1. Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist for Google Research and Google DeepMind, gave a talk at Princeton University earlier this year on Important Trends in AI: How Did We Get Here, What Can We Do Now, and Where are We Headed? https://youtu.be/UTTeXZrpMR0 Accessibly complicated!
2. The UK Department of Education have just published a range of papers (all downloadable) on Identifying and supporting the needs of children with SEND in mainstream settings, described as findings from a series of rapid evidence assessments on what works to identify and support the needs of children and young people with SEND in mainstream and early years settings that cover the identification of special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), effective methods of support and collaborative practices in relation to:
- cognition and learning needs
- sensory and physical needs
- social, emotional and mental health needs (SEMH)
- stammering, speech, language and communication needs
- autism
3. The typically rich August issue of Humanising Language Teaching has just been published https://www.hltmag.co.uk/aug26 It includes, very sadly, a tribute to Jill Hadfield who died in May (with a lovely picture of her) https://www.hltmag.co.uk/aug26/good-bye-jill-in-memory-of-jill-hadfield PDF of the tribute to Jill below.
4. Philip Larkin’s birthday would have been last Sunday, and I joined an excellent talk that evening on Larkin and Birthdays by Philip Pullen (which I hope I’ll be able to share the recording of soon). Also in celebration of his birthday, The New York Review of Books has made four of his poems that they published in 1964 free to view for the next few days https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1964/06/11/four-poems-byphilip-larkin/
Here’s one of them, Home is So Sad
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
5. And, finally, Charlotte Brontë as EFL teacher from David B. Wilson (via the University of Warwick website). Two of her novels – The Professor (published posthumously in 1857) and Villette (1853) – drew on her experiences as a student of French and teacher of English as a foreign language in the Pensionnat Héger, Brussels in 1842–44 https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/research/collections/elt_archive/halloffame/women/bronte/ PDF below as well.
Roy Cross's Blog 