I was just Youtubing when I came across this masterpiece:
Author Archives: jon
Tough Love
The last few weeks have been interesting for me. To counteract the smaller children’s egregious behaviour I have enforced an iron-fist regime, with a nol-tolerance attitude befit of my teachers in Nazi training camp my secondary school.
Any time one of the children does anything against the classroom rules s/he gets a mark; three marks means I stop the lesson, send the others back to their classroom, and ring the offending child’s parents. Breaking the rules involves anything from speaking without putting up a hand, speaking to a neighbour when a written task has been assigned, slouching or sitting in a position I deem unacceptable, getting up out of a seat without asking and other minor misdemeanours.
Whilst this seems to be rather extreme when considering my liberal views, it has been both necessary and extremely effective. I had been against the idea of imposing such a regime upon the better behaved pupils, thinking it unfair, but, since I need to be consistent with all the children, the less well behaved take advantage of it to the fullest, and a minor deviance by one child can cause a cascade of other unacceptable behaviour.
Luckily, the more respectful among the pupils rarely get more than one mark, meaning I never need to ring these pupils’ parents; the more boisterous pupils have, more or less, become manageable. There is still a lot of work, and probably a fair number of telephone conversations ahead of me, but I fell I have made headway into the problem.
The lessons with the younger pupils are more harmonious, meaning I can relax and have a lot more fun with them, which can only be good for their education. I seldom need to raise my voice, or become angry at their conduct, meaning I’m liking them more and more as individuals. This makes my job far more enjoyable, and I look forward to having lessons with them, a far cry from the Jon of a few months ago.
The End Of Nintendo-Thimb?
The following recent article from Live Science was just too good to let go. In fact, it’s so good I’m Ctrl + V’ing it, just in case The Live Science site gets eaten by three-headed green monsters spewing toxic waste from their arses. Such articles are deemed to be ever ridiculed, regardless their actual validity.
The days of attacking aliens with a joystick could soon be over thanks to a breakthrough technique where a teenager played Space Invaders using only signals from his brain.
With a technique that takes data from the surface of the brain, a 14-year-old boy from St. Louis was able to play the two-dimensional Atari game without so much as lifting a finger.
In Space Invaders, a popular computer game from the 1970’s, players control a movable laser cannon in attempts to shoot rows of aliens that move back and forth across the screen. The objective is to kill the aliens before they have a chance to get to the bottom of the screen. Once they land, the game ends. The aliens can also shoot at the cannon, so the player has to try and evade the shots.
The boy, who already had grids implanted to monitor his brain for epilepsy, was connected to a computer program that linked the video game to the grids. He was then asked to move his hands, talk, and imagine things. The researchers correlated these movements to the different signals fired by the brain.
They then asked the boy to play Space Invaders by moving his hand and tongue and then to imagine those movements without actually performing them.
“He cleared out the whole Level One basically on brain control,” said Eric Leuthardt, a researcher at the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. “He learned almost instantaneously. We then gave him a more challenging version in two-dimensions and he mastered two levels there playing only with his imagination.”
A couple of years back, Leuthardt and colleagues performed this research on four adults. But they wanted to explore possible differences between teenagers and adults. Although it’s too early to tell from testing just one teenager, Leuthardt thinks that teens may win this game.
“We observed much quicker reaction times in the boy and he had a higher level of detail of control—for instance, he wasn’t moving just left and right, but just a little bit left, a little bit right,” Leuthardt said.
Forget the Wii, the revoution has truly begun.
Offending God (Or His Followers At Least)
One of my work colleagues has just been through a rough time in school. Whilst she was cleaning her desk of papers and rubbish she threw away a small and dilapidated pamphlet of Arabic writing, assuming it to be some old photocopied homework or reading exercise: it turned out to be from The Koran.
Even though the teacher does not speak Arabic and even though the pages were immediately taken from the bin, rumours started to spread like the proverbial wildfire, and parents were informed by rumour-bloated children.
Some parents kept their children away from lessons as a protest, and Naged (the assistant headmaster) was apparently rung up at all times of the night by irate parents. The teacher has been feeling generally shite for about two weeks now, although the ripples from the recent event have subsided.
I have some more respect fro Naged after this. The slew of telephone conversations he has had to endure must have worn him down and disrupted family life, but he has stuck by the teacher and sorted things out. The kind of thing a real headmaster does.
McDonalds Goes To School
As part of Freya’s current food project at school, some of the children have assembled a McDonald’s pastiche which was displayed on the wall in the play/dining area. Jo alerted me to this, so I took a proper look for myself. True enough, there were a couple of pictures of the children standing outside a local “restaurant”, along with some paper-art burgers and, most worrying of all, french-fry boxes on which the children’s names were written as “McAlice” and so on.
I mentioned to one of the educators that I thought this was not something I wish my daughter to see every day, and I was greeted with mild empathy and excuses for the display. I then wrote an open letter to the school, explaining that we have no problem with junk-food being discussed, but for it to be given a face in the form of a brand-name was tantamount to free advertising.
The offending posters have been taken down, and I await further comments to arise from my letter being discussed in a future teacher meeting. It is a testament to McDonald’s marketing that no-one in the nursery school found this synonymity concerning; one of the first comments I received was “if it makes you feel better there are pictures of vegetables on the walls, too”. It doesn’t, since there is no company called “Vegetable”; I would be equally anxious if pictures of Nike products were used in a clothes project.
Sadly, when I was in the dining area of my school the next day, I saw a similar pastiche about food in Arabic. Amongst the vegetables and fruit loomed two french-fry cartons. Thankfully, they were almost indistinguishable, and were hidden by the other foodstuffs and the hugeness of the dining room itself, something which cannot be achieved in Freya’s school.