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Book Reading: You’re Not Listening

This blog post is about the book You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy, and in particular my reactions to it from a teacher’s perspective.
First, I want to apologise to Chelsea Avard for borrowing the book from her little student leadership library and holding onto it for a whole year while I got round to reading it […]

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Book Reading: Play – How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul

Looking back at my blog over the past few months, I’ve done a lot of these “book reading” posts. I really did mean to do some more on other ideas, but I felt I had to get these thoughts out of the way first. So here’s another book reading post, this time about the book […]

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All dogs have tails

Converses
In maths, or at least university maths, there are a lot of statements that go like this: “If …., then …” or “Every …, has ….” or “Every …, is …”. For example, “Every rectangle has opposite sides parallel”, “If two numbers are even, then their sum is even”, “Every subspace contains the zero vector”, […]

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Bathelling in assignments

The Deeper Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd  defines the word bathel like this:
bathel (vb.) To pretend to have read the book under discussion when in fact you’ve only seen the TV series or movie.
I do not like to bathel, and in fact it is one of my life’s ambitions to find […]

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The shoemaker and Dobby

Do you know the story of the Shoemaker and the Elves? Well, I’ve known it since I was very young. It’s a Brothers Grimm, and it goes something like this:
A poor shoemaker is down on his luck and can’t make enough to feed himself and his wife. All he has left is enough leather for […]

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Books in the 22nd Century

I’ve just read a book called “Written for Children” by John Rowe Townsend. It was published in 1974 and gives the history of writing for children (in English) up to that time. It was very interesting reading. What I’d like to comment on here is the final chapter, where the author talks about the future […]

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Wisdom from the Dodecahedron

The Dodecahedron is a character from the book The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. He lives in the city of Digitopolis at the base of the Mountains of Ignorance. Here is his description from the book (page 145)
 
He was constructed (for that’s really the only way to describe him) of a large assortment of lines […]

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