Musings ... from a beach

Writing in the sand in Dibba, Fujairah (دبا الفجيرة).

Mr Iqbal. The best teacher I ever had!

I'm choking - this just dropped into my Inbox, courtesy of a friend who is a Facebook contact:

Subject: .. a lament ..

Sandy popped in to see me last week. She'd been teaching Rajib (bright boy from your old class) that morning and had complemented him on his beautiful handwriting. "Where did you learn to write like that?" she asked. To which Rajib dramatically tossed back his head and lamented, "Arrgh, Mr Iqbal. The best teacher I ever had!"

Just thought I'd share that with you. It's sure to brighten up your day. Claire.

Honestly - all things aside, I loved my classes as a primary teacher. I always sensed that my classes loved me back because I made them feel safe and set my expectations high. I was far from perfect, but I would always say to my classes that we were a family, that we needed to look after one another and that one day I wanted to see their names in bright lights.

Facebooked III

Fa(r)cebook Part II

Part 2 of the response to Lady Greenfield's Guardian interview where she speaks about relationships and her concerns that social networking sites like Facebook are leading to attention deficit in young people. Click on the image below for the expanded version.

Tor_Khan تور خان

Facebooked II

Fa(r)cebook Part I

Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist.

The startling warning from Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution, has led members of the government to admit their work on internet regulation has not extended to broader issues, such as the psychological impact on children.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/24/social-networking-site-changing-childrens-brains

Lady Greenfield speaks to the Guardian (click)

Lady Greenfield speaks primarily about relationships - she examines the meanings of friendships and discusses radical environmental changes and its effect on the brain when people don't interact with each other in a more general face-to-face sense.

Click on the image here, to see the first part of my (as promised) handwritten response:

Tor_Khan تور خان

The Art of Penmanship

Serendipity ...

... I happened to be having a conversation about this issue only yesterday...

The same old fonts, the same styles of presentation; with so much of the text that we read being in print form, isn't there a threat that somewhere we are being de-skilled both as readers and writers? Of course, this may lead to a different understanding of what it is to be literate, but what about those very important calligraphic forms of writing such as Nastaʿlīq and Kanji?

I do join up when I write, but don't get to write so much because of the emphasis on electronic communication. Anyway, I'll make a point of uploading an example sometime soon Inshallah.

full article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7907888.stm

... Is the ancient art form of handwriting dying out?

A century from now, our handwriting may only be legible to experts.

For some, that is already the case. But writer Kitty Burns Florey says the art of handwriting is declining so fast that ordinary, joined-up script may become as hard to read as a medieval manuscript.

"When your great-great-grandchildren find that letter of yours in the attic, they'll have to take it to a specialist, an old guy at the library who would decipher the strange symbols for them," says Ms Florey, author of the newly-published Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting.

She argues that children - if not this generation then one soon to come - may grow up using only a crude form of printing for the rare occasions in life they need to communicate by pen.