Blog

Every Wednesday, the students of Gallagher Combined School look forward to their trips to Rabie Ridge Stadium. Here, they get to play netball and enjoy a day filled with fun. This weekly event is a highlight for the students, giving them a chance to build skills, make friends, and create…

As you know, a school must not remain open if it has no water. Midrand is notorious for its water outages, so it became very important to ensure that we always have a sufficient backup. We already have a 1 000 litre Jojo on the roof, but that doesn’t help…

Thank you for all those learners who got out there and cleaned up Lupton Drive. Mums and dads should be proud of you!…

In a recent international survey of Grade 4 and 5 childrens’ reading ability, South Africa came stone last out of 45 countries! Only 13% of our grade 4 and 22% of our grade 5 learners had reached minimum, yes minimum, reading skills. My two daughters could read before they were…

How to represent a recurring decimal as a fraction. Let’s take 0,513265132651326 This repeats 51326, which has 5 digits So, it is 51326/99999 (5 nines) Try it on your calculator Multiply an even number by 6 Let’s take 6 x 8 The answer will end with 8 (the second of…

Truly. I didn’t realise that they were any other colours, except, perhaps the occasional black ones. Then a Black Eyed Bulbul happened to get in front of my wife’s binoculars when she was watching someone windsurfing on a dam. Hey! It’s got yellow under its belly, she said. And…

I guess that depends on how old is the person answering the question. When I was teaching Maths and Physics at Eden College, I was 40 years old and the kids used to say I was so old I was an oxygen thief! I’m now twice that age and don’t…

It is, after all, an extremely difficult language. Consider this – Banana. A word with 3 different “a” sounds in one word. Pedal and petal. One pronounced “dle” and the other, with the same spelling, “tal”. And these with different spellings but the same sound. paws & pause aloud &…

Much as I detest the way Microsoft interferes with my computer, I have to admit that their new Bing AI is going to knock google off their perch unless google acts very quickly. I asked this question of both of them – “How to remove dried acrylic paint from a…

My wife, Helen, and I have just moved into another rented house – we choose to move every year. This one has 12 solar panels with a battery big enough for us to run washing machine, tumble drier, dishwasher, fridge and freezer along with heaters and all the other bits…

I’m not a lover of museums. Even the science museum in London didn’t particularly interest me even though I was studying to be an engineer. However, there’s one exception. Helen and I visited the Apartheid Museum a about three years ago and we couldn’t get enough of it. She got…

I started researching this question so that I could present the answer in the simple format that I try to use for the school blog. But then I got drawn into the whole world of continental drift, tectonic plates, earthquakes, volcanoes and lots more. It is fascinating and I will…

Raindrops are round balls of water. When sunlight hits the ball, it goes inside and some of it bounces off the inside of the wall twice and is then reflected back to you. The rest of it just carries on through. The angle between the original ray and the one…

When I went for my interview for possible admission to London University, the interviewer asked me to state Archimedes’ Principle. It goes like this “When a body is immersed in a fluid, the upthrust is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced”. Hey, I was thinking this is going…

Sometime back I wrote about “Springett’s Rule of Gender“. It was my discovery when I was learning French and my French teacher, a Parisian language graduate, couldn’t tell me how the French people know whether a new noun is masculine or feminine. I’ve often wondered whether the rule might…

And, speaking of water, as we were last week, you’re in the middle of the Namib desert and you’ve run out of water. Fortunately, you haven’t quite run out of fuel, but you don’t know in which direction to drive to find a water source. What do you do? Next…

Here in Knysna, the quality of tap water is pretty poor, so there are several shops including Food Lover’s Market, where you can refill your 5L plastic bottles instead of buying new ones. The cost of a refill is R6 for 5L The cost of a 5L bottle of spring…

Those of you who have visited Kruger Park will possibly have noticed a tree with a smooth greenish trunk. It’s an Acacia xanthophloea and is commonly called a fever tree. Where did that common name come from? In its natural state it grows alongside water and the saying goes that…