February, 2020

Curriculum: The Influence of ED Hirsch

https://www.sec-ed.co.uk/best-practice/curriculum-the-influence-of-ed-hirsch/ Greg Sloan is head of Media Studies at Haggerston School. He challenges the way that the ED Hirsch-styled cultural literacy is being imposed by central government. As an alternative Sloan proposed bespoke local curriculum cultures. Sloan questions why the academic arguments for a National Curriculum have “simply disappeared” and asks whether “a narrow band of cultural literacy champions in the Department for Education” have been allowed to decide what is taught to young people. Sloan quotes the then schools minister who describes how after the 2010 election civil servants were confronted by politicians wielding copies of the American core…

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Legion of Super-Heroes #4

Genre: SuperheroSeries: Legion of Superheroes (2019)Publisher: DC Four issues in – and no closer to having any idea what’s going on in terms of the main plot regarding Aquaman’s trident – Bendis decides to partially tell the origin of the Legion. As part of his induction, Jon Kent has to experience the memories of Saturn Girl, Lightning Lad and Cosmic Boy. Each memory shows the characters when they were recruited and then at their first meeting. That’s it. I understand that Bendis is doing a great deal of character building but my interest in this incarnation of the Legion is…

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49% of adults in UK do not read books!

Blame tv, blame radio, blame social media and video games if you want. The fact is that nearly half of the adult population haven’t read a book within the last year, according to research by Kantar Media. just 51% of adults in the UK read at least one book in the previous year. Not only is this a decrease from 56% in the prior year, it also means 49% – essentially half – of adults in the UK didn’t read a single book in a full 12 months. The article I read argued that there was a correlation between three…

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Comics I Read, January

Looking back on the month, it seems like I’ve read very few comics. It works out at an issue a day roughly. In my head I seem to read much more than this. I started the month reading back over Flash: Rebirth, Flashpoint, The Button and DC Universe: Rebirth. This was to get the Doomsday Clock series straight in my head (it didn’t). I read Peter Thunderbolt because I read somewhere that it was a better way of handing a Watchmen sequel (sort of). Dollhouse Family was great and I’m on board with reading the rest of the limit series….

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