Thoughts after watching this tremedous TED talk (which I may have posted here years ago already):

Thoughts: My friend Sam was saying the other night that he wasn’t sure he’d leave Madrid with a child (for smaller towns/cities in Spain), due to the wonderful education opportunites available here, that you just don’t find elsewhere.

Madrid has international, private, and bilingual schools of every grade and pursuasion. If we move to Asturias, will we have the same choices? Probably not, but for me it is still worthwhile taking my child out of a huge metropolis, and into the (or much much nearer to) the countryside, because of the very unique education that one gets by being ‘closer-to-nature’. It is not an academic education, but a kind of nurturing that I value very much, having grown up in a semi-rural area near Oxford.

Granted, I went to good private schools close to my village, an education I value very highly, but as this video points out, they certainly weren’t solely responsible for developing my creativity. Any creativity I have was fostered through my father teaching me about photography, and my mother’s love of the arts. Oh, and I think I had to get pretty good at creative-writing to get through my philosophy degree!

So my question is, in a world of “academic inflation” where “degrees aren’t worth anything” (I largely agree…), and with schools killing real creativity, does it matter if one no longer lives near a fine range of upmarket private education?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. My hope is that we are wise enough to spot our children’s creative instincts in time, and do everything we can to encourage them through any appropriate educational experience we can find – our own, institutional, or otherwise.

Links:

- More thoughts on this talk and issue from the speaker himself

- Interesting “What’s your favourite TED talk” thread that brought me back to this (a day too late! Ken Robinson spoke in Madrid last night, very close to my home, and I missed it, balls!)

Marina and I have some very special free content coming up this week at notesinspanish.com – the first video is up now, on 3 of the biggest and best newspapers in Spain!

Watch the video here!

Been very very quiet over the past week or two as we prepare a big new project for our Spanish site, Notes in Spanish, and Marina deals with her Presidencia (more on that in a second…) It’s been ages since Marina and I have consistently created new content, and it’s wonderful to be recording new audio again. But with only half a day to work each (we are lucky enough to each spend the other half looking after the baby), everything else – blogging, eating, sleeping – goes out the window.

…Except of course for Marina’s thrilling enjoyment of her new role as Presidenta de la comunidad [Definition: Spanish law dictates that in every block of flats some poor sod has to be nominated to spend a year chairing residents' meetings, and being on the receiving end of every niggling neighbourly nonsense, battle and complaint.]

At the beginning of the month, November 1st, the communal, central heating got switched on in our building, and Marina, along with the administradora (person who manages the building accounts etc), get to decide how long the heating goes on for each day (with plenty of advice from the Portero, obviously).

And so, as boilers across the city kicked into action, and the air-quality plummeted in direct proportion to the number of coal trucks (still, in 2009!) refilling cellars across the city, the knocks at the door began…..

Here’s a typical exchange from yesterday:

Doorbell rings, just as baby starts siesta, of course, miraculously doesn’t wake him up, but, we open to find a smartly dressed old lady with a stern expression on her face:

Old Lady: Are you the presidenta?

Marina: Yes…

Old Lady: THEN PLEASE DO ME THE FAVOUR OF TELLING ME WHY I HAVEN’T GOT ANY HEATING?!???!!!

Marina: (Summoning patience of a saint) But you do have heating, it goes on from 10 am now, earlier than ever before in the history of our blessed block of flats.

Old Lady: Well my radiators are tepid to the touch, my house is freezing, and I’m using THREE electric heaters just to keep my Salon warm.

Marina: I’m sorry about that, you see the heating uses a thermostat, and seeing as it’s unseasonably warm outside…

Old Lady: Wa… Wa… WARM?! It’s barely 14º! It’s FREEZING in my flat!

Marina: Well, I think it’s actually bit warmer than that [Note: real temperature actually closer to 18º, not bad for November, no one in the streets wearing a coat!]

Old Lady: It’s COLD! And I’ll be sending YOU my electricity bill for all those heaters…

Etc… Etc…10 minutes later she left with a promise from Marina that she would try getting the temperature increased during the day, and a formal agreement from both Marina and myself that it was indeed pretty cold outside after all, muy sorry for our ignorance.

And so it goes that Marina now ducks into the kitchen whenever the doorbell rings, pleading with me to tell anyone that knocks before 5pm that the most eminent Presidenta de la Comunidad is currently engaged in the pressing matter of her afternoon siesta!

Meanwhile, outside it continues to be most unseasonably FREEZING! pleasant!

Note to Spanish-lovers: Go and sign up for our newsletter at Notes in Spanish, great things coming next week!

This ad pains me on so many levels I’m not sure where to start… Roughly translated as: “It’s name is the BioExplorer Insect Spy: Developer of Future Eco-Responsables” – I can’t even translate ‘eco-responsables’ but I guess the meaning is obvious – as the last line says, Suena muy cientifico, “Sounds very scientific”…

Sounds more like “very optimistic” to me – putting poor butterflies etc in small plastic tubes wouldn’t be my first approach to saving the planet, but who knows, good luck to ‘em!

There is more to say, but I shan’t. Comments welcome.

More ads

Here’s an interesting article by Richard Morley about the increasing problem of pickpocketing in Madrid. It starts out by describing the experience of a new and more sinister approach I haven’t heard of before, the ‘show me your passport, I’m a policeman’ intimidation approach, which sounds most unpleasant.

Madrid is getting a deserved, and bad, reputation of this sort of tourist-targeting street crime now, which is a real shame (we used to say, “Oh, that sort of thing only happens in Barcelona…”)

It’s about time Spain got tough on this. If they can cut this kind of crime down in other big cities, then why not here?