legitimising the chat!

In an attempt to stop the off-task chatter with my Year 9 boys, I have legitimised 5 minutes sport chat at the start of a lesson. They, or rather we, seem to enjoy this and trying to teach first lesson the morning after Murray’s late-night epic at Wimbledon, say, just leads to confrontation!

Parents' Evening

I have what we call 'Academic Monitoring Day' this week and this article seemed very pertinent.
http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx

Revolutionary quote

I love this quote from Lenin, 'There are decades when nothing happens, but there are weeks when decades happen.'
A great way of understanding change but it also speaks volumes for teachers and end-of-term-bottle-necks!

Change

I overheard some of my year 7s in the back row discussing my shortcomings while I was trying to load a video from youtube. One student said to the other that the internet was not invented when I was at school. This hurt!
It got me thinking, though, about how different school is from when my peers and me were at school. I think what has changed are the huge pressures that everyone has to deal with from all sorts of areas. For children as well as staff, whilst there are massive benefits in embracing new and various ideas; being able to absorb change and being comfortable with it, I suppose what that may have done is to make people a little self-centred perhaps. There are increasingly questions of ‘what am I getting out of this?’ and almost as if it is an assessment of energy versus reward. However, questioning oneself is definitely no bad thing and makes things much more dynamic.

saying what you think...

You know that microsecond between catching the reflection in a shop window of a disagreeably tense-looking person — and realising it’s you. It’s that tiny delay before the official censor moves to correct the record. It is the moment when we make assessments that we didn’t know were ours: the moment the unconscious mind blurts it out. Typically this is associated either with a thought too awkward to acknowledge, or with a new opinion to which we are unconsciously moving but not quite ready to declare — even to ourselves.
Such moments are precious. I believe I experienced one yesterday. One of my classes were, as usual, off task and talking about anything other than The Tempest. I usually make a judgement call about these off-task-conversations and they eventually fizzle out and work gets done. However, one boy made a ridiculous comment about the merits of a particular football player and I piped up, without thinking, and said exactly what I thought. This soon escalated into a huge class ‘debate’ and the rest of the lesson was a write-off.

Q1--Expectations

There is the story of the teacher who, struggling with a difficult class of disruptive children, checked their records and, to their astonishment, found they all had IQs of 120 and above. So they resolved to make their lessons more challenging, they were less tolerant of bad behaviour and they encouraged the pupils to believe they were capable of real achievement. The improvement in them was dramatic. It turned out the figures were their locker numbers! The story’s probably apocryphal but illustrates a universal truth. The challenging balance of setting the standard at the same time as exercising human forgiveness, almost without reservation, not least in the light of human frailty, in both the ‘offender’…and the judge. Dr. Carl Reinhardt’s response to the teacher who told him he had no faith in a particular child was unequivocal: “then you have no right to educate him”.

Journey so far...

What do you say after nearly one year of Teach First? Now I realise how English students feel when they can fit into the examination only about 1% of what they’ve learnt! There was a Roman playwright who said that it is when the gods hate a man that they drive him into the profession of Schoolmaster! I can’t speak with any authority for the 5th decade AD but, for today, I beg to disagree and, in particular, to disagree about teaching in a Teach First school. This has been one of the biggest challenges of my life but the most rewarding too. A lot has changed during my first year. Sunday afternoon is a day spent at the desk and I get a horrid sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach knowing just how much energy I will need come Monday morning. More than one night out a week (sober and in bed by 11pm) is one too many and I get up at a time which was, just a year ago, bed time!