Past and present

Spotted this in a pupil’s jotter today: Joan of Arc was a cross dresser. She liked wearing men’s armour. Presumably the women’s armour was too expensive

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SLF11 Prep

Spent this afternoon trying to sign up for the Scottish Learning Festival again – the first time the registration pages froze on me, second time the computer crashed, third time lucky. Actually I’m pretty glad that I did because it make me reconsider which seminars to choose. The whole event is like an annual mental [...]

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Panorama: Classroom warriors

I caught some of the Panorama about encouraging fomer armed forces personnel to become teachers (Reporter: Vivian White.) What I picked up on was staff taking the time to build relationships with pupils, lowering their voices, rather than shouting, sharing responsibility with the class but maintaining authority. None of this shrieks armed forces to me, [...]

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Roadshow

Had fun tonight blethering at a Curriculum for Excellence roadshow I’d been invited to take part in. Nobody was really interested in the wonderful investigations I had gathered evidence for, but then, I should have had more detail on the boards to explain what was going on in all those photos. On the other hand, [...]

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Moving on up

We’ve had lots of fun and games trying to find a suitable school for RT’s secondary education. Mainstream is just not feasible at the moment and the local special school is over capacity and struggling to cope – although they’re doing a great job and we had assumed he would be going there, until we [...]

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Jencks’ mine art

I’m really excited about an article I’ve just seen on the Scotland Outdoors website. I love their podcast and was exploring the articles on the website when I noticed one called Charles Jencks landscape artist. I really like a lot of the land art that I’ve seen, although unfortunately it’s mostly been online or in [...]

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New blood II

I held a meeting with a trio of student teachers to discuss building an investigation. While the idea needs some more work, I gained a lot of insight into their current thinking and how new students might approach working in the library. One task was to find five good websites on da Vinci, but ironically [...]

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New blood I

Every year, I speak to the student teachers about how important libraries are to education, and how they can get the best out of them. Usually, it goes along the lines of  “Go and talk to the librarian – a lot. Keep them up to date in what your plans. Don’t forget to include them [...]

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Back to Japan

The project continues and it’s intriguing. The pupils are meant to be creating an itinerary for an imaginary trip to Japan, with each member of the group creating one of five pages, plus a contents page and a map. What’s so interesting is how the pupils are approaching it. When asked, they’ll say, I’m doing [...]

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Investigating Japan

New investigation today all about Japan. As usual, we’re working to create something that demands thought and synthesis and avoid copy and paste. We hasn’t investigated Japan for a while as new staff were trying out new topics, so it’s nice to be back. This time, we’re asking groups of pupils to create an itinerary [...]

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