A Midsummer’s NIght Dream by Beijing Film Academy
sensitively using aspects of the venue to create a changing dramatic space. The projections on the back wall did things like colour in the organ and draw attention to some…
Articles
The Mull Drier
Don’t use a tumble drier. For a family it can use as much C02 as driving an extra car. Instead get a Mull shieling drier, invented by my friends David and Moira Gracie.
Clearing – Education Guardian
Education Guardian – 3rd August 2009
“When I opened the envelope and saw my results, it was just – disappointment. I felt really, really bad. I threw them on the floor and went to my room in tears.”
Scottish designer’s art for windows
As a child, Sarah Campbell spent her summer holidays on the Isle of Lismore. On walks, she and her artist mother would pick tufts of sheep’s wool from the barbed wire fences and take it home. There they would wash, card and spin it, turn it into fabric on a loom and dye it.
Now working as a designer, Sarah has woven those childhood lessons into the one-off “textile paintings” doubling as window blinds that she creates in her workshop on the tiny island which sits under the mountains of Morvern in the Firth of Lorne for her company Mogwaii Design.
Flawed Interviews 2
An eminent expert witness told Jackie Kemp that paedophile cases in Scotland are being dropped due to flawed interview techniques. This is actually an addition I filed to the piece in the Herald below but it was too late to make the paper.
Albie Sachs Interview
Life sentences – GUARDIAN SOCIETY
The celebrated South African judge is still setting liberal precedents with a ruling that parents should not be sent to jail, because of their children’s rights – which, he tells Jackie Kemp, has important lessons for the UK.
Albie Sachs: ‘Judges are the storytellers of the 21st century’. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
Albie Sachs – lecture transcript
This a slightly abridged text of the lecture given by the ANC veteran and South African constitutional court judge Albie Sachs at the National Gallery of Scotland on June 25 2009 in Edinburgh, transcribed from my shorthand note.
Lighting the Spark: Teaching Awards
The Guardian, June 25 2009
Tobermory’s Tweecher
The Herald June 16 2009
NEW HORIZONS: Social networking and blogging are an increasingly important part of classroom life for both pupils and teachers.
The pen has always been a mighty instrument. But in this internet age, when daily musings are so freely dispensed through Twitter, Facebook and blogs, it is easy to forget the power of the written word. The brightly painted town of Tobermory on the Isle of Mull has recently been reminded of this, after the local paper published a series of messages that had been sent by Lynne Horn, a principal teacher at the local high school, through the social-networking site Twitter.
Teachers banned from Twitter after indiscreet tweet
Council imposes ban after teacher’s comments cause outrage in rural community
from the Guardian Education online
Fellow ‘tweechers’ have responded angrily to the ban
Tweeting teachers in Scotland are incensed by reports that Argyll and Bute council has banned teachers from blogging about their work.
The move came after tweets written by a teacher appeared in the Oban Times.
Comments made by the head of the language department at a local high school, to her friends on Twitter – “Have three Asperger’s boys in S1 class: never a dull moment! Always offer an interesting take on things” – have caused outrage.
Pressure mounts on Scots
Media Guardian
Scotland’s national newspapers are in crisis as readership falls, jobs are cut and London-based titles muscle in.
Scots, once the biggest consumers of newsprint in the world, are losing the habit, with the slump hitting home-grown titles the hardest. The writing could now be on the wall for one or all of the three daily Scotland-wide titles, the Scotsman, the Herald and the Daily Record.
Flawed Interviews Failing Children
The Herald
The Scottish legal system is letting down victims of child sex abuse, according to an international expert based at Abertay University in Dundee.
Kitchen Nightmare on Lismore
Education Guardian
What children put into their mouths at lunchtime has become one of the touchstone political issues of our age and a money-saving plan by Argyll council in Scotland to shut six Hebridean island school kitchens was recently shot down by parental anger.
Mechanical enginering at Dundee
From the Guardian University Guide
The University of Dundee has motored up the mechanical engineering tables, coming from outside the top 20 last year to third place.
This is the first year that students have built a formula student racing car to race in a university competition at Silverstone – a project that the department head, Robert Keatch, says they are hugely enjoying and which is helping their team-working skills.
Cracking cocaine
Most of the pupils at Girvan academy are smartly dressed in school uniform, shirts and ties, and it seems an unlikely place to find juvenile cocaine experts.
But this school in Ayrshire has piloted an anti-drugs programme on cocaine that is to be rolled out across Scotland. Pupils have worked with the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency and Learning Teaching Scotland (LTS), the government-funded body that develops the curriculum, to come up with a programme that focuses not on the health risks of cocaine use but on its environmental and social damage.
Kathleen Marshall Interview
What they long for is people who care’ – Education Guardian
Kathleen Marshall, the first UK children’s commissioner to leave office, tells Jackie Kemp she has never been a fan of playing safe
The ground-floor office a few doors up from the Scottish parliament on Edinburgh’s Holyrood Road has neat venetian blinds and two doors. One is unashamedly dull. The second, smaller door, is shiny, has a bejewelled handle, and is painted with images of mermaids and enchanted forests. Just inside, where other offices have coatstands, is a cardboard wishing tree. Someone has written on one of its paper leaves in a round, firm hand: “I wish I had more one-to-one time with key children.”
In praise of wild camping
The Herald Magazine. Hiking off into the purple yonder with nothing but a sleeping bag and a loo roll – that is camping as it once was and, for some, what it is becoming again. There’s a resurgence in so-calledwild camping in Scotland as the countryside access laws bed in. Forget the designer floral tent with matching curtains, the elegant plastic wine goblets and the pre-cooked lasagne – leave them at home where they belong and head for the horizon with just a toothbrush in your pocket.
Louise Richardson Interview
Education Guardian.
Louise Richardson, the new head of St Andrews, will bring ‘American attitudes’ to admissions and to red tape, she tells Jackie Kemp.
St Andrews University … Louise Richardson was previously the dean of a Harvard college
Does classroom size really matter, Mr Clegg?
Guardian Education blog. The Lib Dem leader’s policy pledge to reduce early years class sizes may seem like common sense – until we realise how impracticable it is.
A new system for reading music
Every Good Boy Deserves Failure. And All Cows End Gorily – or is it Eat Grass? Generations of children have struggled over mnemonics designed to help them translate five black lines and a series of dots into music. Some accomplish this feat; some – like me – remember little except these disjointed sentences. But that could soon be history, according to a charity that’s introducing a music notation system to the UK from Finland that is accessible enough for the youngest children to understand. “A revolution in music education is under way,” says Brian Cope, of Drake Music Scotland.