When was the last time that you: Went out and saw a movie during the week? Took an entire evening off without staying late for a meeting or working once you’d put the kids to bed? Binge read a book in an evening? Spontaneously just went out for a meal? Went to see a play […]
Tag: #preciouscargo
Idealistic, but not Ideal.
Idealistic, yes. That I definitely am. Ideal, I am not. One of the greatest drawbacks of teaching is that we are never done. Nothing is ever done perfectly. When my family are working their nine to fives or their shifts, I am either in school or working from home. When they can measure their performance […]
How Can We Stop Students Writing About Bob, Steve and Bill?
Narrative writing 101 today involved some teaching of planning (story mountains aplenty) and some modelling of how to turn said plan into an actual narrative worthy of an AQA GCSE examiner. Then I unleashed my class of budding writers on the world, or at least on the task. Or at least, I asked them politely if […]
How Can We Set Decent Purposeful Cover & Ensure It Gets Done?
Setting cover can be a real pain! Either you’re, in some sense, being expected to be in two places at once. Or you’re sick. Either way, it can feel somewhat futile if you doubt that the work will being done, perhaps more so if you’re home struggling through a migraine or the like and are […]
Observations: Surviving & Succeeding
I don’t know about you but observations still fill me with dread, causing those cold sweats and stomach clenches. Like most teachers, I really want to do my job well. I really do. But I do not like to be judged. With a classroom full of teenagers, no matter how difficult or stroppy, I know […]
Teacher Sick Day Guilt
While curled up in bed, headachy, full of flu and fed up, I was overwhelmed by one particular feeling. GUILT. There I was, a cold-filled lurgy monster and having to sleep for a couple of hours after popping downstairs to get a drink, but all I could think was: I should be in school. Bear […]
We All Need To Be/Have Kind Colleagues
Schools are hives of activity. From the roughest, inner city school to the most prestigious, private establishment, expectations of teachers are often crushingly high. Our expectations of ourselves are the starting point but we also experience pressure from: head teachers, management teams, department heads, other teachers, other staff, parents and our students. Teaching is an […]
Round Six: ‘Educated’ (Non-Fiction)
With an entire paper on non-fiction at GCSE, it seems strange that we’re not taking more time to really explore non-fiction texts fully. I don’t mean extracts or brief chapters, I mean whole books. This might be one of the ways in which we can engage those who do not see themselves as readers because […]
Because “I’m Quiet, Nobody Really Checks On Me.”
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 […]
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 […]