In this life, there are people that you meet and they just chime with you. You meet and there is an instant click and an affinity; you get all high and bouncy on that initial click and it can feel like you’ll be friends for a substantial wodge of time. Sometimes […]
helen
142 posts
Last week I had a bit of a road trip up and down the UK. It was one of those weeks where I shouldn’t have been in charge of my own diary; to be fair there are a fair few of those in this life and Mr Dr Ross, with […]
This year has been my first year of working entirely an indie, doing stuff that I’ve spent the last 15 years or so working towards. I never thought I’d be a work-for-myself bod, but since doing a really cool – and seminal in my little pathway through this life – […]
I’ve just had a little squizz through the end-of-year brain dumps that I’ve done for the last few years and a commonly recurring theme is bonkersness and new pathways forming. I do realise that I am pretty much mad as a box of frogs and that at times I do […]
This has been growing in my head for far longer than I had intended. I was going to write this up the day I got home from the most amazing experience at Cambridge University at the Diverse Trajectories Workshop. It was a multi-disciplinary, multi-professional, collaborative workshop to explicate what it […]
Doing a bit of a Google on contrarianism and it pretty much describes me at times, and that is probably quite relevant to this little rant. So Google says that, “A contrarian is a person who holds a contrary position, especially a position against the majority.” There are times where […]
There is a place somewhere in the universe that is populated/inhabited entirely by all the odd socks and teaspoons in the world. I don’t know where it is and I don’t know that I’ll ever find it, because if I do find it, I will have a WHOLE load of […]
My Dad started his working life out as a mechanical engineer, designing gearboxes for Leyland lorries in Preston. He got chartered and by the time he retired he was doing stuff around people management and training people using CAD/CAM systems for IBM. I liked hitting stuff, and loved maths and […]
One of the great things about lots of the networks and working groups that I’m in at the moment, is that I’m surrounded by really strong women, with epic ethics, amazing journeys and masses of integrity. Much of that spills over into my social circles too- sometimes I do actually […]
Team Ross had the best day out today in Barf. We went swimming- Mr Dr Ross has been taking the Small Human swimming over the last few weeks and he has done so well. I’m not great at it and I’m a bit scared of water but swimming is a […]
I go the loo a lot. I’m 40 years old and I have spent all of those 40 years making some sort of substantive use of varying toilet facilities. Either by myself (in the later years) or with my Mum in the earlier years. And I’d not paid that much […]
I know it’s hard to believe – if you know me in person it may be a little less hard to believe – but sometimes I can get a bit stroppy and patience with myself is not always something I excel in. Again, hard to believe. But here we are […]
A few years ago, there was a song that came out and it was hilarious. It brought proper joy to my little Sheffield world and made me giggle a lot: What’s the Meaning of Stonehenge, by Ylvis I’d not ever been to Stonehenge at that point and in all honesty, […]
This evening, I did have one job. It was to put beans and spaghetti hoops into the microwave and not burn them. Heat them to a civilised and edible temperature. Not burn them or make them incinerate our mouths. Well the beans didn’t quite burn and Mr Dr Ross’ mouth […]
Today, the small human had a strop. It was the mother of ALL strops. He was proper angry and mad and hated me, his granny (who was with us) and essentially the entire world. He’d had a really good day and had been good as gold. Then we had the […]
It was International Women’s Day earlier this week and on that very same day, I had a couple of properly interesting interactions. They weren’t related to IWD per se, and yet they were. Then later this week, I went to see a dear friend from primary school and we got […]
There are times in life when you just need to laugh and to feel some hope. The word is a completely bonkers place and it has been for about the last umpteen years, with a particular focus on the last 2 or 3 as a source of ridiculousness. I write […]
This last week I’ve been on half term- just the last one before I leave my current job in teaching. I’ve been lucky enough to visit all sorts of different places up and down the M1 and A1 as part of my quest to take the small human northwards to […]
I was chatting to one of my tutor-kiddos the other day because we are doing about Jekyll and Hyde. The session we had was about identity and profiles people have online. We got to talking about Instagram because of the way Jekyll and Hyde is, in its rawest form, about […]
read a thing on the TES just now about teacher retention, and it made think quite a lot. I’ve been in teaching in various guises and roles for 15 years, some of which have been in mainstream, some in management, private schools and I’ve seen a lot. I’ve been very, […]
Heisenberg, I am not. A clever physicist I am not. Epically good at clever existentialism, I am not. I do have the odd clever moment and sometimes use my brain (when it’s not in a jar, kicking about somewhere at the back of my wardrobe). So I will caveat this […]
I drive over Salisbury Plain a few times a week for work at the moment and it is gorgeous. This morning particularly (Thursday), it was like driving into a Bob Ross painting. The colours were so fuzzy and vivid and exciting. There was fog on the hills, just falling down […]
If ever there was a year that did not fail to disappoint, 2021 was it. There was a bit of promise and some excitement last year and until the Monday evening after New Years (when schools had already gone back!), all that was gone in a flash of yet another […]
The other day, a family that I’d worked with for a bit, but had to stop for a time got back in touch and asked if I’d work with them again. It was a no-brainer that I was clearly going to say yes! They are so lovely, as a family! […]
Driving home from my folks’ house the other day, the child asked me what a noise was. I told him it was music. Then he said, but I can’t see it! He asked me what it was and why we couldn’t see music. I had to think about it and […]
There is an awful lot of discussion out there in the ether as to whether teaching is a vocation, a job, a career, or a dark and mysterious, magical art. I am pretty sure at times the main pre-requisite for teaching, particularly of the primary-school persuasion, is the capacity to […]
I whole heartedly believe that the basis of anything we do in life is our relationship with the people doing it with us, to us or for us. Our whole social world is transactional. Through our positions in our social sphere, our statuses are conceived, cultivated and sometimes lost. Our […]
So I don’t often write anything about the Small Ross, because essentially, it’s his life and it matters that he gets ownership of what appears on tinterwebs about him. This isn’t really about him but he’s sort of implicated in it in a way! So all the way through being […]
I remember years ago, I watched Clueless (the film) and they talked about “surfing the crimson wave”. It sounded really cool and it took me a good few more years to work out what they actually meant. Then I wished it was as cool as they’d made it sound. For […]
I started to write this the other day when I’d just read a passage about wraparound childcare being made free for some people in Scotland so that they can attend training courses or get out there in the workforce. I think it’s a great idea and I’m sort of thinking […]
I am not a primary school teacher and I don’t think I ever could be. I cannot master the dark arts that they purvey and control to survive. It is SUCH a skilled and nuanced professional track and I do not have the skill set to manage it. I just […]
Yesterday, for reasons still unknown, I decided that I wanted to listen to George Michael. I wasn’t a fan in the 80s, mainly because I was in primary school and in the 90s, I was far too complicated and into grunge! But as I got older and his music developed […]
I had an old-git health check this afternoon. I’ve got a big birthday coming up in a few weeks and I’m an old git. I’m so much of an old git that I had to have a health questionnaire to see if I’m going to keel over from drinking too […]
I was talking with a friend the other day- she is a home educator and her kids are AMAZING! For their family, it’s a proactive decision and one that they made rather than a situation that was foist upon them because school had been horrible. But talking with her the […]
I trained to teach in 2006-2007 based at Sheffield Hallam Uni but my main placement was at a school I already knew well in Barnsley. At the time I trained, we were in the throes of the ‘Every Child Matters’ and ‘Stage not Age’ bit of education policy. The aims […]
It’s approaching the final week of school for those of us in the State Sector in England. Some of my lovely (and lucky?!) friends and colleagues, who work in independent schools have already broken up so they’re a week of two ahead of me in the decompression stakes, I think. […]
I used to have piano lessons and I actually got really, really far with it- grade 8. Doing that at the same time as A Levels was a really, really stupid thing to do but that’s another brain-fart! So one of the most important things that my piano teacher always […]
Start in the bottom right and then work clockwise (couldn’t work out how to make it collage like I wanted it to!!). That’s the journey. I’ve had this little brain child growing for ages and I managed to get a kind of image of a finished product sorted when I […]
I’ve always been one for making noise when a status quo is unfair or oppressive or just downright wrong. My primary school teachers always said I had a lot to say for myself (not wrong) and then in secondary school, I was on the school council. At the time we […]
I’m going to caveat this post with the fact that I am not going to write a list of reference list for this piece anywhere. If you need to know what I’ve read, then there is a list of where my ideas have been parked in various settings on the […]
Trustee: “A trustee is someone with legal control of money or property that is kept or invested for another person, company, or organization”. (Collins, Undated) This happened to me on Saturday just gone. I got made a trustee. I say this in what seems to be a really passive way: […]
The fear exists and is very much in the house. Well, the garden office at this point in time. But the fear is definitely here. A dude. A dyslexia-famous dude had messaged me this morning, via my website. He’s like ‘been on BBC Breakfast’ famous because of a book he […]
What are we actually doing when we say that education is important? Who is it important for and what do we mean by education?They seem like they should be really easy, straightforward questions to answer at a first glance, and then you scratch the surface of any answer that’s given […]
Oh no they aren’t… oh… wait… Oh yes they are… or not? Maybe? It’s that mythical child we’re looking for. It’s the Schroendinger’s child of remote learning. It’s the child who is doing nothing at home learning because provision is so poor, and they don’t access it because teachers are […]
I saw a meme the other day and it was fantastic. It showed a person with a massive great big stone on their back. It had all of the things that are crappy in the world at the moment written on it: COVID; Lockdown; home-schooling; no time to work; not […]
Or at least that’s what some people who have you think! Last week teachers were superheroes and now we’ve reverted to being workshy faineants who only work 9 till 3 at a push. Never is our position anywhere in the middle. There are three things that prompted me to write […]
Neither it would seem. Apparently, according to the internet we (teachers I mean) are either superhumans or lazy gits. And which end of the teachering-spectrum we fall depends on which particularly flavour of newspaper you read. I’m bored of the construction of teachers as lazy. It doesn’t upset me or […]
When different parts of a body don’t speak to one another (or communicate through nerves and whatnot) then that body tends to have difficulties doing various bits and bobs. If I try to chew with my whole mouth but I’ve had something done on my teeth with anaesthetic, then my […]
I worked with a student this week and they shared their school-screen with me. They showed me the repository for all their work and it hurt my head and I’m the adult. There was so much for them to process and to manage. The student’s school is, to be fair, […]
Where do mess-ups stop, and accountability begin? In any other industry, you’d get in huge amounts of bother for the way that education has been planned and how it has veered from one course to another with seeming wallies at the helm. You’d lay down conservative policies and some cautious […]