Notes and links from Mon 13 July

Status: Most of the stuff my PE teachers at secondary school said went right through me as it was irrelevant nonsense, but one thing has stuck with me. I remember one of them talking about the importance of keeping up sports once we left school and didn’t have him forcing us to do it. He told us about meeting star pupils years later and them smoking and being fat (this was the 80s, and he was a PE teacher) having let themselves go. I don’t really care about that — fuck 80s school sports and all who taught them* — but what’s struck me is I don’t think my other teachers gave a talk like this. Nobody explicitly warned us about the dangers of stopping learning academic stuff. Looking back, the stuff I learned at school was of course important (and while I didn’t do at all well at formal exams I did still learn a lot), but it really just formed a foundation layer for the enormous amount I’ve learned since. Maybe this is normal and unremarkable and everyone keeps learning through their…