Archive | Johns Posts

So January, the month of resolution, has finally passed. Looking back over the year, I was saddened to read of the death of Nobel Peace Prize-Winner, Professor Wangari Maathai. Four years ago, it was my great privilege to welcome and introduce the professor to 1000 delegates at a National Education Conference in Denver, Colorado. She […]

I went to see Malcolm Gladwell speak recently and was fascinated by what he had to say. I have read Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers so knew what to expect but his calm, engaging style was a pleasant surprise. His chosen subject was ‘serendipity’ which he described as the search for something that you do […]

I have had a quote in my head for some time and often wondered about its source. Occasionally, I would ask of the deputies in school, ‘Went the day well?’, not knowing where I had first come across it. Then, on Tuesday in the Times, through a kind of Galilean serendipity, there it was – […]

I was intrigued by the result of the competition to find words, both suitable and powerful enough, to be engraved on a sculpture at the centre of the Olympic village in London. When the games are a distant memory (and maybe even the stadium!) these words in stone will endure as a legacy to the […]

Babar Ali lives in Murshidabad, West Bengal. He attends the Raj Govinda School, which is 10km away.  Every day he catches an auto-rickshaw part of the way and walks the rest.  Babar Ali is the first person in his family to go to school.  He is 16 years old. At 14, Chumki Hajra has never […]

I was neither disappointed nor surprised by the World Cup Final. A tempestuous match in which Holland, predictably, tried to cancel out the higher skill level of the Spanish through endeavour, sweat and passion. Not surprising then that this spilled over into what some media people described as ‘thuggery’. In the heat of battle the lines […]