Articles

Nurses need specialist training for Alzheimer’s

The Herald – 18 September 2009

ALZHEIMER’S is a ‘Cinderella’ condition which is stigmatised and hidden ‘the way cancer was 30 years ago’ according to the author of a report to be launched on World Alzheimer Day on Monday.

Nurses should be given special training to deal with the growing number of people who face a diagnosis of dementia in Scotland, according to nurse consultant Dot Weaks, whose report ‘There is much more to my practice than checking up on tablets’ is to be launched at the University of Abertay, Dundee. She found that nurses who were given training in helping patients to come to terms with the knowledge they have Alzheimer’s were significantly more effective in dealing with patients.

The Grim Reader – Education Guardian

Reprinted in The Australian Age, 07/9/09, and the Buffalo News, USA, 03/9/09
Tuesday 1 September 2009

One day recently I heard an unearthly wailing coming from my 11-year-old son’s room. It was like no sound I’d ever heard from him before. He doesn’t normally cry at television or films but, curled up alone in his bed reading, when the fantasy character he identified with met a grim end, vanquished by the forces of darkness, he found it absolutely devastating.

Anne Fine deplores ‘gritty realism’ of modern children’s books

The Times – August 25, 2009
by Jack Malvern and Jackie Kemp

Former Children’s Laureate Anne Fine said that modern stories offered little hope for their protagonists

Once upon a time, in the spiffing 1950s, characters in children’s books enjoyed wonderful adventures after which they all lived happily ever after. By contrast, reality weighs heavily on today’s young readers, a former children’s laureate has warned.

Anne Fine said that cosy tales in which children’s characters looked forward to future adventures had been replaced by gritty stories that offered no hope for their weary protagonists.Contemporary literature is dauntingly bleak, with depressing endings that do little to inspire.

Former Childrens laureate Anne Fine reads to children from Hermitage Park School, Leith

(Colin Hattersley)

 

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.

Shieling self catering cottage

 

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, South African writer and judge. 

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.

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

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.

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.”