A Don’s Life

Should schools teach twittering?

There was much hand-wringing a few days ago about the idea that primary schools should give up teaching kids about the nineteenth century and should teach them about blogs, twittering and wiki instead.

The thing that bothered me most about this was not the elevation of twittering skills about (say) poetry, but the idea that central government would be requiring twittering (or whatever) of all schools in England. More imposition of a one size fits all model onto long suffering, and very diverse, teachers and pupils.

I can't see anything wrong, in itself, in teaching kids about all kinds of different uses of languages and styles and genres. In fact, I vividly remember when I was about 12 being required to practice writing telegrams in an English lesson at school (and telegrams were almost the 1960s equivalent of twitter, weren't they?).

The task set, I still recall, was to write a telegram to someone who had won a scholarship to Cambridge and ask them to confirm that they would be taking it up (an exercise that was also presumably one of the drip, drip ways in which our academic aspirations were raised). My own effort (of which I'm even now quite proud) was: "WON SCHOLARSHIP CAMBRIDGE WIRE IF ACCEPTING" (I thought it was clear enough without "STOP" between "CAMBRIDGE" and "WIRE".

Not a bad exercise in concision. And nor would twittering be, I suspect.

Michael Ignatieff in parliament

I'm posting this from Ottawa, where we (that's me and the husband) have been giving lectures. Mine was to celebrate the 'relaunch' of the Classics department at Carleton University: it had been withering a bit, but they have had a whole raft of new appointments, and are offering Greek and Latin 'majors' again. There were over a hundred people there last night, students included, joining in the celebration.

Two things have surprised me since I arrived. First is how perishingly cold it is.The natives assure me that March is comparativey warm, The canal which makes a vast winter skating rink is already unfreezing and it is possible to get from place to place via the outside world (there is a network of tunnels under Carleton so that when it's really chilly, you can go from building to building underground).

The other thing is how nice everyone is, I mean the people you meet casually in the street and around the place. Now, I realise that commenters may well write in and explain to me how that niceness is a disguising veneer over a fractured society and point me to the evidence for crime, fraud, corruption etc. All the same, I have to say everyone has been very helpful and nice to me. No more so than on our visit to parliament.

We hadn't intended to visit parliament. But we could just see the building  (the somewhat Scottish looking, Westminster-style creation above) from our hotel bedroom window, so decided to explore. I assumed that we wouldn't be able to go inside. But despite appearances, this wasn't Fortress Westminster, and we were positively encouraged to cross the threshold.

There was an airport security system, administered with a light touch, and plenty of uniformed officers around to explain our options: go up the Peace Tower (which we did: great view), take a guided tour (we didn't as there were no places until 3.20), wander and look (we again we did).

But the highlight was to go into the public gallery and watch "Question Period".