So peace, stay off my back Or I will attack and you don’t want that. The Power – Snap So a couple of weeks ago I woke up to find myself tagged in a retweet to this… As a former member of the armed forces I took great offence with the originator of the tweet… Continue reading Why shouldn’t I be a teacher?

Stare into a white picture and try and empty your mind.  Concentrate on nothing except the whiteness of the white… Now think what your brain is doing whilst you are at rest.  Your heart is still being told to pump blood around, your diaphragm is still being stimulated to help you breathe, your memory is… Continue reading Cognitive Bandwidth – here comes the (semi) science…

So last night I got what was possibly meant to be a sage piece of teaching advice “Fake it until you make it” – to put it into context it was linked to the idea of effective teaching behaviours and how to change yours to match.  However, shortly before this was the idea that personality… Continue reading Faking it?

So today one of my Y4 children described my literacy lesson as “the best ever”. Bearing in mind that literacy is my least favourite thing to teach I’m taking this as my best win ever in my short teaching career. Dave (not his real name) loves an apostrophe.  So much so that he machine-guns them… Continue reading Watch us wreck the mic…

Another post inspired by a conversation on Twitter earlier today.  The premise is simple, all you need to do is post links to the 8 songs that you would take with you to a desert island.  Here’s mine… New Order – Blue Monday  The grand daddy of all EDM.  Originally written to work as an… Continue reading My Desert Island Discs…

They were the words I was both looking forward to hearing and yet dreading in equal measure – “After SATs they are all yours!”. So how could I, a meer trainee, hope to enthuse and inspire a group of children that have just been tested to the end of their tether? I was given one… Continue reading What I did after SATs.

During 2012, I was lucky enough to be deployed away from home (again) providing a small but important part of the security for the Olympic Games in London.  Four years on I find myself in a completely different situation, in a classroom, in front of 30 children every day. To paraphrase the great Chris Boardman,… Continue reading The Aggregation of Marginal Gains…

So, there I was.  43 years old, 4 terms into my teacher training and sitting in the classroom trying to stop the tears rolling down my cheeks.  The morning bell hasn’t even gone yet but I am a broken man. Rewind 5 minutes – I’m just back from the photocopier, making sure I have enough… Continue reading The day it all made sense…

So, I’m in training to be a primary teacher and things are heading on the right trajectory in Y5.  I’m consistently hitting the edge of “Good” in my observations and starting to really enjoy life as a teacher.  What happened?  Well to further my training my school decided to put me outside my comfort zone;… Continue reading I learned about teaching from that…