h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Are you still looking for people to give talks.. Ben said you were after me.. I'm a passable public speaker!

So erm, do you want someone to talk about STIs?

Thank you for the offer! I'm always on the look out for interesting speakers, yes. However I don't book for the health education days. For General Studies I need people be be more, well, general, so STI's would be a bit too specific. My speakers talk about who they are, how they ended up doing what they are doing and then go on to have something to say about some aspect of the world we live in. Media speakers seem to go down well and last year I had someone from the local wildlife trust who also spoke about fox hunting.

Currently I've booked my speakers for this term, including a group doing workshops on Fair Trade and I have someone pencilled in for February but not yet January. How would you feel about doing something on, for example, medical ethics? If you could bring in examples from soap operas they might even pay attention!

Did you have any further thoughts on this, or is January too far away to even know what you are doing or where you'll be? Ben has a contact detail for me if you have ideas and I'm happy for her to pass it on.

Well I don't have a timetable yet for Januray so I don't honestly feel I can committ so are in advance.

I could do some nice interesting ethical dilmea's, perhaps relating to last nights Panorama. I do the same sort of thing for our local widening participation program. Though obviously not in in Grammar Schools.

That kind of thing would be perfect and I'm sure you could adapt to a different type of audience. January does seem ages off, so I'll get back to you nearer the time. I'm tied down to fixed dates I'm afraid, 2 a term, so it might not work out but I have other dates for the third term.

What a sad programme that was. I watched with my daughters, Sunshine, a science student and Moonlight, a philosophy student. In our own ways we had plenty to think about. This evening Monlight and I watched the C 4 prog about children growing up with a mentally ill parent. We both know how lucky we are.

Well I haven't got to actually do a discussion with Yr10s at a comprehensive yet, we've done an assemsbly where they were suitably impressed by our gory slides.

How easy is it to get a discussion going? Would they all be very shy?

I never got around to answering this, or your email either.

Discussion isn't easy with 170-200 people, but my last speaker did her big talk and then I sent them off in groups of about 15 with a teacher for discussions on the theme and the speaker took one of the groups. It seemed to work well. Medical ethics could well be handled in the same way. A big talk for all with smaller discussion groups afterwards about case studies, for example.



If you get a minute, I wonder if you could post to this "Ask" thread. You might know more about the medical side of dyslexia as well as the personal experience. F19585?thread=514986

OOH yes that's a good idea. I guess it depends on how shy or otherwise the individual kids are.

I had one Ethics lecturer who would run her lectures like a day time talk show host - she'd have several speakers to make points and then go through the audience with a microphone to canvass opinions.

There is the sticky issue of careers advice, if this is any thing like my sixth form you'll have a group of kids desperate to get into medical school?

I won't want 'how did you get into medical school' questions from this small group to take over the questions.

The problem with a General Studies day is that you have to be interesting to a wide ranging audience. So your ethics lecturer had it easy, with an audience who wanted to be there and were studying it for a purpose.

My days won't be like that. Yes, here are some who will be aiming for medicine, but also aspiring artists, actors, TV presenters, web designers etc. All being made to attend compulsory General Studies days. Start pointing a microphone at some of them and you won't be very popular!