Category: Miscellany
My daughter is now seven. I have been trying to remember what being seven was like for me. Memories start to become more frequent around this time. Some…
Today I went to a phonics briefing meeting at my daughter’s school. I joked beforehand that we were going to a phonetics briefing session, liking the idea of…
This is the first of two episodes of the Eiffelovercast recorded in San Francisco earlier this month. I was in the city to run some Think Up workshops,…
Last weekend 38 people came down to Hazel Hill for our annual Autumn Conservation weekend for two days of woodland conservation and human restoration. We design the weekend…
I’m writing this on the train home from Towersey Festival to which I had been invited by my friends Nat and Sophie to help out with some swing…
Teaching the Charleston Stroll has become the mainstay of the Mudflappers’ festival swing dance teaching. I think there’s three reasons why it is so popular with crowds: the…
Yesterday at Think Up I ran a workshop training engineers in how to use selfie movies to tell communicate to people about engineering. The aim of the workshop…
Tuesday nights are when the Mudflappers teach our weekly beginners’ swing dancing class before the London Dance Orchestra takes to the stage at Swing at the Scolt Head….
This year I have been experimenting with content flipping in my teaching. The idea of content flipping is that students first encounter the course material in their…
It’s not long until fellow Mudflapper Jenny Millman and I begin teaching our six-week course ‘Learn to Lindy Hop’ at the Idler Academy. Being a lindy hopper and…
I’ve just returned a wonderful weekend in the woods, the first ever Hazel Hill Family Adventure Weekend. The aim of the weekend was to give kids the chance…
It was on a train to Bristol yesterday, travelling with my colleague Ben, that I articulated in I think the clearest terms yet the model of learning that through…
Planning is now in full swing for a Adventures in the Trees, a new project that I am excited to be involved with at Hazel Hill Wood. For…
The letter came in the post yesterday. I can now call myself an Honorary Lecturer at UCL’s Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering. Obviously the ‘Honorary’ bit…
Over the next couple of days I’ll be at Queens University Belfast to do two things: to kick off a new sustainability-themed student project, and to run a…
[pe2-image src=”http://lh5.ggpht.com/-MY6w8huA6Ic/UchQA4uxxhI/AAAAAAAAAbU/Fi8B9PgfMl8/s144-c-o/13%252520-%2525201.jpg” href=”https://picasaweb.google.com/101339256689884186918/62413?authkey=Gv1sRgCN3nl-Dng7iRGw#5893048088573101586″ caption=”Gillespie Park” type=”image” alt=”13 – 1″ ] I’m now several chapters into George Monbiot’s book Feral, and I’m enjoining it immensely. It is already making…
[pe2-image src=”http://lh3.ggpht.com/-IqvJLaCnMnE/Ubn1VYuE31I/AAAAAAAAAZI/RFR8CFqYrV8/s144-c-o/13%252520-%2525201.jpg” href=”https://picasaweb.google.com/101339256689884186918/61313#5889007735525400402″ caption=”Dropping in at the Serpentine Pavilion” type=”image” alt=”13 – 1″ pe2_parse_caption=”false” ] Yesterday morning was a first. I gave a presentation to 80 students at Imperial…
Pushing a pram, as is my new daily habit, has made me much more aware of the relative accessibility or inaccessibility of London. Today I decided the best…
Probably the best module I studied during my year at ENPC was not engineering-themed – but photography. The module was run as an English language course: the subject…