Since yesterday’s posting, I’ve spotted an interview on npr (National Public Radio) with Ben Zimmer, who writes the ‘On Language’ column for The New York Times Magazine. He offers the following contributions to the American Dialect Society’s ‘Words of the year‘ nominations: ‘junk’, his particular favourite – you’ll see why if you look at his… Continue reading Word of the year II
On Sunday, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that linguists from all over the world will be descending on Pittsburgh later this week to discuss, amongst other things, (naturally) Pittsburghese, endangered languages, and linguistic map-making. They’ll also be deciding on the word of the year.Previous favourites have been: ‘google’, the word of the decade last year; ‘plutoed’,… Continue reading From ‘Bushlips’ to ‘static kill’. OK?
The reverberations from the PISA bombshell continue with the New York Times picking up the story. The relentless improvement of education results in countries like China, Singapore and South Korea are undoubtedly exercising the minds of our politicians.The NYT article quotes Andreas Schleicher, director of the OECD’s testing programme, as describing Britain’s performance as ‘stagnant… Continue reading PISA has Gove leaning Eastwards
Despite the lame excuses of Michael Welsh yesterday on Radio 4 and Dr Bethan Marshall today in the Telegraph, there are plenty of examples of schools situated in poor areas having huge success in teaching all children -that’s boys as well as girls! – to read and spell. Michael Gove says that the Coalition is… Continue reading No excuses! All children can learn to read and spell
How enormously irritating it was this morning to listen to Mike Welsh of the National association of Head Teachers talking to John Humphrys on the Today programme about new government figures showing that one in ten boys leaving primary school at eleven have a reading age of seven or below.‘There’s nothing new here,’ declared Welsh.… Continue reading Wuns mor deer frends, …
Following the publication of performance tables by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) today, the blogosphere in the USA is a-buzzing with debate about the decline in standards over there too.‘Your child left behind’ is one of the latest postings on Kitchen Table Math, a clearly ironic response to the US government’s ‘No… Continue reading “The countries that out-teach us today will out-compete us tomorrow.” Barack Obama
I hesitate to put this posting on the blog because it feels like, well, here we are again! What do you know? Britain is still falling behind in the world rankings in literacy, maths and science.The latest performance tables, based on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), shows… Continue reading More news of falling standards from PISA
For advocates of phonics, it can be especially galling to see reputable newspapers and magazines giving space to the claims of the Whole Language lobby, whilst denying advocates of phonics a right to an adequate reply. The question is: what to do about it?In ‘The truth will out’, published in the New Scientist (15/05/2010), Michael… Continue reading ‘The truth will out’
If you’ve never taken a look at TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design: ideas worth spreading) maybe it’s time you did.Here’s Ken Robinson talking about how schools kill creativity.