How to irritate primary school teachers

What a nice book

This afternoon I'm giving a talk at a primary school in Chippenham, and I'm a little nervous. Not because of the talk itself - they always make a great audience - but in case the teachers throw things. Let me explain.

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of taking part in the Channel 4 programme Sunday Brunch to talk about my new book The Quantum Age. It was a really enjoyable morning, and the segment appeared to be well received. But while I may have done pretty well on attempting to get people interested in quantum physics, I put my foot in it when it comes to junior school teachers.

We had discussed the way the current curriculum is essentially Victorian and I'd pointed out how it's not a problem of the subject, because I talk about quantum physics to junior school children and they lap up its weirdness with more easy acceptance than adults. What I then wanted to say was something like 'Unfortunately the curriculum doesn't make a mention of quantum theory, and the teachers don't receive any training to talk about it.' Let's be clear, the criticism was supposed to be very much of the science curriculum, not teachers. But what I actually said was something like 'Junior school teachers don't have a clue.'

Anyone for a quantum coin trick?

The moment I said it, my stomach dropped - but in this kind of high speed, live discussion, it's so easy to not say exactly what you mean. Taken in isolation it sounds terrible - but all that I intended was to say that the teachers don't have the preparation and the material to put across what is now one of the two fundamental aspects of physics, which is a real shame.

I also ought to say that I now have a genuine sympathy for politicians and others who say something rather silly in a TV interview. When your brain is working double time, it can be very easy to lose track of exactly which words come out.

To finish on a lighter note, I was appearing on the same show as the Australian boy band Five Seconds of Summer, which meant that some of the tweets received during the show were not the usual things I'd expect. I leave you with this to contemplate:

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...

Search This Blog