One of the hot topics at my school, based on results and some concerns senior management had last year, has been ‘Quiet Girls’ or ‘The Invisible Girl Phenomenon’. We’ve all had these girls in our classes. The ones who hide in the corner, keep their hands firmly rooted to the table and are the last […]
Tag: #keepbeingcreative
Enablement: Creating a Can-Do Attitude
If we’re doing our jobs right, and I’m sure that we’re trying, we should be pushing our students to do things that, put simply, they can’t do. Not that they aren’t capable of it, but that they can’t do it on their own yet. If we aren’t, we’re only repeating what they’ve already done, what […]
Round Five: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (Adult not YA)
This book is phenomenal. It’s easy to step into the oh-so-real world of Eleanor Oliphant, the office politics, the mundanity of the everyday, the desire for more… The characters are consciously well observed and created – I feel like I’ve met them all in so many places before. Their roles are laid out in so many […]
Round Four: The Colour of Bee Larkham’s Murder (Adult, not YA)
Having been lent this yonks ago, I’ve been feeling guilty about not reading it but, I’ll be honest, I find it hard to read fiction written for adults during term time. YA or novels I’ve read before, yes. Those I let myself read because I know that I can either finish them quickly or put […]
Round Three: Magisterium
For the entirety of this year, one of my year seven students has been telling me to read the Magisterium series. It started with her own excitement and a brief, “You should read this book I’m reading!” and became, as the year went on, much more insistent and much more disappointed as I failed in […]
Round Two: Skullduggery Pleasant
Recently, a colleague stopped me in the corridor. His face was a mixture of concern and outrage. Without knowing what was wrong or, indeed, what I had done wrong, I ploughed in with the question: “Is everything ok? Are you ok?” “Well,” he replied, “I thought that you were an English teacher.” “I am!” “But […]
Welcome to Book Review Season! Round One: Mortal Engines
With school a long forgotten memory behind us (having started week two of the holidays), it seems only natural that the Summer of an English teacher is dedicated to reading and what could be better than the dedicate the blog to the god of reading? As I’ve said in previous blogs, my love of reading […]
Loving Literature for Life…
I’ve always loved reading. Before I could even read you can spot me in childhood photos with a book on my lap. It might be one of my own picture books or I might have snatched a book from the adult holding me but it will be there. As soon as I could read, it was […]
How Can We Make Teaching Fun and Why Should We Bother?
It’s a dreary day, the rain’s pouring outside, the students are damp and mud-stained from playing football on the cesspool of a field, the classroom is a murky shade of what used to be white with displays half peeled from the walls by year seven fiddlers. Never an ideal location for fun. Or a lesson […]
Our Attitude Is Everything.
We’ve all faced difficult students. It was only last Friday that I dealt with one of the most difficult behaviour challenges of my career, facing a non-compliant, defiant, aggressive student. And yet, I still think that it is fair to say that it is our attitude which determines how effective our teaching is. We could […]