1. What’s the point of school? (according to 600 kids) is a blog post by Ewan McIntosh, the founder of No Tosh https://medium.com/notosh/whats-the-point-of-school-according-to-600-kids-392f8f0bd981

Teachers and students agree what the point of school should be, by and large, but there’s quite a gap between their view and the official view of the purpose of school. Ewan’s post draws on the findings of No Tosh’s report into education in Scotland, Exploring the Four Capacities, which suggests that education in Scotland has rather lost its way. Here’s the whole report https://notosh.com/insights/curriculum-purpose-scotland and there’s a PDF below.

The ‘four capacities’ is a term drawn from Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, first implemented in 2004, “which aspires to develop in all children and young people the four capacities to become successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors”.

Here’s the Cambridge Dictionary definition of tosh if you’re not familiar with the term https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/tosh

2.  Two poems by the Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, who died in an Israeli airstrike on her home last October: “Pull Yourself Together” and “Seven Skies for the Homeland” https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2024-01/pull-yourself-together-and-seven-skies-of-homeland-hiba-abu-nada-huda-fakhreddine/

3. A gift article from the New York Times, Portraits of Gazans http://tinyurl.com/55c3wyw8

4. Killing Eve, based on the ‘Villanelle’ novels by Luke Jennings, was a huge hit for the BBC. Luke is now writing a new ‘Killing Eve’ story on Substack, with twelve instalments so far https://killingeve.substack.com/archive?sort=top

I can’t quite make up my mind whether I like it or not!

5. And, finally, a second video feature from The Guardian, Birdsong, about the dying whistling language of the Hmong people in northern Laos https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2023/nov/29/birdsong-the-dying-whistled-language-of-the-hmong-people-in-northern-laos Credit to ELT Buzz for this one.