO glad that there is evidence there that the teacher has not been round with an electronic red pen before the child was allowed to post the piece of writing.

These children have had their individual voices returned to them. They have been enabled to express something about themselves in their writing without the need for prescription. This is absolutely what progressive education is about. Not only that, to appease the standards crew, their sodding SATs results in Level Five have increased from something like 7% to 60%.

And they are surprised? Surely when you enable young people to branch out with their interests, working at their own speed, thinking for themselves you are going to get this sort of progression.

If I was teaching now, I would get my class blogging regularly. I would have been doing it years ago as I know that blogging has developed my writing skills that had been lying dormant for too long.

Not only that, but I am confident that through this emergent writing back in the early nineties, I knew my children far better. I learned about them, had time to talk to them, encouraged them and praised them for them being them, not for them adhering to a set of standards that I could tick off in a specially designed book. My children wrote at their own pace, they had individual tutoring that suited them. It was gloriously deregulated.

And that isn’t to say it was a free for all. Each child was challenged to progress. Every child had individual ‘targets’ that never felt as though they were imposed because they were carefully agreed with every child, each one being unique.

And it isn’t to say that it was easy. In many ways the old Writing Workshops were extremely hard to manage as a teacher but the benefits were so great that a little extra effort of teaching on an individual basis was worth it.

I caught a quote from Samuel Johnson on “Start The Week” on Radio Four. He said that, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”.

Well, I hate to disagree with someone who was allegedly such a great linguist but he is wrong. I suspect that Mr Johnson might well have supported synthetic phonics had he been around nowadays.

Of course people should write for any purpose with any incentive. The very last reason I write is for money. The very last reason these children in Bolton write is for money. So perhaps the new phrase should be “No man but a Bloghead ever wrote, except for money”.

There is probably no money in blogging but there is a wealth of individuality that mere coffers could not possibly pay for. Writing is an art. It is a freedom that a dictionary compiler may not really understand. Writing liberates. Reading transports. These are essentials of life, and through reading and writing we become individuals not a conglomerate of standardised skills.

This is what the teaching profession should be fighting for because within the writing and within the reading you find the child, the person, the individual and you enable them to walk a purposeful pathway.

An Egyptian Uprising in the Heart of Westminster

“So how does it feel to be an Egyptian this morning?” asked the journalist.

“I feel FREE!” was the response from an overwhelmed and excited young woman; a woman who was articulate and impressive, a woman who probably thought that she would never be able to speak her mind, a woman who probably wasn’t a political progressive but had suddenly witnessed something that made her think about what was possible in her beloved country.

Nobody was working, she said and yet the streets still got cleaned because the young people joined together to make it so. The transport system was working because the drivers were united with the protestors and they wanted to ensure that people could travel into Tahrir Square to voice the opinions of the nation. The army stood back and did not interfere with the human rights of these people to protest about the way that they had been governed. The woman went on to say there were no decisions from government and it made her think. Did she really need a government after all? Surely the people could run this show on their own.

Pretty damn impressive. Pretty exciting, until you consider the fact that the army are still calling the shots and the country is effectively under martial law at present.

But there is such force in the voices that are being reported, such passion, such honesty and awakening.

We complain in the West about our governments in various ways such as blogs or comments in newspapers and we take this for granted. It is our right to speak but we cannot really imagine what it must be like to have this voice made unlawful. The frustration and anger of such an act seems almost implausible and yet these people in Egypt and far too many other places around the world are denied this absolute human right. Finding it once more, or in this case, for the first time, must be the most liberating thing in the world.

Before I go on any further, I do not profess to be an academic or an intellectual. I am a woman, sitting in the comfort of her own home, simply looking out on the world that is available for me to see and explaining my thoughts on the issue. Although I am politically interested, I am not politically astute and I certainly could not claim to understand the complexities of Middle Eastern politics. However, I have always, like so many, had an eye on this area of the world.

Many years ago, when there was some dreadful fighting in the area, I listened to the radio with my Mother. I looked at her with horror and said, “Don’t they realise they are killing someone’s brother and father?”

Such is the innocence of youth. Such is the misunderstanding of a three or four year old and yet there was probably more wisdom in my simple, childish words than anything that was coming from the governments of the warring countries at that time.

And the strange thing is that I still ask this question in times of conflict and I still don’t understand.

Yesterday, I looked at the makeshift tents in the middle of Tahrir Square and wondered. Suddenly, I was transported into a future time when similar temporary housing or toilets were to be seen all over Parliament Square. I imagined a train of people from Trafalgar to Parliament, camping down in the middle of Whitehall, demanding justice from the government of the time, trying to get them to see that the people would not stand for policies that continued and reinforced the horrendous inequalities in this country.

My son has just interrupted my writing to report on something he has just seen on the news. He has explained that the life expectancy in Merthyr Tydfil in the South Wales valleys is worse than post-war Iraq. He questioned this and suggested that surely it meant parts of post-war Iraq, and he is probably correct in this assumption. However, the facts are there. The average age of a man dying in Iraq is 64. In the ex-mining valleys of South Wales, it is 58.

And we think that materialism, capitalism and the consumer life is progressive and without inequity?

The people of Egypt have got to be careful. They have got to adhere to their principles of change. They cannot allow themselves to be swallowed into consumerism, with the West taking over with their enforced and supposedly superior form of democracy. I mean, where precisely is democracy actually working at present?

In Italy, where a corrupt megalomaniac has control over the media, and that is before one gets to the debauchery of power? In France, where the people continually strike to no obvious effect? In Britain, where the vast majority of the people did not vote for the parties in power? In the USA, where the so-called democrats have continued to back President Mubarak because of their determination not to offend the might of Israel?

The hypocrisy of the West is as alarming as the absolutism of the fundamentalists. Wedging a piece of paper between them is sometimes a little difficult because there is a certain amount of fundamentalism, or the belief that they are right and all others are wrong, in the Western leaders who espouse their form of democracy to be THE way.

Has it really worked for us?

Yesterday once more, I caught a glimpse of a piece of writing that said those who were campaigning for electoral reform were going to align their message of hope to the fact that the Royal nuptials were taking place a few days before the referendum.

Dear Egyptians, you do well to ponder on this bizarre anachronism and unfathomable contradiction!

Electoral reform and the development of a real, working, democratic constitution in this country cannot possibly happen when we still have the absurdity of a so-called constitutional monarchy with an unelected second chamber of has-beens and priests.

What on earth would the young Egyptians see as workable in our system?

Apparently, we are all going to be smiling away at the end of April because our beloved young man, he – the offspring of that poor put upon Diana, is going to walk up the ancient aisle of Westminster Abbey to marry his university sweetheart. This, according to those in favour of AP, needs to be seized upon as the “feel good factor” subsumes the nation.

How? How? How can these two events be put together so crudely when the very fact that we have a monarchy makes a complete laughing stock of our alleged democracy? How can those in favour of electoral reform possibly want to align themselves with an archaic institution that is standing in the way of true democracy and perpetuates the myth that some people and some families deserve the wealth of the nation by default of their birth?

As I said, Egyptians beware!

So perhaps my vision of a campsite in the middle of Parliament Square should be realised by those who really believe in democracy and are craving for some real change in the constitution, and maybe we should consider that we take to the streets to have our voice heard at, say Friday 29^th April?

I wonder how much democracy we would see taking place in this country if such a thing was organised?

But then I always was a dreamer.

The Joy of eBooks and Applications

I have a confession.

I am ever so slightly addicted to my iPhone.

It’s not a real addiction in so far that I could actually live without it but I don’t particularly want to. It has personal and practical uses, and I think that I am most fortunate that I have this exciting gadget.

I am sure that had I had another type of “smart” phone, I would be as happy with that but as it is, I just happen to have this phone, this model and it suits my needs.

One of the joys of getting the updated model some years ago, were these strange things called “Apps”. At the time, I couldn’t actually see much purpose in these things other than the occasional wasting of time playing games such as Tetris, or sitting on a crowded train having a quick Sudoku session. However, as the “App” world has grown, the technology has matured and there are some extremely useful applications (I prefer not to abbreviate on this one) as well as some hopelessly pointless ones.

I first got a free book application when I got my second iPhone and I have to say, the idea of reading on a small screen such as my phone did not really appeal to me. The list of books on this particular application was somewhat limited, particularly if you wanted a free book, and I wasn’t sold on the whole idea of reading a book on a screen to warrant paying for it.

Now, I have a series of book applications including Stanza, iBooks and Amazon’s Kindle; each offering a different range of titles.

Currently, I am enjoying reading “Women in Love” by D.H. Lawrence. As I sit on the train now, I too can look like a nerd with techno brilliance in her hand, overwhelmed at times by this insightful man who I am now convinced must have been a woman in a previous life.

Other books I have recently downloaded are “Diary of A Nobody” which is something I have been meaning to read forever, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (which cost me about 40p), “The Communist Manifesto” – another book that I think one ought to be able to dip into and “Buddhism: The Essence” by David Tuffley.

It is this book, well something in it, that I am going to start writing about today but before I do so, I just want to make a case for “real” books.

Nothing, in my opinion, can ever replace the real thing.

When you go into someone’s house, the nosiness in me always turns directly to the bookshelves to see what sort of literature the person is interested in. It can tell you more about the person than an hour of conversation.

Books are vital. I am passionate about books. I would fill my house with books given half the chance. I have filled my house with books.

One of my greatest delights, as a parent, was to frequently go into my son’s room before he could even read, and see him fast asleep with about twenty or thirty books in his bed, sometimes with them opened over his face as he fell asleep mid ‘read’.

Beautiful!

So my joy at finding these applications on my phone are not a replacement for the sheer pleasure of page turning, especially with brand new books or books that have yellowed with age and love and have that deliciously used scent.

However, it is good that I can carry on with my reading when taking a book around can be somewhat cumbersome.

...........................................................................................................................

And so to “Buddhism: The Essence”

This book sells itself as a large pamphlet that speaks of the essence of Buddhism in plain English. I’m not sure if it is readable as I haven’t looked at it properly, but it has the Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. I am assuming that there is going to be a commentary of sorts regarding these but just in case there isn’t I’m going to start my own commentary.

At the very beginning of this book is a familiar piece of prose by the great philosopher Atisha di Pankara.

The greatest achievement is selflessness.

The greatest worth is self-mastery.

The greatest quality is seeking to serve others.

The greatest precept is continual awareness.

The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.

The greatest action is not conforming with the world's ways.

The greatest magic is transmuting the passions.

The greatest generosity is non-attachment.

The greatest goodness is a peaceful mind.

The greatest patience is humility.

The greatest effort is not concerned with results.

The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go.

The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.

These sentences, statements, stanzas are so profound that they deserve attention individually. Collectively, they provide a Way, if only we have ears to listen and eyes to see, if only we are open to this sort of spiritual wellbeing.

I profess to be no scholar or Buddhist, merely a woman who is finding her Way; not desperately seeking but searching, not hoping but thinking, not acting but doing.

In order to walk my path, I sometimes feel a need to look at great writing and put my own interpretation upon it. This is a deeply personal interpretation and is neither right nor wrong. It is merely my interpretation at this particular moment, and it could all change tomorrow. That is the glorious essence of walking a Path. It can twist and turn and even double back on itself for a second or two, but it is always moving.

This piece of prose is preceded by a longer ‘dharma’ which I shall return to in due course but for now, I am going to try and write a series of blogs about this verse itself.

A Few Hours at the British Museum

I’m one of these people who find spending an entire day in a museum a bit of an ordeal. Perhaps it is the flightiness of my astrological make-up but I do tend to get a little impatient when there are hordes of people around. In addition to that there is only so much brilliance I can cope with in one sitting. I don’t want to get blasé about what I am seeing. Sometimes, it is just too hard to actually take in everything that you are seeing.

When I first moved to London, I excitedly dashed around from museum to museum almost on a weekly basis. The first summer holidays down here was spent taking in a spectacular sum of exhibitions and shows; an amount of time as yet surpassed by me.

On Wednesday evenings, when a group of us from college all met up in Covent Garden, I’d often go in early so that I could spend twenty minutes in the National Gallery or even the Portrait Gallery before walking up Long Acre to the pub.

That is the wonderful thing about free museums. You do not have to attempt to consume the whole thing in one go. You can simply dip in and out as often or as infrequently as you wish.

It ardently annoyed me when, during the Conservative years of ’79 – ’97, museums stopped being free. I resented the money that I had to pay to get in to see artefacts and art that I believed belonged to me, as a citizen of this country. I was horrified at the thought that there were people who would not be able to afford to go and see these things that were, by right, there’s to see.

Thankfully, that is one thing that New Labour got right and the abominable costs of walking into our museums was rescinded.

Freedom for the people, of sorts.

What a pity the Church of England could not follow the government’s lead and make Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s free to walk into. An astronomical £14 is the price they want you to pay nowadays to get into the City Cathedral with the big dome. It is truly criminal.

Today, I decided to do something. It was a grey and somewhat dreary morning; February at its most stereotypical – bland weather albeit mild. I was keen to do some photography with my new camera but the light was still not forthcoming and so I had to think of another way of purposefully using my time.

As I searched through the internet, I came across a pointer to the British Museum; Picasso to Julie Mehretu.

http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/picasso_to_julie_mehretu.aspx

This was the impetus I needed to get me off my bottom and catch a train into town; an impulsive decision but one that I am glad that I took. Living in London, one really does become oblivious to what this wonderful city has to offer. Even walking from the tube station to the museum, one feels as though one is invading onto another person’s world, of past, present and hopeful futures. Buildings are sprouting up anew, old ones juxtapose awkwardly in some cases but there is always plenty to see, if only we use our eyes to look.

The British Museum stands proudly in a street of Georgian houses. Academia Central, the Bloomsbury life, clever people all around. There have been times when I haven’t felt intellectual enough to go into this museum. There have been times, in my youth, where I have been somewhat overwhelmed and dare I say, bored by the mass of old objects housed within.

Nowadays, thankfully, I am more receptive to this type of learning and I eagerly dive through various exhibitions hungrily wanting to learn, especially when I know I can return home and look at some of the things I have seen in greater detail.

http://www.britishmuseum.org/default.aspx

As soon as you enter into the courtyard, designed by Norman Foster, you feel as though you are in a surreal bubble, encased, and perhaps even trapped in another world where you are merely a spectator.

It is an incredible space and amazingly warm with its sandy stone that appears to be the perfect preparation for viewing these artefacts from those delightfully hot countries of origin.

I hadn’t been up to this museum for some time. As I wandered in, searching for Room 90 where the Picasso sketch was to be found, my eyes met with the posters for the resident exhibition; Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. With the modern Egypt so prevalent in the news at present, I thought I really ought to go and pay some respects to their forefathers. I cannot sit in Tahrir Square in Cairo right now, as much as I would like to, so this was my small, insignificant show of solidarity with those who are peacefully pleading for democracy and regime change.

The museum is free. I could have gone and seen the Mummy room at the top of the museum but I had decided, as is my impulsiveness, that Picasso could wait and I would go and see these books that the dead Egyptians took with them to guide and protect them into the afterlife.

The special exhibitions cost, and I do not have a problem with paying for such brilliance. So I bought my ticket and wandered into a darkened and completely packed room.

It was too much to take in with all the crowds and I was thankful that I had spent the additional money so that I could return at a later date to see the exhibition in better conditions, i.e. with less people. However, you could not be anything other than mesmerised by the intricacies of the papyrus hieroglyphics on display. Fascinating lines of pictures that depict vignettes and spells to help the deceased into their afterlife with Ra guiding and Osiris awaiting. The jackal headed god of embalming, Anubis, was prevalent in all the drawings, carefully and protectively standing next to the dead bodies of these unknown people.

The wooden caskets, carved and painted thousands of years ago, stand vividly and proudly in the centre of the rooms. It is truly stunning to see such mastery in these objects that were then hidden in shrouds for so few people to see.

You do have a sense of invading into a world that you should not be seeing. Every room is crammed with an incredible amount of history that is completely overwhelming and there really is too much for one visit but it is certainly worth taking the trouble to look at this once in a lifetime exhibition.

The final part of the exhibition houses a magnificent 37 metres of Nesitanebisheru’s Book of the Dead. She was the daughter of a high priest in Thebes, and at the time of her death, was an extremely powerful woman. The complexity and completeness of this Book of the Dead is breathtaking, as is her determination to stamp some early feminism into it.

There is no point in me regurgitating what has been written in great detail but for any reader who is interested in reading more, then here is a useful link.

http://www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/3665_BOTD_schools_Teachers.pdf

Having walked somewhat briskly through the “Book of the Dead” exhibition, I wandered up to the higher reaches of the museum to look at my intended exhibition.

The British Museum has an unparalleled collection of graphic art from across the world, and actively collects modern and contemporary works today.

Collected over the past 35 years, this exhibition showcases many of the great artists of the 20th century, starting with Picasso’s study for his masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the painting that shook the art world in 1907.

It also features works by E L Kirchner, Otto Dix, Matisse, Magritte, David Smith and Louise Bourgeois and major contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter and William Kentridge.

The exhibition concludes with Julie Mehretu, the Ethiopian-born artist who is one of the stars of the international contemporary art scene with acclaimed solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim in New York and across the world.

In many ways, this exhibition was too eclectic with pictures ranging from Michaelangelo to Picasso with some unknown artists (well unknown to me) in between. However, I loved the mixture from the erotic pictures of Matisse and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to the disturbing rejection of heroism and nationalistic pride by Otto Dix. Japanese Calligraphy of modern times and sketches from incomplete pictures also stood out in this mixture of work.

Sadly, you couldn’t take photographs in this exhibition and because these are some relatively rare and unknown pieces of work, their copies have yet to seep onto the internet, other than the more famous ones.

Once more though, it is worth a visit to this exhibition before it ends in late April.

I completed this visit to the British Museum with a quick look at the Mitsubishi Corporation Japan Rooms with infamous pictures by Katsushika Hokusai being my highlight, and an all too brief trek into the world of Buddhism.

My horoscope for today said I was going to be a teacher and a student. The latter was more than true with me searching greedily for information on what I could see. The former, I hope, is somewhat fulfilled by me writing this blog. I have offered no teachings other than a plea to do what I have done, and take a wander around the things that are on our doorstep from around the world.

“I go for refuge to the Buddha

I go for refuge to the Dharma

I go to refuge to the Sangha”

I think that is what I have done today.

In Praise of Facebook

In Praise of Facebook

This is akin to politically incorrect speaking. One cannot possibly defend Facebook. One cannot possibly think that this is a viable way of spending time and communicating with people. It is not real communication.

Those status statements are a complete waste of time. Do we really want the entire world to know what we ate for dinner and when the baby last pooped his pants? Do we really think it is appropriate to post photos of children or lewd behaviour in the bars and clubs across the nation?

I would be the first person to admit that there are many things that are very wrong with Facebook. The changes in privacy settings means that one has to be constantly aware of whether your face is marching across the world or whether you have ticked the correct box to prevent this from happening.

One has to be careful to make sure that you do not provide too much information even though the invitation is there to do so.

The status bar is bizarre. People use it to tell others that they are going to bed or what they think of the latest X-Factor contestant. Yet there are also times when a glimpse of intelligence is seen, with people quoting honourable and wise people that they wish to share with others.

Am I a voyeurist or am I genuinely interested in the people who have passed through my life in one form or another? Many would say I am the former. Others would appreciate that I am honestly the latter. I thoroughly enjoy hearing good things about people that have been in my life. I love the opportunity I have to connect to people that in our busy world and busy lives we do not have time for even though we would really like to stay in touch.

Facebook offers the opportunity to do just that, and I suppose if all people used it as such rather than its more negative purpose then it would probably receive better press than it does.

I like people and I have a loyalty to the people who have had a place in my life, even the rotten ones, even those that were relatively periphery.

Okay, perhaps I am just a nosey parker after all.

However, I want to write today about two incidents that have happened to me this week through Facebook that I believe gives the whole genre some credence.

The first relates to a friend of mine from college.

M and I were never that close but we mixed together in a large circle of friends. I would probably never have arranged to go out with M on my own but would happily spend an entire evening in her company.

Without Facebook, I would probably see M once in two years, or whenever one of our group could get our act together to have party. With Facebook, I can keep in touch with her on a different level. Last year, for instance, I found out that we were both on holiday in the same place at the same time, and we had a long chat about what we had been doing, promising that next time we were there together we would meet up.

Her father died recently and I was able to offer some advice on how to cope with the bereavement.

I saw her in the summer. She was looking a little tired, like any teacher at the end of term, but neither of us had any idea how ill she was.

Through Facebook, I found out that she had cancer and she is now undergoing some intensive chemotherapy. I have been able to send her messages and give her the sort of encouragement that I hope will keep her going as she battles with this dreadful disease.

But there is another aspect that makes Facebook so useful in such circumstances. Her daughter has decided that she would like to raise some money for Macmillan nurses by cutting off her gorgeous hair, giving the cut locks to a charity that makes wigs for cancer sufferers.

This week, M posted a note on her page to ask for sponsorship. There was no nagging but I wanted to give something.

This dear girl has now raised £2500 and has increased her target from £2000 to £3000 to reflect the generosity of those who want to make this contribution to her cause as well as the clear generosity of her selfless act (She really does have beautiful hair).

Without Facebook, I’m not sure that I would have heard to quickly how ill my friend was. I certainly wouldn’t have known about her daughter’s charity act. Ergo, Facebook has done its work.

Another incident happened this week, which is completely different but for me, uplifting.

Sometimes, I switch on the computer and put Facebook on in a similar way that others have the television on as background noise. I forget that it is on most of the time, and often miss an instant message that a friend has sent me.

When I first joined Facebook, I wasn’t very circumspect about who I allowed or invited to be my friend. Before I knew it, I had joined up with some ex-pupils of mine. And now, of course, I am glad that I did.

One such pupil, possibly the most academically gifted lad I had ever taught, contacted me, and we had had a small exchange of hellos and how are you doing! Occasionally I would hear generically about what he had been up to and I am sure he might have been interested in some of my postings.

Yesterday, I was merrily sitting at the computer when a note popped up to say that he had sent me a message.

“Hey there Miss, how are you?”

Once a few casual comments had taken place, he then told me that he had just had a paper published and as his old primary school teacher, would I be interested in reading it?

I responded immediately to say that I would love to read it.

He sent me the link and I read with such interest and enthusiasm.

Nineteen years have passed since I last saw this child at the age of eleven, yet through his writing, the years simply disappeared. I could hear his voice, laugh at his humour, admire his skills and rejoice in his values. It was all there, and within it I would like to think there was a little hint of me too (but that is being rather egotistical).

And what a total joy that this man wanted to share this with me, a dim and distant person from his past who hopefully encouraged him to be the person that he seems to have turned into.

Without Facebook, I doubt I would have read this. I doubt whether I would have been in touch with this bloke let alone have the opportunity for him to share something that he is particularly proud of.

So as with all things, Facebook needs to be used carefully and there is so often good and bad in even the worst of things.