Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Nintendo, not nursing homes

I had a day off yesterday - visiting Edublogger, collecting my fabby birthday present (too precious to post), lunching at the excellent Shore restaurant and coming home just in time to watch Spooks. Over lunch, we discussed, inter alia, the reasons for someone to blog. Mine are obviously different from the work-based agenda of many of the blogs I read, but I decided that as far as I was concerned I was aping the essayists whose work we used to study in school - Addson, Steele, Bacon. Maybe a touch of Pepys as well.

Actually I loved Bacon's essays, with their terribly quotable lines - "Revenge is a kind of wild justice"; "Men fear death as children fear to goe in the darke" (I'm sure I remember archaic spelling - I must have been an odd child). I once unearthed a set when I was starting off a top Credit class at the start of S3; we read a few and then I set them to write their own essay "Of Homework". The results were amazing - and the class never looked back, accepting from the off that they were going to be challenged because I thought they were up to it. The two year course was one of the best periods of my teaching life, most of it having been spent in a very ordinary comprehensive - these pupils showed how extraordinary they could be.

I look forward to seeing how far my new Nintendo DS Lite can rejuvenate my aging brain - an obvious investment in keeping me (and Mr Blethers, apparently) functioning mentally well into our old age. I shall report on my progress.

2 comments:

  1. A Nintendo? Mrs Blethers got an Nintendo? When will you ever have the time to play with it? I hate them - purely because children tend o bump into me on the street because they are so focussed on getting Mario to the next level.

    Happy playing - and competing with others around the world!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nah, nah - I'm averting senile decay with wee sums! See today's post....

    ReplyDelete