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Showing posts from February, 2010

Music and (Hidden) Education

Found ourselves reading this comment in the papers: Schools are churning out the unemployable and nodding our heads in agreement. Husband gets sent lots of CVs whether or not he is recruiting. Most of these go straight into the bin. If it's not Oxford, Cambridge or one or two from London University, he does not even bother to look. This article tells us how schools or rather teachers seem fearful to teach. They "facilitate". This morning I heard a trailer on radio of how a young man believes that while in the past teachers were respected purely because they were teachers, these days teachers have to "earn their respect". I'm afraid the schools must have had the management consultants in, paid them a lot of dosh, and then decided to "facilitate". As a former management consultant, I can tell you we are very good at teaching clients how to "facilitate" in the work environment. Assuming that grown-up workers have a basic knowledge, we teach

Lord, don't make me a bunion!

Yesterday my son was chuffed to be playing his first rugby match for the school in the afternoon. If you've seen his 'sporting skills', you would understand why this is such a big deal in our household. At breakfast I had to remind him of three things. Can't remember the first two, but the third was about teamwork. Then we moved on to Paul's analogy of the church as the body. Which part do you play? If everyone is an eye, what good is it? Or if everyone was a hand, not any good either. Later on that morning I had the reason to think about this analogy again and almost prayed "Lord, don't make me a bunion."! When I made this remark after dinner, husband laughed and said, "Or verrucca!" Everyone in a church body has a part to play. But sometimes we get to a point when God allows us to go through the darkest of sorrows and deepest of pain. We are tired, we are worn. Everything around us seems to have caved in on us. We cannot take it any more. I

Good soil, good food

I am often not sure whether to worry about climate change given all the conflicting evidence, lobbying and mud-slinging. (See earlier post.) But I believe that doing something positive for the earth, to preserve its fertility cannot be bad. After all, the earth "belongs to the Lord". As my son once said when he was six: "There is no right in doing wrong and there is no wrong in doing right." So these two Telegraph articles are interesting: Britain facing food crisis as world's soil 'vanishes in 60 years' and Spend more on food rather than holidays, says organic lobby . When it's gone, it's gone. No soil to farm with. No water to irrigate. No food is to be grown. What good is the ability to buy cheap clothes when you cannot farm food to eat? Can you eat your cheap clothes? We are looking forward to our "holiday" (aka visit to my home country) which we try to do once in two years. My son knows no other "foreign holidays" apar