The Talk Not Given

A very busy day yesterday, for the most part spent over at Shah Alam with Hamzah and family. In the afternoon Hamzah and I popped across to a school at Nilai. A few weeks back he'd asked if I'd talk to some of the teachers there regarding matters educational. What exactly I was supposed to talk about was left all a bit vague, but that's the way I like it, so I'd happily agreed, and had a good time for a couple of hours talking about the IBDP to the Principal and a few teachers there. It seems they've been tasked by the government here to put the programme in place by 2015 and are just getting uncertainly started so they were picking my brains (what's left of them) for practical suggestions from someone who's involved in the functioning reality of such a programme. I'm not sure I said anything useful, or anything they didn't already know, but it was an interesting couple of hours from my perspective finding out about them and their concerns - which were real and numerous.

In fact, I'd sort of prepared quite another talk, a much more general affair about broader concerns which I was happy not to deliver. I say this simply because it wasn't what they wanted and the preparation had been of the usual variety for me: minimal in terms of anything on paper, just ideas useful at this point in time to me, circulating in my head in enough order to be ready to spill out when needed. I suppose some further insights might have been generated in the course of the spillage, so there was a slight sense of missing out on a chance there, but it's been enjoyable enough simply thinking through the notions myself, so I don't consider anything wasted. My imaginary talk would have been entitled The Value of Uncertainty and, in fact, riffing through ideas related to certainty and whatever its opposite might be seems to me to have shed some light on that elusive organ - the very heart of education.

In case you are interested, and in the interests of full disclosure, here are my notes, in their entirety, for what I might have talked about:

The value of certainty. Versus: The value of uncertainty. Balance. Voltaire: Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.