The photos from top to bottom:
Prof. Paul Kirschner explaining learning behaviour in evolution perspective
Forsythia and CHN: blue and yellow, the colors of Leeuwarden
Sunset at the small lake near our house (look up Hardegarijp on GoogleEarth and see the lake, it's about 7 miles East of Leeuwarden)
Today I went to school by bike, for the weather was sunny: no single cloud. The wind was less strong (I estimate 2-3 Beaufort), and I chose the route along Tytjerk and partly through the park "De Kleine Wielen". 45 minutes biking. At school there were some dissertations to grade, I like Word with its special "reading lay out" and the editing toolbar very much for its facilitates quick and easy annotating in assignments sent to me by e-mail. We also discussed the conference (see previous post), and my colleague discovered that one of the slogans wasn't valid, namely, that students put "studying" at the third place of their activity scheduling, and that this had to be moved to the 2nd or 1st place. My colleague wrote a letter for the school magazine in which he convincingly demonstrated that this was valid for the whole of the working population: personal care (including shopping, showering, sleeping etc.) was always nr. 1, and leisure was always nr. 2 for most of the people in the Netherlands: don't forget the many holidays, and the Satur- and Sundays! That's why leisure industry is the biggest industry in Western world nowadays. I also had a chat with the editor of the school magazine because of our article about the conference, and he gave me a photo of the conference. (See above). When the magazine is published, I 'll give you a link to it (Adobe-file) to read about it if you can read Dutch (The CHN is more than "only" the internationally-oriented Hotel Management School).
I was a bit disappointed about the dissertations. They have to be written in English, but the language was poor and sometimes "talking language". These students are not researchers or writers, they are "do-ers" and "organizers". Anyway, my colleague and I decided to make room in the curriculum for next year for a course "academic writing skills".
I stole some time from my boss to go outside and make a nice picture of the yellow blossoming forsythia (that's how we call the plant in Dutch), with a part of the school building at the background.
On my way back I couldn't help making some photos in the park (you 'll see them in due time on my photoblog, see sidebar). Once at home, I got "surrounded" by my little son who could talk and think of nothing else than the "kermis" ("carnival" in American-English), and I promised to go there for an hour directly after dinner. Luckily we had "patat" (those McDonalds potato chips) so he finished dinner in record time. I showed him my shooting skills and he got very proud of his father (I used to win prizes with it when I was in the army some 40 years ago), also we drove in the bumping cars. There he found a lost coin which he brought back to the manager, who let him keep it because he was so honest to bring it back, and he could drive a second time. His day was made, and we hurried back home because of the approaching beautiful sunset which everybody must have photographed once in his/her life. Here the result, there are more photos which I'll put on my special photoblog in due time.
1 comment:
I like your idea about a course to teach academic writing skills. Many North American college students don't take their first-year English composition course seriously at all. They don't realize that this is one of the most important coursese they will ever take, because the writing skills they develop in that course will serve them throughout their academic and professional careers.
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