Curios of the week #15

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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This week started with the King’s Birthday public holiday here in Australia. The King’s birthday is an incongruous kind of a thing. It is strange that a foreign king is still the Australian head of state, it is not his actual birthday — that’s in November — but the oddest part of all is that in his home country, the UK, they don’t celebrate this public holiday.

Well, who doesn’t enjoy a long weekend? So we went out to Trentham Falls, Woodend and other parts of this beautiful state that we are usually to busy to visit.

So that was all good.

This week’s curios include nerf guns, tone, ever more vertical whiteboards and a politician displaying a little common sense.

Video of the week

I was sent a link to the following in a badly targeted promotional email:

Well, maybe labelling it ‘video of the week’ is a bit misleading. I didn’t watch this video because I simply could not bring myself to do so. However, it leads with one of the most astonishing anti-knowledge quotes I have seen — and I have seen plenty:

“Do you want to leave children to memorize your numbers, your historical facts, or do you want to have students who actually love you, who actually feel transformed by you? who feel they have grown like a human being?”

Teaching is not therapy for teachers. It’s not about meeting the teacher’s need to feel loved. It is about passing some knowledge from the teacher to the long-term memory of the student. As a wit on Twitter noted, if you want to be loved, buy a puppy.

It is worth keeping this video on file for those times where people try to gaslight us by claiming that nobody is saying knowledge is unimportant.