I woke feeling rough,and
carried on feeling rough all day. Was it the excesses of yesterday or
the aftermath of that flu jab? hangovers rarely last more than an
hour for me. I am not going to be pressured into having any more flu
jabs.
I brekkied whilst
watching an episode of "Early Doors" - the third
episode I've seen. I love it. And then I checked the Internet. Little
had happened overnight. It rarely does.
Leaving er indoors TM"
and "Furry Face TM" in their
pits I set off to work. So as the day wouldn't be all work and no
play I went via Little Burton Farm to try for a geocache. Two weeks
ago I'd tried for this very one. The thing was clearly not there
then. And it wasn't just me being useless - other experienced cachers
hadn't found it either.
I'd since looked at the
on-line logs for that cache and seen that someone had found it
recently; their first and only find. So this morning on the way to
work I thought I would have another try. The cache was obvious, and
on opening it up I could see the signatures of people who had found
it over the last couple of months.
It really hadn't been
there two weeks ago, but here was evidence that this was the original
and not a replacement. Had this newbie taken it home to sign the log
and to show his friends? What was going on here? I suspect I shall
never know.
As I drove to work the
pundits on the radio were talking about the (supposedly)
shocking news from OFSTED that over half the schools in the country
are failing to deliver Religious
Education as a subject.
Apparently the problem is
that no one, least of all the R.E. teachers, really knows what is
expected from R.E. lessons. Are they to be the history of the world's
religions? An academic study of the tenets of the world's religions?
Perhaps to deliver a sense of morality? Or even (just possibly)
crackpot nonsense? Certainly I had all four when I was at school. Mr
Groves would have us draw pictures of selected scenes from the Old
Testament. Mr Storey would lead all sorts of discussions. And once a
week we would sit through the ranting of an angry old vicar. This
chap would aggressively spout the most ridiculous and farcical
propositions as though they were logically valid arguments, and would
regularly reduce common sense to gibberish.
There was a head teacher
interviewed on the radio who gave the impression that she was sick of
these stunning revelations. Apparently she is already contending with
allegations that her school does not have enough focus on teaching
music, drama, hockey, flower arranging and morris dancing. She
maintained that there was only so much time in the day and that
schools should focus on teaching kids to read and write and do sums
rather than to waste everyone's time on fringe nonsense such as
half-baked religion. Personally I think she might have had a point.
The radio show then
wheeled on someone from the national committee for religion in
schools whose committee is due (in a few weeks) to give the
government a formal report on what an R.E. syllabus should contain.
This chap clearly had no idea what R.E. was, should be, or could be
about. But he spouted platitudes with the best of them.
There could be so much
more to religion than spouting platitudes.
Meanwhile the news also
told of Britain's first free Muslim school which has been shut down
amid all manner of
allegations.
]Apparently the teachers
are being forced to wear hijab; female students told to sit at the
back of classrooms so the boys can see what's going on better...
Here's an idea. Why not
let school be about teaching academic lessons whilst imparting moral
guidance from a reasoned and reasonable ethical standpoint, and leave
the supposed pronouncements from invisible imaginary friends to
everyone's spare time.
And so to work. I did my
bit, but felt progressively more grotty as the day went on. There's
no denying I was glad when it was time to call it a day. Were it not
a Sunday I might have been inclined to have phoned in sick.
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