1. To start with today, Keep calm & carry on: Patience and perseverance in learning from Alexandra Mihai on her blog, The Educationalist https://educationalist.substack.com/p/keep-calm-and-carry-on-patience-and

Today I want to write about something that I deeply value and see as two important conditions for learning: patience and perseverance. In a world where we seek quick answers and thrive on instant gratification, cultivating patience almost feels like a luxury. It is often seen as counterintuitive, nostalgic, or even useless. Why wait when everything is moving so fast? But, as I argue in my last post, sometimes it’s worth waiting and pausing precisely because everything is moving so fast. Because we need to process everything we have access to, in order to transform it into learning. And for this we need to train our patience. Learning is not linear, there are many ups and downs, and if we were to give up at the first obstacle we would never get anywhere.

2. This one, at 14:00 UK time this coming Monday, March 23^rd, is a bit language-teaching nerdy: Supplement to Aligning Language Education with the CEFR: A Handbook. More info and registration here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/supplement-to-aligning-language-education-with-the-cefr-a-handbook-tickets-1984807728345

‘What’s the CEFR?’, many of you may be asking, to which the question the answer, ‘It’s the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages,’ may not help very much. Here’s the Council of Europe’s CEFR website https://www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-reference-languages/level-descriptions

3. Here’s a piece on the UKFIET blog by Margo O’Sullivan, Why are we silent? 9 out of 10 children in Sub-Saharan Africa are not learning, and the elephant in the classroom is still being ignored https://www.ukfiet.org/2026/why-are-we-silent-9-out-of-10-children-in-sub-saharan-africa-are-not-learning-and-the-elephant-in-the-classroom-is-still-being-ignored/ When I read the title of the piece, I’d expected it to be about EME (English Medium Education), but it’s not.

Three years ago, in March 2022, UKFIET published a blog I wrote on what I considered the most critical issue for poor children’s learning outcomes: teacher absenteeism. This ‘elephant in the classroom’ is what eventually led me and two Ugandan colleagues to establish Power Teachers Africa in Uganda in June 2024. Three years on from the blog’s publication, I still cannot understand the silence surrounding this crisis. In 19 countries across Eastern and Southern Africa, teacher absenteeism rates range from 15% to 45%. In Uganda, recent data reveal a staggering reality: while teachers may be on the payroll, 52.3% were not actually teaching in the classroom when surveyed.

4. Only four cities from Africa in this Time Out list of The 50 best cities in the world in 2026 Guess which ones before you look at it? https://www.timeout.com/travel/best-cities-2026

5. And, finally, the guiding spirit of these two days for me, Philip Larkin, reading his own poem, ‘Church Going’ https://youtu.be/mN_vWfSgWe4