fear

It is said that the Arabic word Taqwa can never really be translated as it encompasses a range of emotions, the fear of Allah being only one of them. but i wanted to talk a little about this topic becasue fear is a very powerful emotion.

Here are a few things that scare me

There will be more women then men in hell

A woman who wears tight clothes will never even smell the scent of paradise.

Out of every 1000 muslims, only one will go to paradise without first having to go to hell.

Whoever misses the pre dawn prayer intentinally even once will enter hell for at least 50,000 years.

I could talk about Allah’s mercy next. But I don’t want to. Because I think I for one could do with a bit more taqwa in my day to day life.

every child matters

I know every child matters, that is why I wanted to teach in the first place and definitely why I wanted to be a personal tutor! But what I don’t get is why I have to waste time proving it on paper for the benefit of other people when I could be working on actually doing it!
Our college is being inspected next month, (I will no doubt be ranting a lot more about this soon) and so the college has decided that every single scheme of work has to be moved on to a new format with a separate column for every child matters. Now, I don’t want to turn into one of the cynical old men that were being quite rude to the management team in the meeting we had on this topic in the meeting this morning,
but I can see their point.
I teach English .why should I have to mention the every child matters agendas in every single lesson?

A bit of background.

Every child matters came about due to the death of Victoria climbie, an eight year old girl who was severely tortured by her aunt and boyfriend. The shocking thing about the case was that no one noticed how bad she was being treated until after she died, even though all the signs were there and she had had numerous contact with the police, social services etc who all failed to notice or acknowledge her suffering.
The government’s response to this was to make it an obligation for every professional in charge of children to look out for a child’s welfare. In terms of teaching this means we have to show how we are incorporating the following in to lessons plans:

• Be healthy
• Stay safe
• Enjoy and achieve
• Make a positive contribution
• Achieve economic well-being

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe in the agenda and deal with these issues all the time in tutorials. (we did food diaries one time! I had to ..stretch the truth…ok blatantly lie on mine so I looked like a good role model!) I suppose they can be done in English as well. For example, when analyzing a persuasive writing text you could use a piece on why alcohol consumption is bad for you , or any language quizzes would come under enjoying and achieving or you could set an activity where students have to write an instructive piece on how children should cross the road.
I suppose I can see the benefit of it then. Just wish I didn’t have to change all my schemes of work
For those of you thinking of applying for teaching, or about to go for an interview, every child matters is high on the government’s agenda at the moment and so a big thing in schools, so it might be worth mentioning what you know about it on application forms.

Regards.