Pig Sty Avenue

I had a list of statements in a likert test for test administrators: But I didn't want the respondents (after a hard day administering test in a busy school) to go onto autopilot, if possible, so I needed a quick way to randomise the statements - the sort function will only sort them alphabetically, ascending or descending. No problem, once I'd worked it out. Get the RAND function on a cell in the row of the first cell: Drag the formula down the column adjoining your column of text, and it gives each row a genuinely random number: Now sort that column, doesn't matter ascending or descending, expanding the sort to include your column of text. Just delete your column of random numbers. And voila, a now truly random set of statements for your likert. Easy-peasy.

Quite close to the entrance to Pig Sty Avenue v2.0 there was a mysterious mound of earth, with a water barrel on top of it at a crazy angle. I moved the barrel. And started with the intention of levelling the mound. Hmm. This has clearly been a rubbish heap, which someone has decided to throw some soil over. Plastic bags, beer cans, and a distressing amount of broken glass. I gave it a few hours over the weekend, filled four barrow's full with rubbish, and I'm still not there. Just to make things a little more interesting, there was a very big and nasty bramble growing in amongst all the rubbish, and I had to get gangster on it with the spit, (see photo). Words cannot describe how annoying a mixture of plastic carrier bags and broken glass can be when mixed in with soil. Eventually, the only recourse is to rake everything out and then pick through it to get the glass and the bags, not to mention the beer cans and bits of wood and half bricks. It's raining now, but I...

The photo is facing south, from the bottom of the allotment. At the moment, I've only got a half-plot,  to the left of the photo.  It was all weeds a few weeks ago, and now it's dug over and seeded with phacelia. There are fruit bushes (blackcurrants, redcurrant, gooseberries) along the left hand margin. These were grotesquely overgrown, coming half way across the main bed almost, and I had to cut them right back, sacrificing lots of fruit in the process. There are two rows of bushes, the ones you can see, and another row behind them. The plan is to move all the bushes from the front row elsewhere, and cut the back row right down to incorporate them into the hedgerow, which will follow that line. The tree you can see on the left is a cherry - actually there are two of them. They've gone feral, most of the cherries are 30ft high, food for the wood pigeons, which I'm beginning to regard as allotment gangsters, robbing everything in sight, and having noisy parties. So...

Actually, I've just found out, it's a heavy duty grubbing hoe. That's it back in Libya, on the left. It cost buttons in the hardware store, but a lot more when I decided to take it home because my luggage was overweight. Dad kept it in a cupboard for me pending the day when I got my own allotment again. And finally, yesterday, it got back into action. At the bottom of Pig Sty Avenue (Glasgow), there are two great heaps of earth, covered in nettles. I dealt with the nettles, and tried first with a garden fork, and then with a spade to clear the mounds. But at some point there must have been something substantial planted on these mounds, fruit bushes probably, because they were wick with heavy roots. Enter the Libyan hoe. I must have had some kind of premonition when I brought it home back in 2008, because it is the perfect tool for the job. I can dig into the mound, through the roots, grub them out, and then use it to pull the soil forward.  I can finish the job in a cou...

That's me back into English Language Assessment, full time. And escaping at last the allurements of the Common European Framework of Reference to explore the way they do things in the USA, on the basis that when America has an educational paradigm shift, the rest of the world starts writing lesson plans. I've quickly learned that not only the US but Canada, Australia, The Philippines and many (most?) International Schools are using the PreK-12 structure. A good starting point is a paper by the TESOL International Association (motto: "Advancing Excellence in English Language Teaching") entitled  Implementing the Common Core State Standards for English Learners:  The Changing Role  of the ESL Teacher,  from April 2013, (which reminds me, I'd better start to learn to write references again, like, today). A sentence on p2 caught my eye: " TESOL International Association believes that ESL teachers can and should play a critical role in the success of the CCSS....