Last week a colleague at work introduced me to a site called Teachers TV, and specifically to a video of someone called Phil Beadle teaching a class of inner city yoof a poem by Grace Nichols called Island Man.It was pretty engaging stuff, with him having them move around to act out the poem, teaching metre with the use of a drum kit, then launching into a thoughtful q&a with the kids that drew out the imagery conveyed through the verbs. Some of his techniques were too far out to use here in Sharjah, but some we could, and might.

I subscribed to the site, and then yesterday got this e-mail from them:

The DfE website featured a link entitled Cutting Burdens and Bureaucracy. I wonder who this stuff was a burden to?

It’s hackneyed by now to remark that the money has gone to the bankers and their friends, who won’t be funding the big society out of their own munificence any time soon; less usual, remarkably, to wonder how many of these projects could have been got for the price of a nuclear bomb or two. So a lot of the social and quality-of-life programs that, whatever his madness over Iraq and his own personal reactionary slant, sprung up under Blair are now getting shuttered. They wanted their social programs and their nuclear bombs too, and now the debt has sunk them.

So here, in all its shades of grey for those who don’t have too much, comes the age of austerity…