Jackie and I had breakfast together in the garden and saw that our regular birds (starlings, blackbirds, pigeons, robins and the occasional thrush or tit) have now been joined by two enormous hooded crows (or at least crows with hoods). I spent this morning at home working on our next newsletter. Aged Ken, our decrepit white cat, stayed close by – probably he’s afraid of the crows.
After an early lunch I drove to Cambridge for my ReaLM course. Somehow I took a wrong turn and arrived 30 mins late to find the class already beginning to wind down and soon people were going off to work on their essays. I was a bit frustrated at having driven to Cambridge to find there was nothing happening that I couldn’t have done at home. But the sun was shining and I was pleased not to be shut up in a classroom so I drove home and worked on my essays there.
I am now half way through this course and so far I don’t feel that I’ve been challenged much. Our tutor is perfectly lovely, but she is coping with a very mixed group from the private and voluntary sectors and doesn’t seem to have access to sufficient materials of the right level: some of the materials are fine, but others are very poor. I think the low point was being asked to insert missing words into a sentence as though we were appearing on some bizarre adolescent 1960s TV gameshow. Or possibly when we were asked to discern the difference between opinion (“this is the worst England team ever”) and fact (“Bobby Charlton scored 49 goals for England”). Are we dumming down? The more I see of modern learning, the less I like it.
Monday, 12 May 2008
