The retreat for senior pupils at Glasgow’s Holyrood Secondary always provides them with plenty of spiritual food for thought. At this year’s event, the Missionaries of Charity nuns explained why they followed God’s will.
Their testimony moved the kids to bring them plates of tuck at the break, only for the nuns politely to refuse the buns as the good sisters eat at set times.
Fittingly, the nun who did the explaining rejoiced in the name of Sister Vienetta - proving that one slice, in this case, is always too much.
Leaders in waiting
No doubt Daliburgh School in the Western Isles will be licking its wounds after being hit by the inspectors who didn’t think much of it - sorry, found evidence of “significant weaknesses”.
But it’s not all doom and gloom: step forward the pupils. While HMIE did not find enough “effective leadership for learning” among the staff, it praised the school’s youngsters for their success in achieving leadership awards. Ouch!
Goldie oldie
We hope teachers of modern studies scour the Scottish Parliament’s website for rich pickings; they will find plenty.
Take, for example, Conservative leader Annabel Goldie, who wagged her finger at the First Minister in one of the first debates when Parliament came back from its summer hols, lecturing him that “rhetoric is not enough”.
Did she have in mind, perhaps, the MSP who said in the same debate that the Government’s legislative programme “reeks of inertia, exhaustion, escapism and atrophy”? Yes, that was another Goldie moment.
Plus ca change
So it’s finally farewell to the third of the “three Judiths”. Judith Sischy, director of the Scottish Council of Independent Schools, now joins parent emeritus Judith Gillespie and leadership evangelist Judith McClure in the bus pass lounge.
Sischy had a splendid send-off amid the splendour of George Watson’s College in Edinburgh. Recalling a profile of her in The TESS, she noted her comment: “I am confident we can keep up with the curriculum changes, but there is a lot of work to be done. Where are the teachers going to find the time to keep up with all the curriculum development changes? Time costs money and the children need their teachers.”
It could have been yesterday: in fact, it was 1990.
God only knows
The writers of Doctor Who seem to benefit from divine inspiration, according to academic theologian Stephen Holmes of St Andrews University. How else, he asks in the current issue of Life and Work, can we explain the line when the good doctor is killed by an alien vampire: “He gave his blood to save us”?
