Kind Words

When you write a blog for the world to see you can never be sure who reads it nor what they think. Keeping site statistics is one thing. Stats tell me how often, and how long and where from but not whether it mattered.

Comments are always appreciated and thank-you to everyone who has taken the time to write. This weekend I discovered two responses to The Compass Point.

My April 2007 story about the flying cats of Borneo has consistently drawn more visitors than any other. It’s the true story of the 20 or so cats parachuted by the RAF to tackle the rats after a chain of unintended consequences connecting malaria, DDT, and bubonic plague. The RAF also dropped”two cases of stout” – presumably Guinness – for an “ailing chieftain”. The story as told all over the internet also suggested a need for a corrective dose of critical thinking and factual research. It was picked up in a number of places and now by the Plexus Institute – ” a not-for-profit organization that was formed in 2001 by a small group of people from diverse backgrounds who shared a vision of discovering the most beneficial uses for the insights from complexity science….”.

And then this recommendation from Jonathan Martin’s The Good High School Project. (I love the title description: Welcome to The Good High School blog. In part an homage to Lawrence-Lightfoot’s seminal book of the same name, and in the spirit of the student shadowing in Thompson’s Pressured Child, this blog intends to offer an ongoing reflection upon, and conversation about, secondary school best practices in the 21st century. As Thompson says about his project shadowing students: “A critical part of our job as educators is to understand a child’s daily experience in school… Let’s go back to school.”) .

I am glad to have discovered what is already a very helpful and interesting blog and a selective repository and synthesis of what matters most.