“Tokyo offers a lot of spectacle and confusion. This is just a facade. Behind the neon glare lies a steady rhythmic and miraculous everyday world that can be yours if you want it to be.” Tokyo Totem We walked Tokyo for a week in an attempt to make it “ours”. The weather was good, around […]
We only had three weeks of our month in Japan planned with accommodation booked. This gave us the freedom to use our JR Passes flexibly in where we went. The idea was to chat with Japanese people about where we might like to explore and see what emerged that we may not have found back […]
The longhaul train trip to Ibusuki, south of Kagoshima, was relaxing and offered great scenery with the opportunity to read for long stretches uninterrupted. We had no real reason for travelling to this small seaside town other than it was about as far south as we could go and there were potentially interesting onsen experiences. […]
“Welcome to Osaka. Few major cities of the developed world could match Osaka for the overall unattractiveness of its cityscape, which consists mostly of a jumble of cube-like buildings and a web of expressways and cement-walled canals. There are few skyscrapers, even fewer museums and, other than Osaka Castle, almost no historical sites. Yet Osaka […]
Hirosaki is singularly the most Japanese city I know. Will Ferguson We stayed in Hirosaki not because I can’t read Japanese train timetables at all well but because sometimes Hyperdia is wrong (said the JR ticket office assistant). However, it proved to be a most serendipitous visit. The heavy snow that had descended on us at Hakodate […]
Japan is not a small country; no matter what the Japanese themselves may think. The main island of Honshu alone is larger than Great Britain. Were Japan in Europe, it would dominate the continent. Japan is larger than Italy, larger than Norway, larger than Germany…on a map Japan looks small because it is surrounded by […]
“There are two motives for reading a book: One, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.” Bertrand Russell I had the goal of writing a blog post each month this year and feel quietly pleased at keeping up the pace. I have made notes and lists, in all kinds of […]
Staff Development Days provide great opportunities to reinvigorate professional enthusiasms as well as to reflect on learning and life at school. For the last six years Dapto High has spent the final day of the academic year off-site at the Nan Tien Temple in Wollongong. The idea is that staff can best help students learn […]
What place does citizen science have in our schools? I pinched the title of this article from a paper published this year by the Office of the Chief Scientist. Professor Ian Chubb, Australia’s Chief Scientist** alerted the delegates at the inaugural Australian Citizen Science Association conference held in Canberra this year – Maximising the Capacity […]
Reviewing the books I read or re-read in 2015, I decided to choose the thirteen I had derived the most pleasure as a reader. In other words, I reflected on how much satisfaction was felt sitting with the book – and why. If you have the patience, the following slideshow will countdown to the book […]