Writers, illustrators, and photographers

I received this as an email this morning. There may be others who'd be interested who haven't received a copy. 

 

An invitation to an information evening for writers, illustrators, and photographers

Where: Vodafone conference centre, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, 55 Cable Street, Wellington 6011

When: Monday evening, March 3, 6.00–9.00 pm

Do you contribute to the Ministry of Education’s teaching and learning resources? Are you interested in doing so? The Ministry of Education publishes an extensive range of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, short plays, teacher support material, illustrations, and photographs within the Instructional Series (Ready to Read, the Junior Journal, the School Journal, the School Journal Story Library, and Connected).

This is an opportunity to find out more about content needs, the Ministry of Education’s preferred suppliers for resource development and design services, and the commissioning of content.

With the closing of Learning Media Limited as a Government-owned educational publishing company in 2013, the Ministry of Education welcomes this opportunity to provide writers, illustrators, and photographers – and the agents and organisations that represent them – with up-to-date information about contributing to the Ministry’s Instructional Series publishing programme.

Virtual attendance through a live webcast will be available to anyone who cannot attend in person. Wellington-based writers, illustrators, photographers, course tutors, agents, and organisations are encouraged to attend in person.

By attending the presentation in person, you accept the possibility you may be filmed, with the understanding that this will be used in the live and recorded webcast and may be used for further Ministry of Education informational purposes at a later date.

Parking is available at Te Papa in the evening from 5.00 pm for $6.00.

Handouts will be provided on March 3 and will be downloadable from the Ministry of Education’s website (http://www.minedu.govt.nz/) afterwards. The event will be recorded for edited playback afterwards.

RSVP: By February 15 to Peggy Nesbitt (peggy@lifteducation.com). Please let Peggy know whether you would like to attend in person or virtually. If you are only able to attend virtually, you will be sent a weblink and a password when you RSVP.

Questions: Participants attending in person are encouraged to submit questions by February 15 but may also ask questions on the night. People attending virtually must ask questions by email by February 15 to ensure that they are addressed on March 3. 

Forward this invitation: The Ministry wishes to encourage new contributors – including Māori and Pasifika contributors – to become involved in its publications and online resources and would like to broaden its contributor base. Please forward this invitation to other writers, illustrators, and photographers that you are in touch with.

For further information: Contact Peggy Nesbitt (peggy@lifteducation.com, phone 04 381 2251)

Chesterton on education

I'm reading G K Chesterton's The Common Man at the moment.  It's a book of essays that were collected together quite some time after his death.  As always there is an abundance of wit, and sound thinking, of paradoxes and satire.  And dozens of sentences and paragraphs that could be quoted here.

For today, however, just one quote, from an essay called The New Case for Catholic Schools, in which Chesterton shows how foolish it is to think that well-rounded people are produced by schools who choose to cut religion out of their curricula.  

You can have an education that teaches atheism because atheism is true, and it can be, from its own point of view, a complete education.  But you cannot have an education claiming to teach all truth, and then refusing to discuss whether atheism is true. 

We're still having this argument put to us today almost a century after this was written.  We're asked to be tolerant of people's whose views aren't Christian, or aren't religious, but then we're asked to be intolerant of people who do have a religion.

The First Grader & Room Service

My wife and I went to see The First Grader today - we were the only people in the cinema.  Admittedly it's a small cinema, seating no more than perhaps thirty.  Still, it was a shame that no one else had the pleasure of watching this great little movie.

Most people will know that it's the story of the 84-year-old Kimani N'gan'ga Maruge, who took up the Kenyan Government's offer of 'free education for all' only to discover that it wasn't really intended for older people.  Maruge has never had the opportunity to learn to read - and significantly, he has an important letter he wants to be able to read for himself - and so he goes along to school to find that he's joining the children in the primary school, much to the annoyance of the male teacher, who wants to throw him out.  The headmistress, Jane Obinchu, lets herself be persuaded that Maruge can learn, and then finds herself facing criticism from all quarters.   She's not the sort of person who gives in easily, and nor is Maruge, and between them they make a difference to the future of Kenyan education. 


We learn, in a series of violent flashbacks, that Maruge had joined the Mau Mau as a young man in order to free his country, and spent nearly a decade in various jails.  I'd forgotten about the Mau Mau, and my memory of them was that they were a villainous and murderous group who went round slaughtering white people in Kenya.  Of course that was what we heard because we were getting the white people's picture; this was in the days when colonialism was still strong.  The film gives us the chance to change our view of the Mau Mau. 


Oliver Litondo is a wonderful Maruge, and English actress, Naomie Harris (better known for her role as the very strange Tia Dalma in two of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies) is excellent as the headmistress.   This is a great movie - and empowering for old people too!


I watched another of the Marx Brothers movies yesterday: Room Service.  The first half was familiar from some earlier viewing, but I'd never seen the rest.   To be honest seeing the rest was no great joy; this is a piece of nonsense that could have starred anyone.   The Marx Brothers contribution is very straight, with none of the usual setpieces, no musical interludes, and only some of the wisecracks that Groucho is known for.   Most of it takes place in a single hotel room - it began life as a stage play - and it wastes the talents of a bunch of people: Lucille Ball and Ann Miller both appear, but any two Hollywood starlets could have done the roles; the women have very little to do that's outstanding.   Frank Albertson is the young playwright from the hicks, and treated as a piece of furniture or a prop most of the time. 


There are a couple of delightful bit players in it, neither of whom I can quite identify from the cast list.  One, a tall, thin and gaunt-faced man plays the agent with the big cheque that will rescue Groucho and his cast from being thrown out on the street.  He's a quiet centre in the midst of the chaos - for a time.  And there's the man who's from the We Never Sleep collection agency: he's always a moment behind the eight ball, but hard to get rid of nevertheless.  

Education...

Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming -- as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality.... The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity.

Paulo Freire
Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Teach the Teacher

We all know that scene in the movie (any medical movie - take your pick) where the consultant sweeps in with his retinue of newbies in tow, barely nods at the bewildered patient, (who's wondering what all this attention is about), snaps his or her finger at one of the students and in a disdainful voice dares that shivering student to say what Mr Smith/Jones/Bulkoski has wrong with him, and why, and what he's going to do about it. 

It was one of the ongoing features of that long-running TV series, Scrubs, a programme we endured more often than we wished to, since our younger son seem to find it extraordinarily funny.   Screenwriters think it's something audiences can get no end of enjoyment out of.   It ain't so funny if you've actually been a patient in the real-life equivalent, of course.

Which is why there need to be courses for medical people, especially now that they're no longer automatically assumed to be God.   A teach the teacher course (also known as a train the trainer course) is a way of teaching doctors how to teach trainee doctors (it may possibly go wider than that).  

The teaching the teacher course is only one of a number of courses available to the medical profession.  You can go on a consultant interview course (for when you're planning to leave that nasty hospital where you're not appreciated by those in management, and where they blame you for everything from the superbug that's hit the wards to the dust on the tops of the pictures - those funded by the hospital Art Fund). 

It's possible, of course, that you may actually be to blame for the superbug, in which case you'd be wise to go on a medical teaching course and bring your knowledge up to date.  As for the dust on the pictures, try a medical management course where your skills at handling the Dust Management Team will be honed. 

Whatever the course you go for, it can only improve your skills in the medical field.   With the extraordinary number of complications that can arise in that area, it's wise to keep on top of things!

What education can & can't do

In the Wellington paper, the Dominion Post, there's a weekly segment relating to the education of a particular well-known person. EPMU national secretary and Labour Party president, Andrew Little, was the man this week, and I liked a couple of things he said:

Although your formal education teaches some knowledge and understanding, as well as technical skills, it cannot teach values, personality, character and other things that matter in life.

and...

Study is a good starting point for whatever discipline you're preparing for or just for developing an inquiring mind, but that's all it is. It isn't a substitute for life's other passions or the creative spirit.

Quotes from Fabric of Faithfulness

Finally reading The Fabric of Faithfulness a few days before it's due to go back to the library, and came across some quotes I want to keep track of.

Milan Kundera: The devil laughs because God's world seems senseless to him, ; the angel laughs with joy because everything in God's world has its meaning.

Kundera again: Can there be major dimensions of a poem, a painting, a musical composition created in the absence of God?

Those two quotes are from page 88 of the book. On page 90 we have one from Neil Postman:

In consideration of the disintegrative power of Technopoly, perhaps the most important contribution schools can make to the education of our youth is to give them a sense of ocherence in their sutdies, a sense of purpose, meaning and interconnectedness in what they learn. Modern secular education is failing not because it doesn't teach who Ginger Rogers, Norman Mailer and a thousand other people are but because it has no moral, social or intellectual centre. There is no set of ideas or attitudes that permeates all parts of the curriculum. The curriculum is not, in fact, a 'course of study' at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not even put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses 'skills.' In other words, a technocrat's ideal - a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills.

How that rings true with our own educational system, and may well be the reason - or at least part of it - as to why so many students at University behave like such fools.

On Writing

Most students think that writing means writing down ideas, insights, visions. They feel that they must first have something to say before they can put it down on paper. For them writing is little more than recording a pre-existent thought.
But with this approach true writing is impossible. Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals what is alive.....The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know.

Henri Nouwen in Reflections on Theological Education.

Quoted on page 285 of Philip Yancey's Soul Survivor, without any page/chapter reference.

Educating Rita

Just watched Educating Rita on DVD. Made in 1983 it features a young Julie Walters, and a by then not-so-young Michael Caine. (He was 50) I remember reading the play this film was based on a few years ago; from memory it was a two actor piece, with strong and sharp scenes between the two protagonists. Unfortunately the playwright, Willy Russell, also wrote the screenplay, and has taken the opportunity to expand it out considerably. A few of the two actor scenes remain, but without the build up over a whole play, they lose some of their impact. In their place we have a host of other scenes, and a bunch of other characters, many of them stating the obvious, instead of letting us find out about them through the two main characters’ speeches. Obviously a two actor film set in one room was never going to work, but to me what’s here doesn’t work that well any more either. Maybe the piece has just dated, but I don’t remember that the play felt dated when I read it. Maybe it’s Lewis Gilbert’s direction, which is flat and stolid. It’s interesting that Roger Ebert, whose review of the film was written at the time the film was first released, is also disappointed with what’s happened to the original script. So perhaps my feelings aren’t entirely misplaced.
Added to these negatives are the awful mix of hairstyles Walters is given (seven of them, by one IMDB’s count). They go from stylish to ridiculous, and look as though annoyed Walters as much as they annoy the viewer. But the most dreadful feature of this movie is the music (besides the waste of Michael Williams and Maureen Lipman, both of whom have ridiculous roles). The score is played on what sounds to be an Hammond organ and a piano, for the most part. David Hentschel, the composer, never seems to know what he’s about, and gallumps along when he should be sober, and tries out super-dramatic when subtle is called for. Hentschel isn’t as well-known as a composer as a music producer, and Educating Rita appears to have been his last job as a film composer. However, in his other role as a music producer he’s had considerable success, working alongside George Harrison, Elton John, Queen, Phil Collins and Mike Oldfield, to name but a few.

Education in Times of Trouble

How thankful I am that I live in a country that’s basically at peace and has been throughout my lifetime, a country where violence is mostly individual rather than general. I’m also thankful that I live in a time when, for the most part, life doesn’t consist of one political or civil disruption after another.

Certainly in the wider world there has been huge unrest and lack of peace during my lifetime. For some reason I’ve been privileged to be sheltered from this. Whether this has been good for my character or not, I can’t say, but my preference is for peace rather than war.

What made me think about this was in reading a brief history of the life of Comenius, the ‘Father of modern education,’ but more importantly, a wonderful Christian man whose life was spent in times of almost constant distress and turmoil. His first and second wife both died, along with two of their children, and, even then he married again. He wrote prolifically, much of his work was destroyed and had to be rewritten (no great joy in a time without typewriters or word processors), and he strove to maintain a sensible and not extreme form of Christianity.

I only came across his name when I was sorting out some old secondhand books, amongst which is a volume of sermons in German by Comenius. Unfortunately it’s printed in the old German font, but I think in English it’s something along the lines of Sermons for Passiontide, Easter and the Ascension. (The German title is: Passions-, Oster-, und himmelfahrts- Predigten).