But this constant change increases on the job stress and the pressure teachers feel since education is under a microscope now as Labour and Tony Blair have made it their chief concern, one undergoing constant examination and review. This all leads to improvements, sure, but it also leads to a pressure-cooker situation.

And despite the current improvements, not all is well in schools. 22% of British kids are still unable to pass basic literacy tests (this compares to 17% of Canadian kids, 14% of German kids, and 7% of Swedish kids), there is a shortage of male primary teachers (hello, USA...) as only 8% of those teaching kids ages 5-11 were men, it's tough to get principals (since no one wants to be held accountable for every little thing and since many of these schools need a lot of help, much more than one person should take the blame for). People are getting to retire early (the government is letting people 55 and over retire early without losing their pension if the pressure of all this change is too much), there is a drastic shortage of math and science teachers (hello again, USA), and teacher absences are at an all-time high due to stress-related illnesses.

This all started back in '88 with the Education Reform Act which made a statutory 10 subject national curriculum, statutory pupil assessment at ages 7, 11, and 14, local management of schools (akin to our school board), and open enrollment of pupils (which eliminated zoning. Just go where you want.) Additional amendments to the original bill were compulsory teacher and principal appraisals, teacher's pay review being linked to performance, and regular school inspections (once every four or five years, which last a week and are conducted by private investigators whose results are published and can result in school closings if the results are too poor.)

Labour's new education policy included more changes when they took over: class sizes for kids under seven have a maximum of thirty, there are daily literacy activities for all ages, there are government funded booster classes for all 11-year-olds who need help taking their big exam and passing, and the preferential treatment of kids based on social class was reduced (which eventually was once a big problem, but allegedly no longer.)

The structure of schools in England and Wales looks like this: at the top there are the members of Parliament, the most influential members of school policy. They are followed by the Secretary of State for Education (who rounds out the government portion of influence and heads the Department of Education, an entity broken into two parts: the Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority and the Office for Standards in Education, the former being self-explanatory, the latter being the bureau in charge of running school inspections.) Next comes the local education authority / government (there are 110 of these in England and 8 in Wales, each responsible for a specific school), the Education Committee (filled with elected local councilors), the Director of Education, the school governors (like our school boards, they're in complete control of hirings and firings, not the principal), and then the lowly principal (not quite the position of power it is in the States, huh? No wonder it's so hard to find people willing to do this -- you have to ask to half of the country before you can get anything done...)

The British school year starts in September, the kids start going when they're five and go to age 16 (most actually stay until 18, but they can leave at 16 and get a job or go on welfare). Primary school is broken into two parts: infant, housing kids ages 5-7, and junior, housing those 7-11)

8% of the population is in public schools in the private sector, 2% are in strictly special ed schools, and most of those who are in private schools end up in high status jobs (the private sector here is filled with public schools, which are the most elite form of education which doesn't have to follow the national curriculum -- this terminology being just the flip side of that in the States -- private schools in the public sector being the most affluent)

The English school year is 190 days long and consists of three terms of 12-14 weeks each. Each term is divided into half terms (seven weeks of class with one week off in the middle). Kids get two weeks off for Christmas, two for Easter, and six for summer. They go to school from 9AM to 3 or 3:30PM, and get an hour for lunch, and people are now talking of having them go until 5PM (Now that's a long day...)(Another debate that is raging, and is also an interesting similarity to what we see in our country, is that of the year-round schooling proposal. Some want the kids to have a four term year, but they are in the minority (Surprise, surprise...))

The new national curriculum I've been mentioning consist of two different parts, one for those 5-14 years old and one for those 14-16. First the 5-14ers: They have three core subjects -- English, math, and science -- and other choices include art, design and technology, geography, history, information technology, music, P.E., foreign language (this is for 11-14 year olds only), and religious education (this teaches about different religions, usually two a term, not specifically their doctrines, and came about as a compromise following WWII. The government was trying to bring the church-run schools to come into the deal and abide by the national curriculum, but the only way they'd do that is if they could get mandatory religious education classes, so there you are...)(They also got a ton of government money, but no one likes to focus on that, especially not the members of the church...)) Recent options to be added are those of sex ed, personal health, and social education. The kids spend roughly seven hours a week on English, five for math, and then 12 for the rest -- not much time, hence the argument to expand until 5PM.

Now for those 14-16: they have eight core classes -- math, science, English, design and technology, foreign language, information technology, P.E., and religious education (that pesky mainstay). Optional others include art, business studies, geography, history, Latin, music, and the newest possibility, a citizenship class.

The exams that factor so heavily into these kids' lives are take at 7, 11, and 14, as previously mentioned. At these ages evaluation comes in the three core classes of math, science, and English. At 16, the kids take another test, the GCSE (General Certificate in Secondary Education), and this is taken in 1-10 subjects (over 90% of the kids take five tests, and all take at least one.) Of those who take the tests, 50% passed five, but 8% failed all (the 8% that is in private schools? Probably not...)

Once you pass the GCSE (or fail it and decide not to retake it, which you can) you can either work, go on welfare, or stay on for another two years, this time studying more focused material by taking three related courses. Then, once this is over, at 18 you take the advanced level GCE, which evaluates your progress in these three courses (of those who took this, 33% passed two of the subjects.)(Incidentally, this level recently was changed to kids taking five courses during the first year, and then three in the second, so they get a more well-rounded education and have more time to decide what they want to do with their lives.)

Out of all this comes some interesting facts: urban working class white males (how's that for a description? Narrow enough? Results from the next study are to be on "urban working class white males with blond hair and blue eyes who had spaghetti last night and like to read pornography and make crank calls while their parents are at work." Sure to be enthralling...) Anyway, these kids are improving the slowest and people are confused as to why (similar to the African-Americans in the States. Possible explanations relate to the class system stuff I've talked about earlier. These kids feel like they're destined to have jobs in manual labor and don't feel the need to try and change this -- if it's good enough for Pops, then it's good enough for me -- and this seems the most logical explanation for their floundering.)

Teachers here get a starting salary of 14,500 pounds (roughly $23,000), 75% of them earn 23,000 to 30,000 pounds (about $37,000 to $50,000 ), with the best earning up to 35,000 pounds (around $60,000). (Principals, by the way, earn only 27,000 to 55,000 because they want to keep the best teachers in the classrooms, not seeking the bigger paychecks by going into administration (not quite what we have back home now, is it?))

This whole system is a little strange -- the kids don't get grades during the terms for homework, participation, etc. Sure, they get homework, but it isn't graded. This is basically a sudden death system where how you do on those exams at 7, 11, 14, and 16 are all that matters -- they're the only things on your permanent record. (Talk about your high pressure situations...)

This is all terribly interesting, and so we head off today to the British Museum to do a little learning ourselves (the lecturer would be proud at how inspired he has us...) It's another museum (are you as sick of hearing about these things as I am about going to them?) but, as always, there are some things of note. Like the Rosetta Stone, for example. It's from 196BC and little town named Rosett (hence the name). It has three distinct languages on it: hieroglyphics, demotic (the everyday language of the time), and Greek. There wasn't much to it -- just a big, pretty, polished black rock with tiny writing all over it -- until a Frenchman discovered the names of Cleopatra and Ptolemy written in Greek. This led to the decoding of the demotic texts and this, in turn, to the cracking of the hieroglyphic code, a monumental achievement to say the least.

Then there's the Assyrian carvings, great panoramas whose pictures fall into one of four categories: an attack on a city (led by a king, an easily identifiable man with a flat hat), a deer hunt, a lion hunt, of a memorial to a god. These have immense detail for their age, coming from the 7th century BC.

There are the Parthenon sculptures, those pilfered (legally, mind you) by Lord Elgin, from the storied site in Athens. He bought them from the Turks, but now the Greeks want them back (the Brits are fighting this, not only because they are a centerpiece in their museum, but also because if the give them back it opens the door for all items in museums not originally from that country to be returned. Plus, the Brits argue that they've taken much better care of them than the elements would have, what with the high pollution and acidic rain found in Athens.)(An interesting aside is that the Parthenon was destroyed back in 1687 when Turkish gunpowder that was being stored there exploded. Quick question: who the hell stores gunpowder in one of the wonders of the world? That's like the US storing plutonium in the Grand Canyon. Stupid...)

Anyhoo, the Elgin Marbles as they're called, come from the pediment, the triangular array of sculptures found on each end of the building, and are beautiful (and massive when seen up close. You have to remember, these were created to be seen from way down below, so when you stand right next to them, they're quite titanic indeed.) (The exhibit also does a nice job of explaining the three areas of interest on the Parthenon -- there's the pediment area, the metopes (the area underneath the pediment and between the heads of the columns), and the friezes (long panoramic relief sculptures, similar to those of the Assyrians, that were found on the inside of the building).

One final thing of high interest was the Mausoleu of Kalikarnassos, a tomb for Maussollos that was 140 feet high, had thirty columns, a pyramidal roof, and an unbelievable quadriga (merely a statue of four horses and a chariot. They have one of the horses on display and it is unbelievable -- absolutely huge. The head must be as big, if not bigger than my ego...) Besides the size, the other reason this is so nifty is because that's where we get the word "mausoleum" since this was the graveside memorial to Maussollos.

I make my way upstairs, past countless Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Egyptian remains until I reach the Apocalypse display, a temporary exhibit that covers the depiction of said event through the years. This is a really cool display, housing early medieval and Celtic drawings (coming in the form of highly colorful illuminations), modern depictions (including an awesome Mexican Day of the Dead arrangement of 3D paper-mache sculptures), but by far the high point was the fact that they had all 15 of Albrecht Durer's woodcarvings, the most beautiful and intricate things you can imagine (I studied these last year, especially the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and they're incredibly detailed. They're prints of his woodcarvings, so they're dark black drawings on stark white paper. Very cool, indeed.) I pass some cool works by John Martin, Odilon Redon, and Sutton Hoo, and then make the museum a memory.

I leave, have some dinner, and then head off to the theater to see Les Miserables, the last big musical I wanted to see. Talk about saving the best for last. This is utterly amazing -- the songs are wonderful, the sets and arrangements sent chills up my spine, and it's so sad -- I even shed a tear. Very beautiful. A little overwhelmed, I head back to cry myself to sleep. Boo hoo...

Tying up loose ends

Still, there was some interesting things to be learned about the darker side of things. I learned that the stocks and pillory were the two most popular forms of punishment back in these days (the stocks were simply used to immobilize the victim's feet, forcing them to sit there and endure the ridicule and scorn of onlookers, while the pillory did the same to their hands.)

I also learn some interesting things about leeches: the longest one seen was 18 inches long, they were used to balance the four humors (phlegm, blood, black bile, and yellow bile), they have 32 brains, were used 300 years ago, and have a painless bite since they secrete their own anesthetic.

I learn Nostradamus studied the plague and cured many people of it in the town of Aix, earning him a favorable reputation, and then he got into astrology where he predicted all these major events, including the accidental death of the King of France in 1566, and this cemented his place in history.

Did you know vampire coffins must have the soil of the occupant's original grave in order to connect their death to their eternal life? How about this: there is a vampire / werewolf disease, erythropoietic protoporphyria, which is caused by too much porplyrin (a basic substance of red blood cells). This causes red eyes, skin, and gums, it causes a receding upper lip (which makes the teeth look longer), bleeding cracks in the skin everytime it is exposed to sunlight, and a hormonal imbalance which causes increased hair production and certain limb distortions. (The former few items obviously leading to a diagnosis as vampire, while the latter few lead to one of a werewolf.) These people were often locked up and fed bread during the day, and treated as outcasts and dangers.

I find out that during the Black Plague, people bought body parts of freshly executed criminals outside of Newgate Prison to help ward off the effects. A foot meant a safe journey through life, while eyes allowed you to see the approach of evil.

All of this stuff is rather interesting, but I just can't take the high dairy content in its presentation, so I leave and head over to the V&A museum to finish what I started a couple of weeks ago. I walk through the stained glass gallery, the ironwork gallery (which is full of various grates and fireplates (simply the decorated backs of fireplaces which protected the walls behind them and also acted as additional radiators of heat due to the insulating powers of the iron.))

I check out the Frank Lloyd Wright gallery (which really isn't a gallery since it isn't very large, but it does have a nice recreation of the Kaufmann office he did in Pittsburgh, an attractive room done all in wood -- walls, desk, chairs -- and set off by the cream colored carpeting that covers the floors.)

After whizzing through the print gallery and the miniature painting gallery (there are some really ornate and amazing portraits on the tiniest of brooches and whatnot, but I forgot to bring my frigging microscope, so these are about as useful to me as a truckload of pregnancy kits and a lifetime supply of Afro-sheen.) I have officially completed the V&A museum, so I set sail to whip up some grub.

After a small dinner (a big mistake I'll pay dearly for later on) I go to Stringfellow's again, that high class gentlemen's club from before. This time it's free champagne and canapés from 7-9PM, and when we arrive (I think the time on their clock says 7:00:02, but I think it's a bit fast) we're the first one's there. My pal buys our drinks (the first and only ones we will pay for all night) and sit back at the bar for a while. Long story short, my buddy nearly gets thrown out for not paying for a table dance (I swoop in to save the day, though, paying for a dance I didn't receive, but it will be the only money I will spend all night, so it's OK, in retrospect).

Near tragedy averted (we nearly got thrown out of a place offering us free booze and boobs! Egads!) we both proceed to get exceedingly drunk on the free champagne (where are those damned canapés? I'm starving! "Want more champagne?" Sure...) and then when that gravy train rolls out of town at 9, I decide to find us another one, so I sweettalk the manager (dear old Pat -- what a sweet, unassuming woman) and score us free drinks for the rest of the evening and 100 pounds worth of table dances. Nine hours later, absurdly drunk, we are the last ones to leave, the imprints of endless bared breasts burned into our retinas (it's just like looking at the sun, man. You look at something that big, round, and potent for too long, it's going to stay with you...)

So needless to say, Saturday I wake up a little rough around the edges (staying up drinking, naked breasts or not, until four in the morning will tend to do that to you). Headstrong as ever, though, I decide to drag myself out of bed and do some more stuff in town. I decide to make it a WWII day, starting out at the Cabinet War Rooms, a system of underground rooms that Churchill and his gang lived in while they were coordinating the war. They are right in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament (which makes sense, I guess, in case they needed to get any feedback from the other yokels in power) and became operational in August of 1939, one week before the war began. There are 21 rooms in all, and there are loads of interesting things to be found within them.

The signs tell me that the Blitz, the heavy bombing of London by Hitler, lasted nine agonizing months, including 57 straight days at one point. It started in Sept. of 1940 and finally ended in May of '41. 456,000 homes were destroyed, while an unbelievable 4,073,000 were damaged. There were 18,800 tons of bombs exploded over London, and 71,270 on the entire country.

While walking through I see the overseas phone room where Churchill would secretly talk to FDR (not even the rest of his War Cabinet knew about this), I spy a thing that looks like one of those spinning noisemakers for parties, but this was to announce the presence of gas in the building, and I even see a sign that says "There is to be no whistling or unnecessary noise in this passage" as Churchill was said to cherish his silence. (He also was said to cherish his hole puncher, which he lovingly termed "the clop", as he abhorred staples and paper clips.)

You get to see Churchill's bedroom (with a giant garbage can next to the bed for his endless cigar butts. The reason it was next to his bed was because he liked to spend a large portion of the day in bed, as long as possible (can't fault the man for that...)), the map room (an small room with an insane number of maps plastering the walls, all covered with a sea of colored pins and yarn marking troops and territories, respectively), and by the actual cabinet war room where the meetings were held. It's all very cool, and I leave to head over to the Imperial War Museum to continue my WWII day. (I also get to add a little WWI in there for good measure.)

The museum is great, chock full of old relics of war -- tanks, planes, boats -- each with a nice explanation of its use, its importance, and its dimensions. There are the V1 rockets -- otherwise known as the doodlebugs or buzz bombs, I learn --which were really unmanned planes which flew to a certain height and then plummeted to the ground (they earned their name for the chugging noise it made). 2400 of these bad boys fell on London during the Blitz, along with 500 V2s, the big brother of the V1 (these were unbelievably powerful, packing one ton of explosive power and were virtually invincible -- unlike the V1s, these made no noise and they were supersonic, traveling at 3500 ft/sec.)

Along with all the hardware, the museum has an exhaustive and incredibly well organized collection of items. They lay it out chronologically, filling case after case with uniforms, guns, propaganda, etc. along with tons of information. They have recreations of the trench warfare of WWI (which is very cool and kind of creepy. I don't know how they did it...) and of a bomb shelter during the Blitz (you get to sit in a bomb shelter and then walk through the recreated streets of a bombed out London.) Add in displays on code cracking, espionage, and paintings of the different wartime eras and you've got yourself an unbelievable museum, definitely one of the best I've been to.

This is enough for one day, so I slag off to the box, waking the next day for a relatively easy Sunday -- all I do today is go to a football game (soccer, to us Yanks). I see the West Ham United Hammers take on Wimbledon and it's a great time. Every time West Ham has the ball and is moving to score, the crowd starts buzzing and chattering -- it's electric and infectious. And even if they don't score, the crowd still gives them a round of applause for a job well done (they're so frigging polite I just want to slap 'em...) The Hammers really are quite good, with guys like #10 - Di Canio, #14 - Canoute, and #8 - Sinclair, they have a ton of scoring opportunities. (Canoute, in particular, is amazing to watch. His footwork is so quick and crafty, I don't know how the defense keeps up with him. Half the time he fakes himself out...) Eventually, West Ham does score, and when they do the place goes absolutely berserk. It's pure pandemonium -- people screaming and jumping up and down: unbelievable. There's really nothing quite like it. I have a blast, though, and the weekend winds to a close on a high note.