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 […]
#covid19
19 posts
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
I just looked through what I wrote at the last year’s summary point. Also, our internet was down because someone sliced through the cable over the road, which was really handy. I just imagine that now and get literal chills of horror! But my post was excited and buzzing full […]
Some of us are just more equal than others in this tale of two countries. Some of us are so equal that computers decide we’re allowed good grades and some of our equality means that the computers decides we’ll get lower than we deserve. And then the all-benign ‘powers that […]
Lockdown 1.0 was marked by Banana bread, egg shortages and toilet-roll stockpiling. For the new lockdown, we’ve had toilet roll stockpiling and it’s bleak out there. I’m pretty sure that gazillions of people everywhere are panic-buying eggs and flour like there’s no tomorrow and as though they’ve going to make […]
Back in the Day A ‘Walk of shame’ has always had really negative and stigmatised connotations for me. It was something to sort-of hide and sort-of revel in when I was at uni and playing rugby. It tended to be preceded by a somewhat jaunty and vivacious night out with […]
I’m not in charge of the world. I think it would be terrifying if I were. Unlimited Viennese truffles for me would be first order but then the real stuff would kick in. I think any world-domination plan/chocolate procurement plan should carefully consider what the values are that underpin the […]
I live in a strange old twilight zone between schools and Universities. It’s manifested in my home life and professional lives concurrently, and at the moment, it’s properly bruising my brain. Scottish Highers and Standard Grades. A levels. GCSEs. They’ve all been cancelled this year and SATs have been stopped […]
Unprecedented. Unparalleled. Extra-ordinary. These are all part of words and phrases that we’ve heard a lot over the last 3 months or so since the COVID-19 lockdown. And it’s not wrong. We are in really strange old times and it may well be that way for a while yet. Shops […]
Mr Dr Ross and I are slightly bonkers. This is the caveat for everything that we do and live out in our house. Lockdown has somehow emphasised our bonkersness, but not in a grumpy, argumentative kind of way. Rather it’s that we’re bonkers in seeing new things we can try […]