Teaching is to Emancipate

Thanks to Krysia for tagging me with this meme, which has attracted some inspirational blog entries around the world.

My picture is about the excitement in teaching outside of the comfort zone: taking the risk responsibly, engaging in life with the children and being prepared to allow them their own individual discoveries in the context of a supported learning environment - in this case, up a tree.

Meme: Passion Quilt

I take the liberty of tagging Ollie Bray, Neil Winton, Tess Watson, Andrew Brown and Sinclair MacKenzie.

The rules are simple.
1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

It’s well known that teaching and learning improve whenever teachers get together. We saw fantastic sharing of good practice in new technologies and other things at Teachmeet07 at the Scottish Learning Festival and when the event was exported to BETT in London it became a global institution, attended physically and virtually by educators from around the world.

Next week sees the Teachmeet series return to Scotland. Speakers and lurkers are signing up on the wiki already (including myself). Come along, share some great ideas, see some new technologies and meet some great people - people like you - in a stimulating environment.

What’s a teachmeet? Read all about it and how to set up your own local event here.

Oooh! Oooh! Looks like it’ll be available on flashmeeting!

I have a great deal of time for our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. We do not necessarily agree on politics - I actively opposed his introduction of IR35 when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, surrounded as he was at the time by the likes of Dopey Dawn Primarolo - but I know him to be an honourable and charitable man of principle. What happens, then, to such a man when promoted to the highest level of authority and influence in the land?

Take his latest article in the Grauniad, for example. He speaks valiantly about the importance of education:

we can be the first generation to commit ourselves to offer all our young people the fullest possible chance to make the most of all their talents

and yet he scatters his thoughts with such utter tosh as

Globalisation dictates that the nations that succeed will be those that bring out the best in people and their potential.

It is evident that Globalisation means economic anarchy: you’ll see more stories like Young’s shedding workers in Scotland where the prawns are caught because it’s cheaper to ship them to Thailand and back than sustain our home economy. The nations that succeed will be the ones that always succeed: those that pay no heed to moral rectitude, sustainability, principle or shame in the same way that Britain built its Empire.

This is the age in which the First World became the Third World. Whilst education sets you free of the bonds of ignorance and bigotry, naive self-delusion from some kind of apologetic, politically correct sense of fair play will consign you to the underdogs of the new society.

I would like to see our Prime Minister and all those who are in a position to do anything about it, grip the nettle firmly and tackle what ails us directly:

• Education fails because it is damaged by inclusion of those who don’t want it
• Children don’t want it because they often don’t need it (welfare and the black markets provide)
• Parents are the ignorant product of the damaged system of the last 30 years
• Cheap imports destroy home economies
• Centralisation destroys Public Services
• The Chinese do not care how much damage they do to us or anyone else because of the principles of their own constitution
• Forcing children to remain in school until they are 18 will cause further damage to an already struggling education system

Perhaps it’s time we had our own Constitution, a set of principles upon which a society can be built, although I think we’re a little late for that. We live in the age of expedient and immediacy and therein lies our downfall. There is time for men of principle - like our Prime Minister - to exercise those principles in the duties they perform if we are to preserve the civilisation we currently enjoy. Failure to do so will mean this state of civilisation is merely an ephemeral summer, to be longed for in years to come like a previous generation remembers the summer of 1939.

Don Ledingham’s latest post reminded me of a time when I was in industry. I was a Project Manager for a supplier of Visual Systems for Flight Simulators (big ones, not your PC toys) and had to deal regularly with clients, one of which was British Aerospace. My opposite number there seemed a difficult character: sometimes he would be pleasant and others, downright truculent. I could never tell what he was going to be before a call or visit.

A while later, we became colleagues at British Aerospace and I learned a great deal from him in the manner of the Second Lieutenant learning from the experience of his Sergeant-Major. He quickly confided that one of the best ways to keep the suppliers on their toes was, when the phone rings or a visit is planned, toss a coin - Heads for “Warm and Fuzzy” and tails for “Cold and Prickly” - thereby explaining his seemingly erratic nature. He was right about it - although I did my duty to all of my clients properly, I always took extra care to be 100% on the ball when it came to British Aerospace.

Draw your own lessons from this. Needless to say, although we are both now some time out of our times in industry, Brian and I keep in touch and I often bring to mind the lessons he taught me.

Flixster - Share Movies

An exercise my school is engaged in, the SMT being in full panic over the latest HMIE inspection, is a “consultation” exercise with the whole school on, well, I think, discipline. Or behaviour or something. There’s a committee / working group. There are memos and this week we have suddenly given over two periods in our vertical tutor groups to it. Whatever “it” is. This week is prelim week, by the way, so the seniors are excluded from this con(sultation). Anyway. Keep up.

The instructions for tutors leading the discussions state clearly what the aims of the school are:

We aim for you to:

• Develop a clear sense of right and wrong
• Develop respect for yourselves, for others and for property
• Understand that we are all responsible for our actions
• Realise the importance of honesty, trust, reliability and manners

Funny. No mention of Education. I’ll not bore you with the details, except that in the discussion I did have with my wonderfully perceptive tutor group, we came up with what we thought should be the aim (singular) of the school, with a few supplementary objectives:

The aim of the school is EDUCATION with supplementary objectives of:

• Developing social skills
• Developing language and communication
• Developing self-esteem
• If possible, to do so with enjoyment.

Doing things on principle seems so rare in education leadership. Maybe that’s why it’s so dysfunctional. Yet here, in my little group, are the clearly stated principles upon which an empire could be built. There’s hope.

Q. Where do you find the man in a Primary School?

A. In the Head Teacher’s Office.

So goes the cynical but not entirely unfair observation that there are too many women teachers in Primary. There are almost seven newly qualified female teachers under the age of 25 to every male in the same group and some are concerned that this is damaging education, for boys in particular. Changes in the curriculum have been attributed to the improved performance of girls: Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute says, “It helps the working habits and strengths of girls who work in a much more systematic way than boys who tend to follow high risk strategies and take a chance by swotting it all up on the day”. Research from Durham University shows that the real difference between boys and girls is about half a grade, but that feminization of the exam system unfairly biases results in favour of the girls.

There’s been a suggestion that “the feminisation of Physics would be the start of its decline”, which may be just a reaction to the suggestion that positive steps should be taken to make the subject more attractive to girls. More research is required on the impact of feminization of teaching and, separately, the exam system.

My view is simply this: education, like justice, must be blind to gender, race, colour, social status, culture and so on when it comes to opportunity - at the same time as being sensitive to all of these factors and other individual needs, as far as is possible, when it comes to getting the best out of each child. How? Well, that’s down to the teacher.

Tonight’s BBC Panorama programme was not the forecast partisan ill-researched pap but rather a useful wake-up call to our childrens’ trusting and naive parents about the dangers of unmonitored activity by children and their predators using social networks like MSN, Bebo and so on.

A mother interviewed on the Panorama programme referred to “level 5″ images. The levels are used in determining severity in the courts for sentencing purposes and are based on the Copine scale.

The best advice from the programme, offered by a former paedophile, is to have the family computer in the lounge or a common area of the house and definitely not in the child’s bedroom.

I had a quiet Christmas courtesy of a couple of broken ribs and it seems medical incapacity is giving Adam Sutcliffe time to explore and develop his own Web 2.0 presence with some great tools and services. Yesterday, I picked up his use of Odiogo on his blog which is a service that converts your text blog entries into a podcast: I’ve added it to the sister blog to this one, over at http://mrhood.co.uk/pub if you want to try it out. Like Professor Hawking, we have to put up with the American accent but I’m impressed with the computer-generated diction overall.

Another brilliant service brings into sharp focus that publicly published means exactly that - if you publish on any of the major social media sites, then anybody can anonymously access that publication. Spokeo is such a service: all you need is the email address of a “friend” and this service will bring you whatever they publish on these sites, whenever it goes public. Adam is concerned that it bypasses the usual notification from services like Twitter but they claim to preserve the sources’ privacy settings.

Thanks for these, Adam, and I hope you get well soon - but not so soon to prevent you digging up some more of these little treasures.

I made this video from screen captures of some of my sites and with the help of the good people at animoto.com.