writer | researcher | academic
Happy Black History Month This post is an extended version of a comment I made on Brittany Lloyd's substack, because it deserved to be an article. Decolonisation has to be an everyday act. I know this from my own attempts: how often do you turn to the 'worthy' thing you might be doing, rather than... Continue Reading →
How can you educate when your own education was a lifetime ago? I recently had the obligation of transcribing for a young student during an exam. Like any educator I find acting as a scribe difficult: your role in this context is to write exactly what they say, ask no leading questions, and not comment... Continue Reading →
transcript of a podcast I wrote on how to decode poetry at a basic level. episode 1 - summarise.
What podcasts do I recommend, and what makes a good podcast to me?
I had to write an essay because I was taught too well not to.
Thank god for teens on Spotify. Their knowledge on so many topics is as lacking as mine, whether we’re talking about classic 80s hip-hop they weren't there for or Romantic classical music when they're not sure if romantic is an era or a mood. The beautiful thing about the teens, though, is that even if... Continue Reading →
Do you ever find yourself researching something so strange that you stop and wonder what brought you here? I find that it’s almost a daily occurrence for me: whether it’s finding a stack of books on the history of various astrologies (what’s more surprising, that I needed it or that it’s a surprisingly well-covered field?)... Continue Reading →
This pandemic is a life-changing cultural shift, and one of the questions we ought to take from it is the purpose of education: what are people hoping to get out of their school experience?
Expanded from a National Geographic competition entry.
1) Contact time isn’t what defines your degree as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. 2) Neither is the subject you study. 3) Neither is the institution in which you study. 4) Student loans are not sufficient for either the institution or the individual. 5) Education should only be for those who ‘deserve’ it (replace deserve with whichever word you like, they’re all there in the comments). 6) This is a crisis that is not only affecting the young and the middle-classes. 7) European degrees, or having the army pay for your degree, are not solutions. 8) We cannot institute the policy of ‘paying’ people for attainment in their degree by giving people with 1st class degrees a discount.
