Kitten murderers

Mmmm... kitten. In gravy.

The Definition of Irony

From Typography.com

Reading level

Apparently...

Bisexuality, crotch-staring and loads of totty. Kids TV today...

Children's television isn't what it used to be

An actor who says he was unfairly dismissed from the hit BBC children's programme In the Night Garden made unacceptable comments to a colleague, an employment tribunal heard today.
Isaac Blake, 28, who brought the unfair dismissal case against Teletubbies producer Ragdoll, made continual reference to 'totty' on set, a statement from a colleague said.

Blake has alleged that he was sacked from the programme after he complained about a faulty animatronic suit he had to wear as a Tombliboo character. He also claimed that he was called 'bitch' and 'faggot' by a colleague.

However, this morning Marcus Difelice, representing Ragdoll, read out statements from production staff alleging that Blake had made inappropriate comments to them.

One of the statements read: 'Isaac was always making comments to me that were not acceptable.

'I had to say to him once, 'Why can't you have a conversation with me without looking at my crotch?''.

Another said: 'He [Blake] kept saying he was distracted by the totty on set.'

Blake denied doing so.

The tribunal in Birmingham also heard evidence from Italian actress Elisa Laghi, 31, who performed alongside Blake during filming in 2005 and 2006.

She admitted calling Blake a 'bitch' during an argument, but said she had used the word 'faggot' on only one occasion, in jest.

She said she had walked into a changing room and saw Blake and another actor who played a Tombliboo with their trousers down.

'I said, 'Oh, you two look like a pair of faggots,'' Laghi said.

She added: 'I'm bisexual myself so I don't have a problem with people being gay.'

Blake said he had been unfairly dismissed because he had raised concerns about health and safety from being in the animatronic suit and about verbal abuse.

'I think if I had shut my mouth, taken the abuse, worked in a faulty suit, I would still be there now,' he said.

Ragdoll is contesting the unfair dismissal case. The hearing continues.

Four outcomes of teaching

Not sure I agree with the thesis of this Guardian article, but this paragraph is nice:

Numerous studies show that the bridge between teaching and learning is sometimes a bit rickety, and that what we might think of as great teaching doesn't necessarily result in the most learning. Teaching and learning is a transaction that has four possible outcomes. The first and second show an easily understood cause and effect: either the teaching is good and kids learn stuff, or it's crap and they don't. However, there are instances when the teaching is great and the kids learn nothing, or, strangely, occasions when the teacher couldn't knock the pedagogic equivalent of the skin off a rice pudding but the kids still get multiple A-stars.

That last bit is interesting in the context of universities with good reputations. I visited one in the south of England once where the staff on one course (Fine Art) had a policy of only recruiting students who were already so good, they could piss off and carry on doing their own work rather than worry about teaching them anything. The bizarre thing is, as a result of the place becoming legendarily difficult to get in to (because standards were so 'high') it acquired a reputation for being good, despite the fact it wasn't...

Desperately seeking students

The Guardian reports:

Up to 40% of Japan's 744 universities could go bust, merge or close in the next 10 years, according to research by a British professor at Oxford, out later this year.

Decades of falling birthrates have shrunk the number of 18-year-olds, who provide 90% of all university entrants, down to 1.3 million last year from 2.05 million in 1992. With no baby boom or immigration influx on the horizon, the figure is expected to further plummet to 1.18 million by 2012 - an overall decrease of 42.3% over 20 years.

[...]

'To survive the global competition among universities, each institution in Japan is trying to create a unique selling point for itself,' he says. 'For example, there are universities that focus on attracting office workers to study part-time and those that are trying to recruit as many foreign students as they can.'

Japanese universities are also starting to teach classes in English in a last-ditch attempt to recruit students from outside Japan. Waseda University is one example. Its international studies faculty now runs the majority of lectures in English.

Japan's predicament might ring alarm bells for those in the know in the UK. The number of our 18-year-olds is predicted to fall dramatically between 2010 and 2019 because of fewer births in the 1990s. By 2019, there will be 120,000 fewer school-leavers in the population than a decade earlier. By 2050, the proportion of 15- to 24-year-olds will make up just 11% of the population. It was 16% in 1990.

[...]

A Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) paper, Demand for Higher Education to 2020 and Beyond, argued that closing the gender gulf by getting more boys into university was crucial to maintaining and expanding numbers in the sector. But the thinktank's director, Bahram Bekhradnia, does not think the demographic decline we face poses a threat to the majority of institutions.

Those that could be hit, reckons Gerstle, are the less prestigious, the recently founded and those in rural areas.

Good grammar not included

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A Walk Up The Fife Coast

This VoiceThread tells the tale of a walk I made last summer