As has been my practice in the past, I recently unleashed an end of year survey on my students, with the aim of having them tell me what I can improve, and what they appreciate and enjoy. The survey, which can be viewed here…
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Tag: self
End Of Year Assessment 2014-15
Assess This Teacher
Yesterday I put together an end-of-year survey for my students. Instead of focusing on lots of questions on different aspects of my teaching, I simply asked students to grade me in the same way I grade them: a comment, an attainment score and an …
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Hard Lesson #11: Guns are not glorious
Having been invited to read to a class of students for reading week, I looked for a chance to work with a group of older students who I have not taught in two years. The Y11 group I wanted to work with stuck in my …
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Friends Without Benefits
What Facebook, Twitter, Tinder, Instagram, and Internet Porn Are Doing to America’s Teenage Girls
This is an abridged version of the full article from Vanity Fair. It has been prepared for educational use with students in lower secondary school (ages 11-14). Inserted at times are …
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Dvorak
I am writing this post on a Dvorak keyboard, and it is slow going. For most of my life, I, like most other people, have used a standard QWERTY keyboard. Despite knowing that this type of keyboard is not optimal for typing fast (many believe …
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12 Hard Lessons
The following 12 ideas are lessons I think we really should be teaching students to help them become healthy, sane adults. But for whatever reason, they are hard to teach and even harder to learn. How can we get these messages across to students without …
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To admit you were wrong…
Full-size download (right click and choose Save Link As).Paradox
Paradoxes are a great way to get student thinking and talking about thinking. The initial state of confusion, followed by the illusive, enigmatic feeling of understanding is somehow enticing and enjoyable. I spent a little pastoral time discussing the following paradoxes with a group of …
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I and You
We come unto this earth, shooting head-first blind and wet so much like one link in a chain of boundless length. From this bundle of sopping joy we start, through an unknown life to live, and to the ultimately nameless soil to return. Each one …
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Learning To Surf, Bali, 2007
In August 2007 I took myself off to Bali with the notion of learning how to surf. The following is my journal of that trip, which I just ressurected from my old blog. For some reason I wanted to keep this writing available to me …
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