Listing Details
| ID: | 14 |
| Title: | A Changing Life |
| URL: | http://travellingspouse.blogspot.com |
| Feed URL: | http://feeds.feedburner.com/AChangingLife |
| Category: | Society: Lifestyle |
| Description: | The author maintains an interest in Africa where she was brought up, especially regarding the environment, education, health, and how these affect women. |
| Little lambs eat ivy - Wed, 16 May 2012 14:36:39 PDT |
 Maresy dotes And dozy dotes A little lamsy divey A kiddley divey doo Wouldn't you? Translated: Mares eat oats And does eat oats And little lambs eat ivy A kid'll eat ivy too Wouldn't you? ... or, maybe, mint sauce....  Who said that?  |
| On the beach today - Tue, 01 May 2012 13:22:33 PDT |
The weather has been so bad recently that just being able to walk along the beach has given me hours of simple entertainment. It was good to be able to get out in the fresh air and look at what the tide brought in. Nothing exotic but it helped me while away an hour or so. I present not so much a collage as a compilation of what I saw. A ball of fishing net was would up so tight you could have used it as a football, I suppose. There is a lot of plastic fishing net around on the beach, some pieces larger than others.  A hagstone, supposed to be lucky because it has a hole through it. This one had several interconnecting holes so maybe extra lucky. I didn't pick it up so I hope my luck remains.  I'm sure this was a hubcap once. I kicked it about and it seemed like a hubcap. It must have been in the water a long time.  Somebody's collection of shells was abandoned, not allowed to carry it home, I imagine. I have my own collection or I would have rescued them. They are , I think all of them, whelk shells.  Whelks produce the white papery mass known as sea wash balls, their egg casings, also known as fisherman's soap. If you use the ball like soap, apparently it will produce a lather. I didn't try.  A ridge of sand along the line of the beach. We don't normally see sand at this level but it must have been deposited by the rough seas. Later the lower edge has been redistributed by the tides but quite an amount of it has been left high and dry.  It's hard work walking along the shingle but I kept going because I though a shot of the two kites by the fishing boat would look good. By the time I was near enough to get a decent shot, the kites had disappeared. You can see to the right how sharply the beach shelves. Getting back up to the top requires determination and a zigzag course. You could clamber straight up but not with a camera in your hands.  Right at the top, a bluebell was waiting for me, a garden escape I think. Wild bluebells generally have fewer bells on them. Tomorrow is the designated walking day so with a bit of luck and sunshine, i will be able to make a comparison. Even though it was up close to the road, the roots must have had to penetrate a fair way down. That was by no means all I saw on the beach - there were corks, seaweeds, driftwood, gloves (not matching). all sorts of things to keep an idle mind happy.   |
| A cloud of grannies - Mon, 30 Apr 2012 04:13:24 PDT |
Quoting Arthur C. Clarke, "If children are interested then education will happen", ProfessorSugata Mitrahas repeatedly shown that this happens. He is Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University, and has demonstrated that children will learn with minimal help using computers. Have you seen "Slumdog Millionaire" or read the book? That was inspired by Sugata Mitra's first experiment in this direction, when he installed Hole in the Wall computers in Delhi. There, without any instruction, children learned to use computers. You could call this minimally invasive education. To take this a stage further, mediators can guide the children using the grandmother method. What is the grandmother method? Standing behind them and admiring them all the time, little more than that. So now they have 200 volunteers admiring students around the world (India, Africa, Columbia) using Skype, a webcam, and a microphone. There are many places where for various reasons teachers don't want to go and they aren't all in developing countries. They are often the places where teachers are needed most. It could be that minimally invasive education could be part of the answer. I would be very happy to volunteer to admire, and I will do, but the sad part is that lack of funds is holding them back. It is a Fixed Funding campaign and will only receive funds if at least $25,000 is raised by Mon Jun 11 just before midnight PT. So far only $510 though this has risen almost $100 since I started writing this post. There is some hope. Contribute here. Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. ~William Butler Yeats   |