An eccentric 19th-century poet who dressed in white and barely left her bedroom might seem an unlikely role model for today’s teenagers. One headmistress, though, says that girls could learn a lot from Emily Dickinson about dealing with the pressures of modern life.
Read MoreOne child wrote of a suicide bomber; another of the ‘sweet honey mangoes’ of home. Kate Clanchy helps them tune into their inner voice
Kate Clanchy, tall, fast-talking and slightly intimidating, lays out more than a score of slim books on the kitchen table in her Oxfordhome. They are collections of poetry written by children she taught, published with the help of grants that she tirelessly raised.
Read MoreLatin and the works of Sophocles are no longer the preserve of public schools thanks to a project that links professors with underprivileged teenagers.
An initiative between King’s College London (KCL) and Newham Sixth Form College in east London offering lessons in Classics to bright sixth-form pupils is now in its second year.
Read MoreStories and mathematics have always been woven together in my mind – two foundational ways of looking at the world, not incompatible but complementary. When I was growing up, my mother told me myths and fairytales at bedtime, while my father recounted stories of famous mathematicians and gave me his favourite maths riddles to try to solve. Which is maybe why in my new novel, The Tenth Muse, I try to bring the two together, while challenging the many mistaken assumptions people hold about maths. My protagonist is a brilliant and ambitious mathematician who happens to be a woman tackling one of her subject’s most pressing conundrums.
I hope her journey provides a history of mathematics and the ways it has changed the world, the challenges women in particular have faced in trying to join its professional ranks, and a glimpse of how exhilarating it can be. My favourite kind of maths reveals the outer reaches of the imagination and how in finding a solution it is possible to illuminate an idea. Maths can shine a light on both the simplest and most complex things; the same is true of my favourite literature.
Read MorePre-Us, the alternative to A levels created and used by many English public schools, are to be scrapped.
The last Pre-U qualifications will be taken in 2023, with resits in June 2024, Cambridge Assessment International Education said. The small number of pupils taking the qualification had made it unsustainable, the exam board added.
Read MoreThe Evening Standard’s Women Tech Charge podcast is back for series two and Entrepreneur First co-founder Alice Bentinck is this week’s guest.
Hosted by Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon, the CEO of STEMettes.org, Women Tech Charge invites women from all areas of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) to share amusing and insightful insights into their careers and what it’s really like to be part of the 17 per cent of the UK’s tech workforce that identifies as female.
Bentinck had her first taste of entrepreneurship when she was 16 and tried the Young Enterprise programme at school. Her team was given £10 and tasked with coming up with a product.
“It was just the beginning of understanding that business was a thing and that start-ups were a thing and just the rush of having a small team, creating a product and then selling it to people and they will give you money.”
Read MoreMyopia rates among under-16s have tripled since the 1960s. Opticians urge parents to send their children outside
An epidemic of short-sightedness is linked to youngsters staring at screens, reading books and doing homework, say scientists — who recommend removing their gadgets and sending them outside for at least two hours a day.
Researchers have found a direct relationship between the time youngsters spend on “nearwork” and myopia. They also predict a surge in the numbers of people who become blind or visually impaired, as people who develop short-sightedness early in life are at far higher risk of serious eye problems when older.
Read MoreThey are denounced for preserving privilege and ensuring the wealthy keep their grip on society’s glittering prizes. But one boarding school charging up to £35,000 a year is accepting pupils from troubled families in a move that could ease the pressure on Britain’s care system.
Kingham Hill School, set in 100 acres of Cotswold countryside near the home of David Cameron, has admitted its first pupil part-funded by local social services. Oxfordshire county council is contributing £14,388 a year to the boarding fees of a girl whose fostering arrangements fell through. The same sum will be contributed jointly by the school and Buttle UK, a children’s charity.
Read MoreEver tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. But try to succeed 85 per cent of the time.
Scientists have discovered that there is a perfect amount of failure, suggesting that those who get the answers wrong 15 per cent of the time while studying have found the optimum difficulty level to stimulate fast learning.
Researchers said that a success rate of 85 per cent, or getting about six of every seven questions or challenges right, was the “sweet spot” for fast learning, explaining that anything above this is too easy and anything below is too difficult.
Read MoreReading fairy tales and solving puzzles with your children could reduce their risk of developing dementia in later life, it has been claimed.
The suggestion came after research found that eight-year-olds with strong problem-solving skills retained them in old age.
Scientists studied 502 Britons born in the same week in March 1946 who took thinking and memory tests at eight and again between the ages of 69 and 71. They found that “childhood cognitive ability was strongly associated with cognitive scores . . . more than 60 years later”.
Read MoreIn a Victorian Gothic church behind Harrods in west London, a group of young people from troubled backgrounds have gathered to rehearse a play about school.
Excluded is a new production, set in a turbulent GCSE class in a Londonsecondary school in 2019, that attempts to shine a light on the problems faced by vulnerable young people within the education system.
The content of the play is close to home. At an early workshop exploring the issues, it emerged that all but two of the young performers had been excluded from school. Some are care leavers, some have mental health problems, others have been young offenders. Many have been affected by the consequences of knife crime, which they link to the increasing number of exclusions.
Read MoreAnother year, another wave of students trampling across autumn leaves, making their way to their first lectures heady with a cocktail of excitement, apprehension and a nasty hangover. But while every year brings new faces, one feature of the academic landscape remains ever-present: the huge, imposing blackboards.
Now photographer Jessica Wynne, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, has thrown a spotlight on this workhorse of academic endeavour, travelling across the US and beyond to capture the blackboards of mathematicians.
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