July | 2019 | garyhollingsbee.com

Education, books

“Learning” and “Path-following”

I’m reading Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful The Old Ways. Early on he connects learning and path-following: The relationship between thinking and walking is also grained deep into language history, illuminated by perhaps the most wonderful etymology I know. The trail begins with our verb to learn, meaning ‘to acquire knowledge’. Moving backwards in language time, we reach the Old English leornian, lto get knowledge, to be cultivated’. From leornian the path leads further back, into the fricative thickets ofProto Germanic, and to the word liznojan, which has a base sense of ‘to follow or to find a track’ (from the Proto-Indo-European…

music

Music: No Pussyfooting by Fripp & ENO

It’s 45 years ago that the musicians Robert Fripp and Brian Eno recorded the material which became the album, No Pussyfooting. It’s an album I picked up in the late 1980s/early 90s and still listen to from time to time whenever I’m having an ambient phase. I’m sure I got into it and other Eno/ambient stuff after listening to – and being pretty perplexed by – Lee Ranaldo’s album, From Here to Infinity. I was hugely into Sonic Youth at the time and remember being shocked by how abstract Ranaldo’s solo music was. It took some reading and listening around…

tech

Tech Froth: SSD Upgrade and Dual-booting Sierra and Mojave

My MacBook Air is seven years old. I’ve looked after it pretty well and to the casual eye would still look brand new (the magsafe cable is the only thing that has worn a little). Though I increasingly use my iPad for day-to-day stuff, I rely on the Air all the time. I resisted upgrading OSX for about three years. Deliberately so. There are a number of apps I use that I know will stop working if OSX upgrades. Some of the apps have moved to subscriptions that are prohibitively expensive and I can’t afford to use them. On the…

comics

Nothing disappears from the internet

It’s strange! I was just reading a Blogger site, saw that I was logged in and rediscovered – to my delight – that my old Blogger comics review site, Livid Comics, is still live. I maintained it between February to November 2013 when I was collecting Adam Warlock comics and reviewing them. Looking back, the commentaries I did on Warlock were fine. I collected a longbox full of Warlock appearances and have every issue he’s appeared in from the later 1960s through the 1970s and 1980s. It gets a bit patchier after that and, for some reason, the later appearances…

Education, English teaching

TES English Podcast: How to improve writing in secondary

My notes from recent TES Podcast where English teacher, Chris Curtis (Learning from My Mistakes blog and new book How to Teach English and former Whovian) offers some great advice teaching writing. The TES gives an overview of his ideas in the podcast. Encourages a degree of emotional detachment as a teacher (eg. conversations about mistakes; “if we live in fear, we’ll never push the boundaries” He identifies three issues confronting the teaching of writing: “beige writing” – students write very standard answers. Students default to “waffle mode”, a comfortable form of writing. Needs to be challenged. fluency – some…