Galled by my own predictable slavishness to the Gregorian calendar, I find myself reflecting on the year gone by. The whole New Year shebang is mawkish and overblown in my opinion. If we are going to celebrate new beginnings, let's make it Spring when the world is truly re-born and we can literally and figuratively … Continue reading The fall and rise of educational orthodoxy – 2018 revisited

In the past month I have been distracted from the things I would like to be doing at work. It is immensely frustrating. I have been drawn to things that really need my full attention, and so I have focused almost entirely on these matters. The result is a deep sense of dissatisfaction and even … Continue reading Distraction is dissatisfaction

CODE, SCHEDULE IV. I. - Every School must have:- (e) A Punishment Book in which all cases of corporal punishment must be recorded. I have the Punishment Book for our school. It resides, along with other archive documents, in my office; a reminder that we are mere custodians of the school's heritage. It begins on … Continue reading The Punishment Book

Scene 1 The glass doors slide open and a middle-aged lady enters the hall. She is dressed as if she has arrived straight from work and appears in a hurry. She scans the hall and refers to the flimsy piece of paper in her hand, trying to find where she should be going. Finally, she … Continue reading Sliding doors

My wife doesn't wear earrings. She stopped wearing them 25 years ago when she met me. I was an opinionated young man (as opposed to the opinionated older man I am now) and made it clear that I had no time for jewelry and piercing. She should have just carried on wearing them anyway, but … Continue reading Wear the damn earrings

Thinking about the knowledge you want students to acquire is fruitful. We spend a great deal of time as teachers planning lessons and sequences of lessons, but perhaps not enough time considering the nature of the cognitive specimen in question. I am currently teaching Year 7 students how to use spreadsheets. Critical to basic spreadsheet … Continue reading Let knowledge drive your lessons

"You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." Morpheus, The Matrix (1999) In 2015, I swallowed a red pill and accepted the uncomfortable … Continue reading What was down the rabbit hole?

In the late 1990s, I worked at a school with a formidable Headteacher. Her reputation had been partly forged during the era of Thatcher cuts to school funding. Legend had it that, at the height of the crisis, she had announced at a meeting of staff that from this point on everyone must bring in … Continue reading The toilet roll market

I often get asked by one or other of my daughters what I've done at work that day.  I usually give them one of two answers. I might say "Nothing exciting. A few meetings. Wrote a report. Had to sign stuff." These are the bad days when I've had to plough through the things that … Continue reading MBWA

At the risk of over simplifying things, don't children go to school to learn stuff? Okay, that's not the only reason, but can we agree that it is basically the point of school? But what stuff should they learn? Is it useful stuff (that will help them get a job), or relevant stuff (which they'll … Continue reading The right stuff