Educating the Dragon

Sir Ken hits the mark again. He’s speaking on creativity/ education/ and the general systematic sleep-walking toward the future.

I will be listening again to the talk and reflecting on it further at some later date, I just wanted to share with you the audio recording of the presentation.

David Hill is a wonderfully natural story-teller. He has just finished a series of visits to schools in the Hawkes Bay, finishing here at Hastings Intermediate .

I would love to tell you of the great tales he told, but I really couldn’t do them justice. He first tried writing when he was 16 or 17, trying to impress a girl. Then he leaves it alone for a decade until he finds some old notes he made…. Now 23 chapter books later and still writing, in fact we were honoured with the first public reading of his, yet to be published, next book.

If you ever get the opportunity to invite David Hill to your school, take it. He is well worth listening to.

The first Christians were referred to as “Followers of the Way”, hence the title of this post. My personal beliefs in God and Jesus Christ are not often mentioned in my blog….. however my two world collided tonight, I knew my church has just redesigned their website. But little did I realise that my Pastor, Paul Davison has his very own blog. I’m looking forward to reading this thoughts and ideas. He spent hours upon hours creating content, writing pieces and converting older (cassette recorded) studies into downloadable mp3 files.

I know Durff will probably be interested in this and others of you as well, having a church website like this, I think enables us all to access to the spiritual side of us that we all too often keep locked away, out of sight and mind of this frantic world.

The quality of those downloads is fantastic. Paul has a great ministry, both challenging and encouraging, well worth listening to.

Go check it out.

Another successful collaborative project.

Students took the parts of newspaper reporters and illustrators to create a 6 page news paper in 3 hours.

I was delighted with their enthusiasm and desire to meet the deadline.

They worked in pairs to write recounts including the 5 W’s and H. using complex and compound sentences, writing and linking sentences together in short paragraphs…. But shhhhhhhhhhh…. They think they were just designing and creating a newspaper.

Go Ted McCain!!

Those of you who have the patience to follow my blog will know that for the past little while now I have been tripping around schools. Doing some relieving here and there.

One such school I happened across asked for me to come in and cover some member of staff for a little while. During the course of my time there I have got to know some of the students and one in particular made me wonder. There was something unusual there, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

I decided, the only action I could take was to speak to the Special Needs Co-ordinator. Not knowing who I was to speak to I approached the DP and asked the question: “Who is your special needs co-ordinator?”

A fairly easy question, I thought. But perhaps I caught them off guard, their mind on other things, maybe the answer was more complicated- “there used to be one, but…” or “So and so was but now they are….” Or perhaps that’s the English term and Kiwi’s call them something different.

Whatever it was I got this blank, scratching “I don’t know” head and directed to my syndicate leader. Or perhaps my Syndicate leader WAS the SENCO- (but that was not revealed to me)

Hmmmm. It just bothered me. Member of staff needs to be aware of who’s responsible for what, who to go to for what.