Discourse Analysis

What makes a teacher great?

Daily writing prompt
What makes a teacher great?
View all responses

What makes a teacher great?

When Moo descended from Mount Academia, he brought down with him the ten tenets to which great teachers, knowingly or unknowingly, commit. He asked me to transcribe them here, since they were in danger of being neglected and / or forgotten.

  1. Mastery of the subject – great teachers know their subjects inside out. They do not read their graduate school notes to their students, heads bowed, chins on chest, droning on in a low, boring mumble. They encourage questions and are open to debate with their students about the subject that they know so well and openly love.

    Master thy subject.

  2. Humility – great teachers are humble. They know that they are not omniscient. They also know that knowledge changes across time and that they too must change and follow new ideas. They also know, perhaps instinctively, that some of their students are as intelligent as they are. They never dismiss their young charges as idiots, fools, or lunatics to be beaten and forced into the required shape.

    Be humble.

  3. Flexibility – great teachers are flexible, not rigid. They can bend the rules, reshape the syllabus, change pace and tone to match the needs of their students. In addition, they ask their students about their needs and try to address those needs in a personal way, sometimes on a one on one basis.

    Be flexible.

  4. Reaching out – great teachers reach out to their students as a group and as individuals. They never paint themselves into the know-all corner where they alone know best, and they know, with absolute certainty, what’s best for their students. Great teachers know, above all, that one size, in great teaching, neither fits nor benefits all.

    Reach out.

  5. Equal treatment – great teachers treat their students equally. They do not fawn on the best and scorn the worst, nor do they teach by the WWII convoy system, teaching only at the speed of the slowest. By extension, great teachers try to create an atmosphere of love in learning and joy in the subject.

    Practice equality.

  6. Honesty – great teachers are honest, fiercely honest. They know their own strengths and weaknesses, their own limitations. They work on their weaknesses, striving to turn them into strengths. They also push the boundaries of their limitations, striving always to keep up with the ever-changing frontiers of knowledge.

    Be honest.

  7. Human beings – great teachers know that they are human beings and they recognize early on in their careers, that while they are teaching a subject, they are also preparing fellow humans for a life beyond the ivy-covered walls of academia. By extension, they emphasize the humanity of their students and try always to develop and sustain that humanity.

    Be human.

  8. The meaning of meaning – great teachers reach out beyond their subjects to teach the meaning of meaning. Why is the subject important? What can each individual use this hard-earned knowledge for, in their own lives? How can they reshape their own lives and create better ways of learning and living? This teams up with reaching out and enters the realm of learning for learning’s sake and love of learning and love of knowledge.

    Love thy learning.

  9. Creativity – great teachers are creative. They open their students’ minds to new ideas, fresh knowledge, better ways of doing things. They never use phrases like ‘thinking outside the box’ and they do not build better boxes, one or two sizes larger than current boxes, inside which their students must now sit, work, and think. Creative teachers tear down the walls of medieval academia and open their students’ minds to the winds of change and fresh knowledge.

    Be creative.

  10. Life long learning – great teachers teach students how to think for themselves, how to teach themselves, how to self-assess, how to check and double-check the knowledge (all too often nowadays, fake news and / or false knowledge) handed down to them from a multitude of sources, far too many of them unreliable. Great teachers teach their students to know themselves. They also teach them how to work out whether a source is a reliable fount of information, or not. In short, they teach life long learning and neither they, nor their students, ever give up hope.


    Teach Life Long Learning.

Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?

Daily writing prompt
Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?
View all responses

Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?

Let me begin by asking a straightforward question – what on earth does this question mean? Permit me to begin with the word lifestyle. I googled it and got the following – 1. a set of attitudes, habits, or possessions associated with a particular person or group. 2. such attitudes, etc, regarded as fashionable or desirable. Let me now google sustainable. Here’s what I found – 1. able to be maintained at a certain rate or level – “sustainable fusion reactions”. 2. able to be upheld or defended – “sustainable definitions of good educational practice”. 3. Sustainability is ability to maintain or support a process over time. Sustainability is often broken into three core concepts: economic, environmental, and social.

This is all very interesting indeed. So, what can I practice daily that will allow me to maintain “sustainable fusion reactions”? Answers via snail mail, trained snails please, via the North Pole, to arrive by Christmas, if the snails can maintain the pace. What can I practice daily to “uphold or defend sustainable definitions of good educational practice”? Good question as a retired former teacher, I have to admit that there is very little I can do about an academic world, already moribund, that I left fifteen years ago. As for the three core concepts of economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, and social sustainability, well, I really don’t know what to say.

Economic sustainability – I look at the growing number of homeless and the multitude of retirees who are forced out of their homes or apartments and onto the streets by rising rents, and I feel fear and dismay. I watch prices rise and my savings fall – you tell me, pretty please, what can I do about it? Hope? Pray? Petition? Buy less? I already do that. Eat less? I already do that. I can control a certain amount around my own house and home, but there’s little I can do about homelessness and the stock exchange and the cost of living.

Social sustainability. Covid brought shutdown (2020) and shutdown meant a great many friendships and connections were broken. It is hard, at my advancing age, to establish new friends, begin new relationships, or renew connections with friends who are happy to remain disconnected. Besides which, a year or more of masking, not meeting, not leaving home, changes one’s lifestyle. It is hard, as I say, to gear up and start again.

Environmental sustainability. “Drill, baby, drill.” What can I do, on a daily basis, to stop drillers drilling, miners mining, polluters polluting, forest fires burning? I certainly try to pollute as little as possible on a daily basis – but – I do not own an open cast mine, an oil refinery, nor do I have an oil field to exploit, nor a space ship to launch like a modern day Noah’s Ark, to escape the deliberate destruction I am doing to the earth. Clearly, I try not to play with matches, especially on a hot dry day. But that’s mainly a cross between courtesy and common sense. To phrase it another way, I certainly didn’t guzzle up all the cod on the Grand Banks, or allow the sewage from a major sewage works to overflow into rivers, lakes, and seas in order to save money and make larger profits for my friends and shareholders.

Given my limitations, yes there are things I do on a daily basis to live a more sustainable lifestyle. I eat less. Go out less. Exercise and stretch more. Try to recycle as much as possible. Try not to over indulge and to make my daily bread stretch as far as possible, sometimes into a second or third day. I would, if I could, buy seven loaves and five fishes, go out into a central square, and feed a multitude. But, alas, something like that is really way beyond both me and my pension level.

What’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten?

Daily writing prompt
What’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten?
View all responses

What’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten?

No single item of food stands out. That said, eating is a cultural thing – does one eat on one’s own, or does one eat with family and friends? What role does food play in one’s life? For me, for example, food is cultural, an occasion, not a meal. For example, a fresh, Spanish croissant, for breakfast, a late breakfast, at the bar in the Rincon, Avila. Before me, the daily newspaper, open at the page with the daily chess problem. The coffee, freshly brewed, a cafe con leche, and the croissant, waiting to be dipped in the coffee, and the resulting delight transported to my mouth. Sometimes, there are no croissants left. Then, one of the world’s best kept secrets, un sobao pasiego, a small sponge cake, from the Vega de Pas in Cantabria. It holds together when dunked and can be eaten moist or dry.

By extension, when younger, after an afternoon’s soccer on the beach – la Segunda Playa del Sardinero, in Santander – cool red wine from a porron, and selected seafood in the form of tapas, nibbled with the other players, as thirst is quenched, and the appetite that comes from running on warm sand under a hot, summer sun, is slowly sated. Seafood – this includes octopus – pulpo a la gallega – or squid – calamares rellenos en su tinta – or caracoles de mar – sea-snails – or oysters, fresh, with a squeeze of lemon – or mejillones en salsa de tomate – mussels in tomato sauce – gambas a la plancha, roasted shrimp – or gambas al ajillo, pan fried shrimp in garlic – or almejas a la marinera, clams, Spanish style – the point is to ganarse el puchero / to earn your food, by dint of hard work, and to share it with your friends.

When I think of Welsh food, once again, it is the family gatherings and the love around the table that dominates. Under these circumstances, a simple boiled egg – not everyone can boil an egg properly – with hot toast and fresh salt butter, can be an overwhelmingly delicious meal. Eggs – so supple, so creative – scrambled eggs, creamy and lightly curded – an omelette aux fines herbes, with a lightly tossed green salad – a tortilla espanola, easy to prepare, but incredibly difficult to prepare to perfection. Free range eggs, fresh from the hen house, sea salt prepared locally, olive oil from a local terroir, potatoes, also local, onions from the garden. Each of these contains within it the taste of the same earth, the same air, the same rain.

Speaking of which, to travel to the high hills in the Province of Avila, and to smell the herbs that grow in the sheep pastures, thyme, rosemary, and to know that the flesh of the spring lamb will be flavoured by the herbs it has been eating – even the lechazo, a lamb still on its mother ‘s milk, tender, so tender, and so small that it broke my heart to see it. A lamb so small that I couldn’t eat it. I watched it appear on the family table and vanish in a couple of mouthfuls, washed down by a specially selected wine. I enjoyed the company and the rest of the meal. But I’ll never forget that tiny lamb.

However, it’s never just about food – it is about the cultural content of the room, the family, the table, the friends, the joy of sharing and caring. Oh dear, and I never got around to telling you about the paella I made, the ones that appears in the lead photo!

Write about your first crush.

Daily writing prompt
Write about your first crush.
View all responses

Write about your first crush.

No. No, I can safely say that I have never had that sort of crush, except on a teddy bear or a little poo-pee aka puppy. I guess my first real crush was an orange crush. And no, again, not that orange crush either. I guess I have never been a fan of the Denver Broncos. But, as a child, I loved Orange Crush and Dandelion and Burdock, the former suitable for children and the latter looking remarkably like grown aka groan up beer.

During my time at university, I fell victim to several crushes. One was at the bottom of a collapsed scrum while playing rugby. Never much fun that sort of crush. All those sweaty, smelly bodies. Another came in an attempt to beat the Guinness Book of Records under the achievement – how many people can you get inside an English Telephone Kiosk? This was in the sixties, when England actually had telephone kiosks. If you have never seen a real English telephone kiosk, there’s one down in Kingsbrae Gardens, and I highly recommend a visit to that antiquity – almost as good as the statues in the gardens.

Anyway, one day in rag week, a group of Bristol University students, me among them, started crowding into a telephone kiosk. We entered upright, tried kneeling, others kneeling on our shoulders. We managed about twelve.

Doors open or doors closed? This baby came with no instructions. Poor parents, even more miserable single parents. And they are almost always young women, aren’t they? Come to think of it, maybe we should have invited some female students to join us – much lighter in weight and far less smelly – in the bad sense!

So, we tried a different tactic. If the first measure was a crush, and indeed it was, well, the second measure??? Judge for yourselves. One of us held the door open, the rest of us lay down like logs, feet outside the door, and the newcomers lay down on top of us. Ingenious indeed. But those at the bottom could scarcely breathe. They were the victims of a real crush.

Like the finger in the woodpecker’s hole, we reversed it – feet in, heads out. We got up to twenty-seven students. Then we ran out of student volunteers. Revolting. We asked passers-by to help us. But to no avail. Reversed and removed. Equally revolting. Sent our efforts in, with photos. There was no response. We didn’t make it. I still don’t know what that particular crush record is.

In Cassis-les-Calanques, 1960, I was one of eight people standing in a Citroen Deux Chevaux. That was quite a crush. But, in Santander, Spain, 1970, Clare and I watched 11 people, yes, eleven, get out of a SEAT 600, a 600cc Spanish four-seater car, otherwise known as a bullet / bala, and with about as big an engine as your lawnmower. They exited, one by one, and proceeded to enter the local church for Sunday mass. Can you imagine 11 people riding on your lawnmower?

Maybe that wasn’t a crush at all. Maybe it was just a (Morris) minor miracle.

What does freedom mean to you?

Daily writing prompt
What does freedom mean to you?
View all responses

What does freedom mean to you?

When I look at that one word, alone on the page, I think, above all, of the multiple meanings attached to such a word, then I think of how it can be twisted in so many ways to make it mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean. So, let me begin by asking, what does freedom mean, in general, not in my own specific case.

Freedom – “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.” Interesting – no mention here of right or wrong, of truth or lies, of harassment or of perjury. Freedom – speech with no hindrance or restraint.

Freedom – the “absence of subjection to foreign domination or despotic government.” Wow! The first is very interesting but the second is extremely problematic. We need a definition of despotic and of government. We also need further clarification as to who decides what governmental despotism means. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder and if there is no arguing about taste, is the definition of despotism purely subjective? Who shall guard the guards? Does a despot consider himself or herself to be despotic? Do his or her followers? Or is it only the people who suffer and become victims of the despot’s hands, feet, orders, laws, commands, bullies, or general conduct?

Freedom – “the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved.” This is certainly much clearer. Thank you.

But consider where this very brief analysis has led us. And we haven’t even started on the Biblical meanings of freedom – “freedom from sin” – “and the truth shall set you free” – and here we are only scratching the surface of the possible religious and philosophical meanings of what the Spaniards call libre albedri’o, or free will.

What does freedom mean to you?

And now we move into the personal and the personal circumstances will change for each one of us. In my own case, freedom is my new Nexus 3 Rollator. It allows me to put aside my canes and walk around the block, something I have been unable to do for several years now. Wow – freedom to walk on my own, just leaning on my wheeled walker. Freedom to talk to my old friends, many of whom I have not seen or spoken to for a long time. Freedom to meet and talk to new neighbors, many with their lovely children and wonderful dogs. Freedom to breathe in the fresh air of early spring and to visit the flowers as they start to grow. Freedom, for me, is also the ability to see with my own eyes. Last month, I had my lenses laser-polished and now I can see again with 20/20 vision. Wow – that is really freedom, to to be able to read all but the tiniest print, without needing to use glasses. Freedom, for me, is also the ability to be able to cook, shop, move, live, without excessive pain. My new powers of walking have helped me with that. Long may it continue. It is also the good fortune to have enough money and strength to live in my own house and not to need a care home or regular home help.

Freedom – Such a magic word – such a powerful word – such a personal word. The freedom to choose to be myself, dependent on nobody else – and long may that freedom continue.

What public figure do you disagree with the most?

Daily writing prompt
What public figure do you disagree with the most?
View all responses

What public figure do you disagree with the most?

Some definitions please. What is a public figure? There are several statues in my local park. Are these public figures? If they are, how do you, or I, disagree with them when they can’t reply to our questions? Their mere presence, is that enough? Their historical past? Their figures now cast in bronze or stone? The crimes they committed (in our current opinion) from a time in which they did good (their society’s position)? “Judge not lest ye be judged!” We are all walking on thin ice and I do not wish to be the one who casts the first stone.

What is a public figure? A politician – provincial, regional, national, international? A TV personality? A film star? A rapper? A musician? A teacher? A preacher? A newscaster? A hockey player? A baseball star?

And how do you define disagreement? How do you disagree, and in what ways, with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the Song of Joy, even if you are a Beatle and can sing “Roll over Beethoven” or mimic it on a Tuesday night in the local bar at a Karaoke show?

How do you define the most without defining the category and nature of disagreement? Mozart vs Bach vs Beethoven vs Vaughan Williams? Wordsworth vs Byron vs Donne vs Dylan Thomas? So let us go back to the beginning, and ask again “What is a public figure?” “How do you define disagreement? And how do you categorize “the most”?

Goya vs Velasquez vs Turner vs Dali vs Picasso?

“What’s the definition of Baroque?” “When you’re out of Monet.” Come on, you’re joking, aren’t you. “You’re having me on, aren’t you? You’re having me on.” “Pull the other leg. It’s got bells on.”

And I offer a nod of gratitude to The Two Ronnies and my good friend, Moo, who painted the painting that leads into this blog. He called it “In search of enlightenment.”

And no, I don’t disagree with him. But is he a public figure? Or just a figment of my imagination? And if he is a figment of my imagination, what, dear reader, are you?

What is your career plan?

Daily writing prompt
What is your career plan?
View all responses

What is your career plan?

“Pull the other one, it’s got bells on,” as the comedian said on our old black and white TV back in the late fifties when the television shows first started. My grandfather bought that TV in 1953 in order for us to watch the Coronation of Elizabeth II. I was nine years old at the time. Now I am – hold on – “How old am I? Let me count the days” – as Shakespeare might have written, if he had actually written his own plays and poems. Or were all those glorious words written by a conspiracy of authors who then had their work claimed by some else aka Willy the Shake? Snake oil, all of it, or as they say in some parts of Wales – blydi hel.

I wonder how many of my readers know how to play Tute, a Spanish card game, slightly akin to whist? Well, in it you score by singing – Canto las veinte – o canto las cuarenta – well, I am well on my way to winning my game of Tute because Canto las ochenta!

So, at eighty years of age, after fifteen years in retirement, what sort of career plan can anyone have? Plan – is it a detailed proposal for doing or achieving something? Or might it be – an intention or decision about what one is going to do? As for career – is it an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress?

So, in my retirement, what opportunities are there for progress when I seem to be regressing most of the time? And what plans can I make when the unplanned knocks on my door at irregular, uncomfortable intervals?

And that’s the problem with prompts and life in general – one size designed to fit all and I do not fit in. Never have. I no longer have a career. I no longer have any plans. I drift with the winds and the waves “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”

I guess my only plan is to stay afloat for as long as possible and to avoid, if I can, that deadly dive down, down, down, into Admiral Brown, and down to Davey’s Locker.

What was the last live performance you saw?

Daily writing prompt
What was the last live performance you saw?
View all responses

What was the last live performance you saw?

Depends on how you define performance, doesn’t it? Here’s one from a couple of days ago. I left the lid of my pot of wildflower honey slightly open and, guess what? This is what I saw inside. Actually, there were fourteen of them. Some ran for it. Some were so absorbed that they just lay there, inebriated. I grabbed my cell phone and took this shot.

It could have been a video. The seven that fled, it might have been eight, looked like a broken line of can-can girls fleeing from the Moulin Rouge. But look at the color of that honey. Such a rich, warming gold. It was, quite simply, one of the best honeys I have ever tasted. And I have to say, that I cannot blame the ants for invading such a honey-trap paradise.

The live performance was the running, fleeing, burying into the honey, and wild whimpering of the ants. Then, when I squished them, it was their feeble twitching, followed by their gradual submission to a force majeur.

The Nature of Art and the Art of Nature – a live performance, followed by a still life. A nature morte, as they say in French, or a naturaleza muerta, as the Spanish say. On the bright side, I like to think that they found their land of milk and honey, their earthly paradise, before they met their tragic end.

A Broken Heart

A Broken Heart

What does a broken heart look like? Good question – and I, for one, don’t know. Maybe my artist friend, Moo, does. He painted this image of a Fragmented Heart the other day. Not that his heart was broken. He told me he was interpreting the words and feelings of a close friend (who shall remain nameless) who has been having the feelings associated with a heart that was actually breaking. Tough times, eh?

Rejections get me down and annoy me, but they don’t break my heart. I submitted a short story to a magazine on January 4, 2023 and got a rejection letter yesterday, May 6, 2024. It was a form letter, 16 months after submission, just to say “no”!

Of course, the few acceptances that I actually do get make up for the many rejections, as is always the case. However, there seem to be fewer of these acceptances as my thoughts look inwards and I turn from ‘poetry of play to poetry that expresses the authenticity of being‘ (Johannes Pfeiffer). In this day and age, I fear that readers seek entertainment and distraction and prefer the light-hearted to the heavy hand of deep thought and poetic authenticity. And remember, I do not distinguish between poetry and prose, as many do. For me, poetry is writing, be it in poetry or prose.

But back to the theme of the broken heart. Here are three linked poems.

Old Wounds

“The slow wound
deepens with the years
and brings no healing.”

The Minister by R. S. Thomas

How deep time’s wounds
have cut and carved,
not just in flesh and bone,
but in the embers
of that slow-burn fire
 they call the heart.

Memory and mind
have also played their part.

Some days, those wounds
don’t ache at all.

But there’s no real healing,
and a moment of madness
or a knife-edged finger nail,
careless, in the dark,
opens them up again
to bleed afresh
and remind us
of the frailty of the flesh.

I Remember

“I remember so well how it was back then.
I was lonely, my heart so broken I couldn’t
count the pieces, nor put the puzzle together,
 although I tried so hard to make it whole again.

I still bear scars, trenches dug so deep,
lines gouged into my body. I can’t always sleep.
Nightmares pave a crooked, cobbled way to day.

Some nights, I wake up suddenly from a dream
and scream the way that stuck pigs scream
when, hot, their blood comes steaming out.
Other nights, in pain and panic, at shadows I shout.

I search for someone to care for me. I want them
to understand my grief and help me forget the thief
who stole my joy and left me this life of disbelief.”

Signs of Age

What is pain, but the knowledge
that we are alive, and relatively well,
and still on the green side of the grass.

Long may it last. For when the pain is gone,
we shall soon follow. And this is age,
and age is this pain, and the painful
knowledge that we are no longer young,
can no longer bend the way we bent,
or touch our toes, or even see our toes,
some of us. The golden arrow pierces
the heart. Fierce is the pain. But when
that arrow is withdrawn and the heart
no longer feels alive, why, how we miss
that pain, how we weep to find it gone,
perhaps never to come back again.

Pain, like rain, an essential part of the cycle
of the seasons, of the days and the weeks,
and all the months and years that walk us
around the circadian circle, in time with the earth
and its desire to open its arms, and welcome us,
and greet us, and bring us our rest, from pain.

So much wisdom sewn into the wrinkled skin,
the gap-filled grin that glows with humor,
the crow’s foot signals of old age,
or merely those we associate with ageing,
and the knowledge that, yes, many
have walked this wobbly way before,
and many more will follow in our footsteps.

Take your pick – ‘poetry of play to poetry that expresses the authenticity of being‘ – but I know which I prefer and ‘still I live in hopes to see poems of authenticity.”

How has technology changed your job?

Daily writing prompt
How has technology changed your job?
View all responses

How has technology changed your job?

I suppose I must begin by saying that, having retired fifteen years ago, I no longer have a job. So, Technology has not changed my job at all. However, when I was actually working full time, technology made an enormous impact on my work.

Keeping up with the Jones’s! I travelled to Oaxaca, Mexico, on a faculty exchange program in 1995 and was astonished to find that the Escuela de Idiomas of UABJO, had better computer and technology features than I did in my home university. I was way behind the Oaxacans in what I taught and how to deliver it. How to catch up, that was the question!

In 1996, I started a Multi-Media Certificate at the University of New Brunswick, completing it in 1999. As a result of this certificate, my beloved and I built our first web pages and produced our first Quevedo Online Bibliography. This also enabled me to start teaching a course entitled Mexico Online. This course took place in the university’s computer laboratory and, instead of requiring written papers, it asked the students to create their own web pages and to do their own online research.

This was the first step into the brave new world of WebCT, Blackboard, and the many other web platforms that rapidly became available, often at great cost to the student. Student costs – well, they skyrocketed. So, I did my best to cut them down. Texts, especially literary texts, in online format, for free. A formal course outline, online, discussed with the students each term, and changed in accordance with each class’s particular needs. This guaranteed that teaching and learning were both flexible, and did not become bogged down by the trap of the one course, set “in electronic stone” for all eternity. This is a trap into which far too many teachers fall. The everlasting course, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, taught without further changes and with no end, amen. No thought, no development, and knowledge a static state.

But technology also changed the teaching environment. We began with the static classroom with rows and rows of desks looking down on the stage where the professors, at the podium, performed their annual circus acts of passing knowledge from their notes to the students’ notes, without it passing through anybody’s head, as my first prof in my first university once told the class.

Then we moved to the chairs and tables classroom, where the professors could, if they chose, wander among the students, get to know them by their names, and create a dynamic small group teaching environment in which each individual received increased professorial attention if and when needed.

Enter Technology. The Computer screen replaced the black, green, white board (I have scrawled with chalk and marker pens on all of them). Classrooms became fixed spaces again. And the computer program doubled with, or replaced, the formal lecture. Static knowledge delivered to stationary students sitting and passively watching.

They were called smart classrooms. My favorite moment of the day? When I stood up and asked the class if this was indeed a smart classroom. Yes sir, they always replied. I would tap on the wall and ask the wall – “What’s two plus two?” The class would wait and wait. No answer. I would ask again. No answer. “Not such a smart classroom, then,” I would tell them.

Technology is great, as a tool for genuine teaching and learning. But it brings problems with it, as we are beginning to find out. Brainwashing, false information, erroneous material that misleads, quite often deliberately … Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? Who shall police the police? Who shall program the programmers? Perhaps the Romans, all that time ago, had it right. Caveat emptor – buyer beware.