Addicted to Trash

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Posted 29 Aug 2010 — by cheersphilip
Category diary, thought

I have a confession to make – I am addicted to free online Flash games.

I can’t stop playing them, every moment I get. I love playing them, but when I finish playing them I feel somehow lessened and unfulfilled, as if I’d just been stuck in traffic for hours.

This has not gone unnoticed by my ever-loving wife, who has pointed out that this may be some sort of diversion strategy. In fact, she has wisely pointed out that I may find myself being more fulfilled by, perhaps, cleaning the house or, just maybe, cooking us our dinner, or even – who knows? – doing some shopping.

Now, a couple of days ago my wife and I were musing over the possibility that we don’t have anything that stimulates us mentally. Having just completed her degree, and not considering herself an intellectual, she was surprised to find herself enjoying her dissertation. We decided to do a little essay each over the next fortnight. We will choose a topic, research it and write up our findings. The results will be presented to each other one evening over a bottle of wine.

So, having found this quirk in my character that enables me to eschew my responsibilities and focus only a 17″ screen for hours on end, I’ve chosen to investigate the psycho-physiological effects of video gaming.

Results will be, undoubtedly be posted here in a fortnight.

Game on!

PS: God only knows what my life would be like if I’d ever ventured into serious MMRPG games such as Halo, World of Warcraft and others… you would literally never hear from me again!

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Holidays

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Posted 15 Aug 2010 — by cheersphilip
Category Uncategorized

Tragically coming towards the end of the holidays – I’m already mentally preparing the speeches i will give to inspire and strike awe into my fresh new students.
None of which I will actually give as I imagine, and none of which will have the desired effect. There are just so many possibilities in the students, so many variable, that i will undoubtedly get flustered and awe-struck myself at how intelligent and perceptive the new students are. This always happens.

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You want to ban THIS?

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Posted 26 May 2010 — by cheersphilip
Category Rant

You want to teach Design & Technology in your schools, but you don’t want your students to use these:

Do you have any idea what these things can DO?

This is not an advert for mobile phone companies – it is a call to arms against the anti-tech tyranny!

Do you, school leader or administrator, have any idea of the capability of these devices? Can you not see that all students, from all backgrounds, already have and regularly use one of these devices? Most of them have better ones than i do!! They can do more things, faster and easier, than most of the programmes supplied with my free teacher laptop! And the students ALREADY OWN THEM!!

Yet you want me to teach Design & Technology like it mattered, whilst pretending that nobody has one of these, that we’re all in some era where D&T is softwood mortice & tenon joints and ‘chalk and talk’ lessons. Ridiculous.

Rise up, D&T teachers of the world, (well, the UK then), and unite against evil tyranny of technology oppression!

Petition your headteacher and Local Authority to allow the use of mobile phones, in order to raise student engagement and cut unnecessary spending on duplicate resources. Throw off the yoke of alleged cyber-bullying and educate your students on the use of digital technology – send them the message (via text? <ouch>) that their culture is not subversive, but that it is the future!

You can do it if we all do it.

Cheers,

Philip

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Crikey, it’s interview fever!

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Posted 26 May 2010 — by cheersphilip
Category Rant, diary

Okay, so I went to an interview on Monday – and I got the job!

Sweet – a part time design & technology teacher in a nice school in Norwich – exactly what i was looking for.

But then…

Then I heard back from the SSAT. They were looking for a National Network Coordinator on secondment, which on paper pretty much looked like my dream job – travel around the country talking to specialist D&T departments. Lovely.

Except now I already have a 0.5 appointment. I wouldn’t want to change that; they are extremely nice and I’m really looking forward to starting in September, it’s just that the SSAT job was the one that i originally wanted…

However, the SSAT have kept me waiting OVER TWO MONTHS after the application date to inform me of the shortlist. Okay, they were waiting for the election and some certainty about their funding. (goodbye BectaX – the right idea, just a little too late!).

So, what I am going to do is go to the interview (tomorrow – short notice!?) and see what happens. I think some negotiating is going to be called for.

But… if i get the secondment as well, what am I going to do about my RDTHSC training? I won’t have any time left to go and train teachers how to use their workshop machinery. Crikey.

Onwards and upwards. In other news, I’m still making oak boxes, fully mitred, for my wife’s degree show, selling our campervan, renovating my Vespa, moving house and progressing with the DVDs. Will this ever calm down? A part of me hopes not!

Cheers,

Philip

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Another Lesson

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Posted 23 May 2010 — by cheersphilip
Category diary

Hooray! Another interview tomorrow! And this time the mini lesson is everyone’s favourite – scales of production!! The one you’ve all been waiting for!!!!

Or perhaps not.

This is going to be a real challenge. There’s not much you can do in 25 minutes that engages students with the dull facts about one-off, batch and mass production. And tomorrow I will be demonstrating that fact.

What I’m thinking of at the moment is a brief intro to outline the different scales, pointing out that the students have already done one-offs. This will be followed by a ‘batch production’ exercise, where each table will try to produce as many of a given product (not sure about this – paper planes? Birthday cards?) in a given time. Each person on the table will have a different job, in a production line type set-up. Whoever produces the most (insert product here) wins!

We then round up by questioning what we would need to make our batch production line into a mass production one, with the likely answer being something like having a machine to do it all for you. Of course that means that most of the students on each table will lose their jobs, but that’s the way of the world, kids!

So far so nebulous, and I really need to pin down what we would make – my wife has a set of printing blocks and ink pads, so I’ll most likely take those along. What are we going to print? I don’t want paper planes flying around the room, and birthday cards don;t have enough challenge in them…

The search continues.

Cheers,

Philip

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Today’s Lesson

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Posted 13 May 2010 — by cheersphilip
Category diary

Well, this is a first.

Can you see what I'm doing wrong?

Looks like I’m using my blog to help me deliver a lesson in a ‘foreign’ school! This lesson will take place in Norwich, which I’ll have to get to by starting out at seven in the morning and travelling until eleven.

After that, I’ll be in interview mode. For a teacher this means doing a sample lesson, sort of like try before you buy. Its a funny old situation, as you have no idea about who the students are, where they’ve come from, what their day might have been like, or anything.

For the lesson I’ll be using eggtimer (thanks to @chrisleach78 for finding it).

The school gives you a topic in advance, and some basic information about the students i.e. how many there might be, and you have to come up with a lesson to fit the slot you’ve been given. In this case twenty minutes.

My worst fear is that another teacher, given the same broad topic (exam preparation), has chosen the exact same detail to focus on. Of course you don’t find out until afterwards, so i guess you can’t worry about it too much.

The reason I’m typing this up in the blog is simple. Going to a new school, with various different IT solutions is a tricky business. Will your powerpoint work? Will their computers recognise the file type? Its all a bit of a nightmare, so I thought ‘why not put it all on the internet?’ I know they have this, and have asked the head of department if they can see my blog, which they can, so all good.

The lesson is simple – the topic is exam preparation and the learning objective is to gain an understanding of what makes for an effective study environment.

  • Show the first picture (me in my untidy spare room) and ask for comments about what I’m doing wrong vis-a-vis study
  • then get students to write or draw in detail what their own study areas are like (with the timer),
  • share with a partner (timer again)
  • note down some comments for improvement that their partner suggests
  • round it up with some examples fromt he various people
  • finish off with the second picture, showing me putting into practise what it is that I’m preaching.

What have I changed?

Lovely.

Hope you enjoyed the lesson. Wish me luck!

Cheers,

Philip

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Thought Patterns

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Posted 28 Apr 2010 — by cheersphilip
Category thought

I firmly believe that the way we think forms habitual channels in our minds. Neuroscience bears this out, with works such as ‘What the Bleep…‘ and, dare I say it, ‘The Secret‘ following the trend.

As such , I now find myself having to think creatively – making stuff for the ‘Mr Watson…‘ DVDs that I’m making. Trouble is, I’ve been doing do much analytical thinking, my brain is just stuck on that “analyse the inputs, process, produce an output” kind of stimulus-response behaviour, to the extent that my creative muscles are totally dead!

For anyone stuck in the same situation, take some heart from the fact that we can reprogram our brains, with just a little effort.

If you’ve ever had to think creatively (and I don’t just mean doing a piece of ‘art’), then the way of thinking you used will still be in there, somewhere. All you have to do is try to start thinking like that again, and it will surely follow.

For example – cast your mind back to the time that felt that you were coming up with creative solutions to stuff in your life. Where were you? Who was around you? What was the atmosphere/ambience?What did it feel like? What were you physically doing? What period of your life was this? What were the overiding themes of that time? Reminisce

Then do a few simple exercises. Creative thinking is ‘right brain‘, where most of the activities we do day-to-day tend to be ‘left-brain’. Make the shift by taking an object and asking yourself weird questions, like ‘what would it be if it were made of ice/could fly/was gigantic/ covered in grass/ made out of a gas/ you could drive it/ could live in it/ it was microscopic/ 2,000 years old/ furry/ made for people with no hands/ to be used by fish-people/ worked by magic/ was free/ could only be used once?

Okay, no actual, useful results come out of thoughts like this – but that is left-brain thinking! The result is that you can start to think more flexibly, more creatively. and that is the kind of result you are looking for (it’s not a ‘left-brain’ result because its ’soft’; not measurable or quantifiable). I’ll bet it feels pretty good, though!

There’s also an interesting exercise somewhere, about reading out the names of colours that are coloured in the wrong colour, e.g. black, red, blue, green, orange. Now go back and say aloud the colours of the text for each word. if that makes sense.

Anyway, that’s what I’m going to do. I’ve got to find an image to match the word ‘product’, but al I can think of is ‘iPhone’. Appalling!

Cheers,

Philip

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Time for a TeachMeet?

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Posted 19 Apr 2010 — by cheersphilip
Category Ideas, Rant, diary, thought

Okay, I want to meet teachers and students and anyone who can help me understand why education isn;t working (IMHO) and what we can do about it!

So I went to Becta-X and that was fun and techy and information overload but I didn;t feel that it really hit the mark for, just identified that there was a mark that was being missed.

It may have been there that I picked up the habit of writing really long sentences with no punctuation but I guess hey thats just speculation.

So anyway, there seem to be these things called Teachmeets, they are a type of ‘unconference‘ that you organise yourself and then people come along and you all talk and there’s no agenda and thats it.

This sounds perfect I just want to meet other people who think differently to everyone else and can kind of see there’s a problem and want to DO something and not just wait around for someone esle to do it and then complain that that wasnt what should have been done.


Fast Tube by Casper

Does anyone out there want to join me? I have no idea what I’m doing, othere than the speaking to other people thing which i believe  i already mentioned – i’m going to need a date a venue and a sponsor to start and somewhere along the way there’ l be people invited nad then it’ll happen and who knows what.

We also need a title – i was thinking of something like ‘SATs: Secret Agent Teachers’ as one that would bring together people who see that there is a deficiency in our current system but who also see that change will not come from that top, we have to be agents of change ourselves – hence secret ‘agents’.

This is for people who are in the system and want to change it from within.

So, are you with me? It would be really cool if you could join in, like I said, so just let me know or stay keen and then maybe I can eventually get to the end of this incredibly poorly-structured blog post.

You will hear more about this!!

Cheers,

Philip

PS: I’m looking at Friday 11th June as the date. We’ll do it in the evening, its after school, its the week after half term so teachers may have a chance of still being fairly fresh and we’ll keep it small and tidy and fun. Normal syntax will resume in the next post :)

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Education: What do we DO?

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Posted 13 Apr 2010 — by cheersphilip
Category Ideas, Rant, thought

Reading this book at the moment “What’s the Point of Schools?” by Guy Claxton.

Very interesting, so much so that I want to spend the whole day reading it, neglecting the renovation of my campervan that i was going to do.

My wife tells me that I always do this, it’s like OCD or something, but then I lose steam after exhausting my interest and go on to something else.

Something tells me I should listen to her. I think this is important enough for me to take it slowly and let the interest build, so I’ll just post my impressions so far.

What I’m feeling at the moment is that it is extremely annoying that education in this country is not better. There are so many quotes, anecdotes and solid statistics over the last century, that for us to be in basically the same position is a joke.

It is a joke that makes me very angry, to be honest.

What i want to know is, what are we actually going to DO?

The whole system feels like its in gridlock – schools, students, parents, governments – no one can do anything because they are all tied up together in a vicious-circle, self-fulfilling prophecy state of affairs.

So this is what I’m thinking of doing.

At Becta-x the other week, I was talking to Kate who basically challenged me to run an unconference about education.

Damn it, it looks like that’s what we’re going to have to do, because I just don’t see any action out there at the moment to suggest otherwise.

I have no idea how to do this, so if anyone feels like coming on board, please give me a shout. We’re going to need people to turn up, too, so get prepared to spread the word.

We’ll start off small in a central London location, of an evening, so that teachers can attend. This will happen by the end of the school year.

I want to know what other people, face to face, have to say about education – any part of education – and what we can actually do to improve it.

That is all for now. I’m off to read my book – no, work on my campervan!

Cheers,

Philip

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Good Breath (Typewriter Bubble)

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Posted 11 Apr 2010 — by cheersphilip
Category Stories, Typewriter Bubble

Click for a closer view

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