OK, another language warning. This morning alone, I was called a ‘dumb cunt’ by one student, told to ‘fuck off’ by another. Both after a small thing. But it turned out great. Here is the latter one. In a by now pretty standard way, I simply turned around and told him in a serious tone …
Category Archive: 4. Teaching
Stories and musing about teaching
Sep 09
Can scootering save schools?
I have shamelessly re-purposed the title from what has to be one of my new favourite TED talks, alerted to by @malynmawby (Thanks Malyn!). See it below … Did you catch those points? Failure is normal. Nobody knows ahead of time how long it takes anyone to learn anything. Work your ass off until you …
Aug 24
A kindred soul in our school
This afternoon, after lunch (and those who teach will tell you the vagaries of THAT particular time) we gathered about 25 school staff and students for a chat with an interesting guest speaker via Skype – Ira Socol. If you don’t know Ira I recommend you check his blog and/or connect with on Twitter – …
Aug 17
By stealth
One of the best times I’ve had in my teaching career was starting and teaching a Philosophy & Ethics course at a high school – even though the course was choked off in the end, read all about it. I had taught and truly enjoyed teaching P&E not because I think students should know Aristotle …
Aug 05
Letting go
Thumbs up … If you are sensitive to expletives, please stop reading now. It’s Friday and I need a stiff drink. I have just spent first week as Advisory Teacher at our Big Picture school. This is about as remote as it gets from the quiet of a desk at Moodle HQ. It is also …
Jul 26
First impressions
I am starting a new category on Human. Big Picture. A great model of education. Motto of Big Picture: “one student at a time in a community of learners.” In a nutshell: students select an area of passion and interest and they ‘go deep’ over a term, looking at the interest from different perspectives and …
Jun 28
Performance vs Learning
I am getting a little tired of unreflective grade-and-test-bashers, silver-tongued and ‘inspirational’ gurus on the educational speaking circuit peddling a rosy picture of learning and lame ‘garden-like’ analogies. I am getting even more tired of assessment-standard-accountability-statistically-crazed literacy-with-funding, 3Rs, ‘core knowledge’, test and merit pay, bean counters, vote counters and ‘good old days’ pundits. Well, the …
Mar 04
Ed-tech Ferrari in first gear – why change?
This is a reply to a healthy ‘ring’ of posts by Mark Drechsler (Learning technologies – should the tail wag the dog? – an excellent string of replies growing there!), David Jones (The dissonance between the constructivist paradigm and the implementation of institutional e-learning) and Mark Smithers (e-learning at Universities: A Quality Assurance Free Zone?). I …
Feb 11
The ultimate question
Pompous title? Read to the end and that may change Yesterday I watched an avalanche on Twitter, for lack of better analogy. Within minutes, a very casual pondering of a couple of good, open ended questions (OK, let’s call them philosophical) between Bianca Hewes and myself turned into a frenzy of criss-crossing replies by almost …
Feb 09
(In)conceivable?
Imagine this … The medical scenario may be laughable but, transferred to the context of many schools and classrooms today, quite … (in)conceivable? The anecdote in the presentation is an extract from a classic and wonderfully dangerous book titled ‘Teaching As A Subversive Activity‘ by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, written in 1971 (!). If …
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