History is at the heart of our culture and there are some fantastic resources uploaded and freely shared on the internet by history teachers who have a passion for learning and a deep love of their subject.

Just as History is constantly in the headlines nationally, we are pleased that History is also making headlines at KEHS as we look forward to Dr Janina Ramirez joining us  for the day on Wednesday 20th March. Her new TV series Chivalry and Betrayal has received excellent reviews: ” her new take on the war integrates cultural, political and military history wonderfully well and uses period artefacts and settings to stunning effect.”  Dr Ramirez will be talking with our girls about her own career and delivering a lecture on ‘Illuminating the Dark Ages’. We are sure that it is going to be a fascinating day!

•  Permanent snow and ice covers about 12% of the Earth’s land surface, a total of around 21 million square kilometres.
• A single snowstorm can drop 40 million tons of snow, carrying the energy equivalent to 120 atom bombs.
• The largest snowflake ever measured fell across Fort Keogh in Montana,U.S.A. on the 28 January 1887. It measured 38cm across and was 20cm thick.
• Snow kills about 200 people a year in the U.S.A. The primary snow-related death is from traffic accidents.
• Dr. Vincent Joseph Schaefer (an American chemistand meteorologist) was the first person to make artificial snow in 1946.

There is also an interesting article in the Telegraph that recalls the Big Freeze of 1963- well worth a read!  And do check out this BBC site about Harsh Winters in the UK.

• Servants entered the household invisibly through their own doors
• Marriages and babies could lead to dismissal.
• One servant given authority over another invariably had to be cruel and distant in order to be taken seriously.
• The devotion that nannies were supposed to exert over their wealthy charges was very rare.

He believes that with many of the modern dramas the British like to ‘take comfort in a past that only seems so good because so few are alive to remember it well.’

Downton Abbey is good Sunday evening television drama, and if it encourages our students to carry out more research about the Edwardian period, then in my view it probably does no real harm at all.

Mince Pies

INGREDIENTS

240g / 8 oz Plain Flour

120g / 4oz Butter / block Margarine

Cold water

1 jar Mincemeat (sweet)

METHOD

1. Oven  on 200°c / gas 6. Flour a tartlet tin.
2. Make shortcrust pastry – rub fat into flour until it looks like breadcrumbs
3. Add 2-3 tablespoons cold water. Stir in with knife to form stiff dough.
4. Divide into 1/3^rd and 2/3^rds.  Roll out larger piece on floured surface.
5. Cut out 12 bases and line tartlet tins.
6. Put 1 heaped teaspoon mincemeat in each base.
7. Roll  out remaining pastry and cut out tops. Wet edges of bases to help tops to stick.
8. Position  tops and brush with milk or water. Make 3 scissor snips on tops (only if it covers base completely).
9. Bake 15 – 20 mins until golden brown

Still in the festive mood? Check out the Roasts and Toasts of Christmas Past at the English Heritage Site and do have a look at the blogs mostly with a festive theme from our year 7 girls.

Enjoy the break and have a lovely Christmas!

My own secondary education took place in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s and now, more than ever, I am very much aware how dependent I actually was on the quality of the teaching. Indeed I owe a great deal to my History teacher Margaret Hodgson; she was detailed, meticulous and thorough in her approach to the teaching of History. She moulded her A level students into superb essay writers, insightful analysers of 16^th century historical source material and effective independent learners. Looking back, without her input into my education I doubt I would have flourished so much at university and I certainly wouldn’t have become the teacher I am today. But she was the exception- my English teacher was a bright young thing from Cambridge who had lost his way in a large comprehensive school. Lessons were unprepared and he loved to be distracted by some of the more wayward girls in the class who wanted to talk about everything but the set English texts! In French our teacher, another Cambridge graduate, was on extended sick leave for the last two terms of our A level studies (she never returned) so we had to make do with the occasional supply teacher and work set, but not marked, by the Head of the French department. In the midst of such mediocrity, Margaret Hodgson was a shining light of inspiration. She was the teacher who gave me the wings to fly and for that I will be forever grateful!

We are very interested at the moment in looking at the role of computing in the girls’ education and with this in mind we are keen to look at the role that coding could play in the curriculum. I have read with interest the latest articles about the need to offer more than just coding in education. Tom Crick comments, “One of the reasons that programming is increasingly perceived to be a 21st-century literacy is because it is ultimately empowering, developing the ability to manipulate and control your digital world.” Nevertheless he goes on to make a very important point: “But if there’s one lesson we should take away from the problems of the past 15 years is that we must not focus on transient and superficial technology skills. Computer science is not programming (and vice versa) – we should be wary of teaching programming just for the sake of teaching programming, without thinking about why we want to get students to program.”

“July 29th, 1948: The sun blazed down on Wembley Stadium in London on Thursday, July 29th, 1948, when the fourteenth games of the modern Olympiad were formerly opened by George VI in the presence of a host of dignitaries and a crowd of more than 80,000 people. The King, in naval uniform, was accompanied by the Queen and Princess Margaret. Lord and Lady Mountbatten were there, as were the Shah of Iran and the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Trygve Lie. The members of the International Olympic Committee paraded on the turf in top hats. The games had attracted some 6,000 competitors from countries ranging through the alphabet from Afghanistan to Yugoslavia. The Germans and the Japanese were not invited and the Soviet Union stayed away. The Olympics of 1944 would have been held in Britain, but had been cancelled because of the Second World War, and there was a certain appropriateness in the fact that the 1948 games in London were the successors to the notorious 1936 event in Berlin, which had been employed for Nazi propaganda by the German regime.

Britain was still in a state of post-war bankruptcy, austerity and exhaustion. Bread rationing,as it happened, ended on the same day that the games began. There had been no question of building an Olympic village and no money to create new stadiums. Well-worn venues were used for the swimming in the Empire Pool at Wembley, the shooting at Bisley,the yachting at Cowes, the rowing at Henley. The competitors stayed at colleges and barracks in and around London. Because of rationing, many of them had to bring their own food.”

There are another seven days of competition, many more hours of TV coverage and certainly this is proving to be one of the best summers ever in terms sporting success. The legacy of these games will surely be that many young people will aspire to take up some of the sports receiving such extensive coverage. Youngsters will aspire to be successful whatever their background and irrespective of whether they have been educated in the maintained or the independent sector.

At the Hay Festival Nicolas Ostler, a leading linguist, even predicted that in the longer term English will die out like Latin. “One day English too, the last lingua franca to be of service to a multi-lingual world, will be laid down. Thereafter everyone will speak and write in whatever language they choose and will understand.”  He also claims that half of the world’s languages are so endangered that they will die out by the end of the 21^st century. According Ostler technology will play its part in killing off English as people will be able to translate written documents quickly and use hand-held devices to translate speech in real time.

In May I was fortunate enough to hear Professor Keri Facer speak about education and the need to adapt to a changing world in the 21^st century.  Keri suggests that schools should be reconceptualised; they should be places where students and teachers should imagine, discuss and start to build the futures that they would like to have. The clip below provides an opportunity to view Keri discussing the future of learning.

For those who have excellent recall skills there is actually a World Memory Championships, which  Joshua Foer took part in recently and which is chronicled  in his bestselling book ‘Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.’

Success in examinations requires excellent recall skills and courtesy of the website ‘Ace Online Schools’, listed below are 10 sites to help to test your memorising skills.

• BBC: Explore Your Memory: Test your memory in a battery of tests   involving shapes, colours, pictures, numbers, patterns and more during   this 20-minute exercise from the BBC.
• BrainCurls.comMemory Q’s: See how well you can remember sequences of numbers,      letters, tones and bars.
• Braingle Memory Tests: How many numbers, letters or words can you  remember after looking at them for a brief period of time?
• Brain List Channel Word List Recall: Test your short-term verbal memory by memorising 15 words.
• The Cognition and Language Laboratory Memory Test: A 3-minute quiz that tests your short-term memory of visual objects.
• Essex University Online Memory Experiment: See how well you can memorise      sequences of numbers.
• JakeMandell.com: Not only test your audio memory, but also find out if you’re tone deaf.
• Memory Loss Online Memory Self-Tests: Test your verbal and facial memory in  two 10-15-minute experiments.
• Test My Brain: Test your memory of numbers, words and faces in a 15-minute quiz.
• Zefrank.com Memory Test:  Like the game Memory, but with animated patterns. Can you beat the average score?

So, how good is your memory?