From "'You Can Hear a Pin Drop': The Rise of Super Strict Schools in England/Inspired by the academic success of schools like the Michaela secondary school in northwest London, some principals are introducing tight controls on students’ behavior" (NYT).
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Re "Ozymandias": Here's the full text of the poem, here's the relevant episode of "Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast," and here's the recitation the poem in one of my favorite movies, "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" (the scene is a traveling theatrical production in the Old West):
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How bizarre! The movie clip omits the last 2 words from the 2nd line of the poem, so it doesn’t scan or rhyme. “ … Two vast and trunkless legs OF STONE …”
it SURE Seems like,
if you just put a glass over the snail (like i do with spiders).. You'd be pretty safe
"The movie clip omits the last 2 words..."
I'm not sure why they chose to do that — maybe because you're supposed to have it memorized! — but I've added a link to the full text of the poem.
"If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?!"
Hey, Teacher, leave those kids alone!
I can understand rules in school, even strict ones, but yelling poems in unison is really, really weird behavior.
But I assume they still teach that men can be women, and that some families rule because of divine providence.
In ten years (or sooner) the entire student body will be reciting verses from the Quran instead...
Based on the photograph in the NYT story, Katherine Birbalsingh, the principal of the Michaela Community School needs to apply some discipline to her workspace.
Ballad of Buster Scruggs was well written, the gold miner scene was hilarious (but technically inaccurate). , I’ll find you, pocket! Did Pee Wee Herman play the gunfighter?
I like the school, a bit of horseshit is helpful, like at West Point when you have to know how many seconds until graduation for the first class and such.
Excellent. I'll have to see the movie. I like Gielgud's reading to. And of course, there's breaking bad.
Because of this blog, whenever I see Ozymandias referenced I always think of Joyce Carol Oates now.
Salt. A superintelligent killer snail still lacks speed and thumbs, so it cannot do much to stop a saline assault.
Gastropods (lit. stomach foot) and Cephalopods share a common ancestor. The two lineages parted company sometime between 485 and 444 million years ago. The head-foots took with them brains and eyes that rival those of many vertebrates, leaving the snails and their kin with a permanent case of the dumbs, but they did retain the ability to invade the land.
Killer snails do exist, and they have the power to lay low the strongest man in a matter of minutes. The textile cone is a marine snail that preys on fish by piercing them with a barbed harpoon loaded with one of the most devastating neurotoxins known to science. Their beautiful shells sometimes wash ashore in the warm regions of the Indo-Pacific from the coast of east Africa to Hawaii where collectors prize them above nearly all other seashells. However, sometimes the living animal is still inside the cone making beachcombing hazardous to the unwary. All the cones are venomous so all can inflict searing pain at least, but the textile cone is the worst.
A nice one for sale
Wow- that is an awesome rendition of the poem.
It's nice to witness the shibboleths and sophistries of the Sixties crumble and tumble. I grow increasingly confident that the 2050s will resemble the 1950s more than they will resemble the 2020s. But how to hasten those sorely needed changes before civilization collapses in the United States? The Michaela school, even as a private entity, would find it hard to escape the bureaucratic interference of the Department of Education, let alone the bloodstained talons of the NEA harpies who would do whatever was necessary to sabotage such a school. The least they would do is rescind the certifications of any teacher bold enough to seek tenure at an American Michaela school.
The solution as I see it is the repeal of Public Law 96-88. The Department of Education has done nothing but erode academic accomplishment in public schools while simultaneously increasing per-student costs. Currently, we get less value from public education per dollar at about a 20-to-1 ratio compared to the 1960s. As it stands now the NEA has effective veto power over staffing decisions in the Ed. Dept., which in turn adopts NEA-approved policies. A more pernicious public/private relationship can hardly be imagined. It's like Lockheed-Martin appointing the chief-of-staff of the Air Force. It effectively isolates national education policy from the will of the voters, and it must be expunged even if it means dismantling the entire ediface along with Constructivism. Readin', writin', and 'rithmatic, all to the tune of a hickory stick works. 21st-century American public education does not.
SLANT eye for the classroom sounds strangely diversitist.
I recall doing that stuff at parochial school except instead of killer snails it was Roman Catholic dogma, and nobody told me it was overly disciplinarian or too controlling. Those nuns weilded their wooden rulers like longswords and we complied. My older brother said it was a great preparation for going to prison, if nothing else.
Katharine Birbalsingh used to write a blog - To Miss With Love, in which— as Miss Snuffy—she described her experiences teaching at an inner-city secondary school. She is a supporter of the traditional teaching methods described in E. D. Hirsch's The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them (1999). She writes that the book "opened [her] eyes" to what was wrong in schools, and argues that education should be about teaching children knowledge, not learning skills.
I used to read her blog regularly.
You can read the linked article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Birbalsingh
She maintains that misguided progressive politics in schools have held ethnic minority and working-class children back from academic success and that the political left seek to address problems within education by pouring more money into schools rather than fixing deeper issues, stating "there is a lot of power in ideas, and if the ideas are wrong, then the education system will not deliver.
Black and ethnic minority children do very well at her school, which has outstanding results.
Progressives in the UK hate her.
Doesn't he remind you of Stan Laurel?
That is, if Stan Laurel had no arms or legs.
So long as children are not prevented from learning by being in physical danger, schools don't matter that much. There seems to be some advantage for the worst students having a good versus an average teacher. That's it. We're all just chasing magic here because we so want it to be true.
I can see sending your kid to a school that will teach something close to your religious beliefs, or be strict about not bullying or teasing if you child has some oddity, but otherwise - or if you are already seeking contacts for the future, as with a prestigious college - no. The evidence just isn't there. We just believe it should be there, so we always find some reason that it is.
Jpsepgbleau writes, "Did Pee Wee Herman play the gunfighter?"
Hardly. That was Tim Blake Nelson, Phi Bata Kappa, Bown, 1986.
Sounds like the Catholic schools I went to. Esp the all boys one. 25 swats for making noise in Study Hall. It was about self-control. 4 years of that and you've got compadres for life.
“Jpsepgbleau writes, "Did Pee Wee Herman play the gunfighter?"
Hardly. That was Tim Blake Nelson, Phi Bata Kappa, Bown, 1986.“
Thanks, I was just commenting on the likeness. I studied engineering and was not eligible to be Phi Bata Kappa. ( with all due respect to you, Questor)😉
There aren't that many parts that come along for quad amputees, just a few roles in some of Beckett's plays.. I was therefore saddened to learn that the Coen Bros. cast an able bodied actor in the role and used CGI methods for the absence of limbs.
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