There’s too much structure in the way we teach writing skills in schools, according to Philip Pullman.
On Radio 4 today, the bestselling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy reminisced with his former secondary school teacher about 1950s English lessons and those first schoolboy compositional attempts.

Seventeen-year old South Korean Park Tae-Hwan’s upset win on Sunday at the world swimming championships in Melbourne says a lot about the broad philosophic approach of his Australian coach both towards training for elite athletes and encouraging children in sports.
In the 400m freestyle, Park also beat his hero, Grant Hackett, the Australian who has dominated [...]

Most days I drink tea from a mug with a quote from Winston Churchill: “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Churchill’s quotation is about attribution, or what labels we put on things. Behavioural science blog The Situationist, in an excerpt from Stanford [...]

More from knackered downunder
One explanation for American and Australian sporting achievement is their preparedness to look at new methods and throw away the old. It’s all about the search for the next revolution.
Milt Nelms – an American performance enhancer and with whom former champion Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe trained last year – says he’s [...]

Sir Roger Bannister is 78 today. And this must rank among the best four minute videos on the internet.