Jonesieblog

[I came across this draft post today - I wrote it back in April.  Time to set it free!]

Am I the only person in the world that finds the sentence “We had a discussion around this issue” incredibly annoying, when the writer means that they had a discussion about the issue?

“About” here means “on the subject of” as in “what is this book about?” “About” shares a different meaning with “around” – bodies could be scattered about the battlefield as well as around it. But this does not mean that I could ask “what is this book around?” and it therefore seems nonsensical to say that I am having a discussion around a topic, unless I am genuinely discussing a range of issues which sit around the topic at hand in some sense.

Stumble it!

North Berwick High School is being inspected! This will be my second inspection, and I am feeling relatively calm about it. I wonder if any of the inspectors follow the edublogosphere? It would be really cool if they turned up to school with some prior knowledge of the kind of things we’ve been up to.

As always, you can follow my experience more immediately via twitter.

Stumble it!

Inspired by John Johnston’s post, I borrowed some GPS devices from Geography today and took a small class out onto the astroturf, where they tried to draw giant quadrilaterals.

We ended up being rather short of time, and had a few technical problems, but a good time was had by all and the students had to think about the properties of quadrilaterals in order to be successful. I’ll hopefully have a google map to add to this post on Monday.

Here’s the map.

Stumble it!

Stephen Fry has joined Twitter today, as @stephenfry, and is already being followed by over 1000 people.  He is also following most of those people in return – myself included.  The consensus is that his Twitter presence is probably being managed for him by a PR company, but nonetheless the possibility arises that he might actually be looking at our tweets and blog posts.

All across the Twitterverse folk are trying to think of things to say which are suitably witty, erudite or both.  I’m sorry to say that, in the parlance of US sitcoms, “I’ve got nothing”.

Stumble it!