Reflections - An interview with SPVR

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A future for farmers and fishermen

Staring back at me as I make my tea this morning are the monster eggs I spoke about getting from our neighbour a couple of days ago. So big are they that they cannot fit in a standard egg box. Driven to bring the scales out and weigh them, I discover that two together are more than most supermarket fillet steaks—nearly 200 grams. An omelette from them would be a substantial meal. It's one of the curses of the modern world that everything seems to be driven towards standards that are merely cosmetic or economic. These poor orphan eggs, from hens working for supermarkets, have been excluded from their destiny by their size. Over the last year, I have attended many meetings with local farmers. And one topic that has been exercising them in this prime beef-producing area has been a reduction in the weight of cattle that the big store chains want to buy. The stores want the steaks on their shelves to cost under £10. Apparently, that's the point at which the customer thin...

Taking a long view

Today's that annual reminder of my comparatively modest academic achievements. The day when school students across our country receive the formal record of how they have done in their studies. I suppose I am a living example that exam results less than you hoped for are not "the end". But most receiving results today will be demonstrating achievements. And using them to move on to, more study at a higher level, the world of work, or the mind-expanding experience of a few months or a year off. Alas, the choice of a year's travelling around the globe is all but shut off for the time being. The world will still be there in years to come. It wasn't really an option for us after school. None of my classmates packed up, and hopped away. We were a less confident group than today's youngsters. The education system rigidly prepared us to pass exams, to be able to demonstrate that we had acquired knowledge. Few of us had learned how to learn. Even fewer had th...

Diagrams to inform and puzzle

Yesterday's "zoom" with my god-daughter and her mother was illuminating. Father was lurking somewhere off-camera undertaking some other activity. With parents holding four degrees between them and her being an only child, one might assume great progress on the home-schooling front. The response to the question about how parents were doing as teachers, elicited a preference for father over mother. A strong defence of mother's maths teaching was immediately tabled. One could see a teenager in waiting in this eight-year-old's sideways look at mum. The difficulty must lie, in part, with how and when different parts of maths are now taught. I could recall my digs mate Chris & I when we were students together in the 1960s being invited to assist our landlady's best pal's twelve-year son with his maths homework. It was on a bit of topology. The Collins English Dictionary defines this subject as: the branch of mathematics concerned with the generalisation...

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