Posts

Lessons that Last Forever

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It dawned on me the other day that I am of an age where I have met with thousands of teachers in my time, observed countless teacher-pupil interactions, and observed the very best and the very worst of this most noble of callings.   And while there are many teachers who conscientiously teach their subject as if that were the whole point of their calling, every now and again there is the true gem - the teacher that first builds the child, and then, through relational inspiration, orientates the child into their specific subject. I don’t really remember anything specific about my high-school Science lessons as a child, but I remember everything about my teacher, and there are lessons that he taught us as a class of human souls that I hold fast to still and in a life-time of my own Science teaching, emulate daily.  Acclaimed Irish psychologist Tony Humphreys has been instrumental in my growth as an teacher, and taught me a great truth that has informed my understanding of the...
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Why Exams Matter - and Don't Matter at All

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As I walk around the end-of-year exam venue in silent, unhurried stealth, I am at the same time awed by the intensity of the experience that 'final exams' presents, amazed by the logistical complexity of ensuring exam integrity (which, ironically, relies on administrators assuming that none of us has any), and sobered by the fact that, after around 12 years of formal schooling there are some that will stumble at this most significant (and simultaneously completely irrelevant) hurdle - for when a child fails a final exam she or he is as much failed as they themselves have failed.    Exams are, at once, a critical benchmark that holds systemized education together, and a completely meaningless measure of momentary knowledge. Exams act as a systemic gate-keeper, designed to fit young people into boxes. I often wonder why cattle walk so willingly into an abattoir, compliant and oblivious of the system that is there to chop them, box them, and ship them off for sale. A cynic may re...
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Generosity of Spirit - invaluable concepts that are rarely taught in schools.

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In the course of a lifetime we will encounter all manner of humanity in all of its most diverse forms. The problem with humanity, though, is that what we see outwardly does not always accurately reflect the inner story unfolding in that person's life. From good people dealing with difficult issues putting on a brave face, to evil people hiding dark secrets behind a benign facade - in the deeply human enterprise of education the quote (mis-attributed to Plato, but thought to have originated with one Ian Maclaren in 1897 (paraphrased here))  “Everyone is fighting a silent battle you know nothing about, just be kind.” could never be more appropriate. No message is more needed in our days of stress and storm, of selfish striving and merciless competition.   In any group dynamic (such as a classroom), there are individuals that stand out through their shadow behaviour - behaviour that tells a story to the observant: the bully, over-compensating for feelings of inadequacy by project...
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An antidote to resentment and cynicism - living in the present will set us free.

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Social media would have us believe that, as we reach a certain age, the world around us begins looking disjointed and broken, while the world behind us is remembered as  reassuring and predictable - the nostalgically secure 'good old days'. Of course, a lifetime is a journey not defined by past or future - it is shaped by the incremental decisions that we make in the present. To allow oneself to be imprisoned by some form of generational label is self-debilitating. Similarly, to live in perpetual hope of a brighter future (or in fear of a worse one) robs us of the present. The present is all that we can control, and the incremental gains (or losses) that we realise in the present shape the future, pixel by pixel, until the picture is complete.   Our life journey, then, is largely shaped by the accumulation of incremental gains and losses, but there can be no denying that there are monumental events that come around to throw the entire equilibrium out of balance. There is ...
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The obligation of kindness.

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We're born with millions Of little lights shining in the dark And they show us the way One lights up, every time you feel love in your heart One dies when it moves away   Passenger - All the little lights (2012)   I find it really interesting that as educators we invest so much effort into our own academic degrees and focus so hard on teaching our subjects, and yet at times we forget that the most significant role that we play is in the formation of character and the nurturing of the human spirit. We teach people, not subjects - as the old saying goes. As much as a pupil in my Mathematics class may be learning about geometry (I hope), they are learning much more from my humanity in the way that I engage, they are developing self-esteem through the ways in which I recognise their unique self, and they build a picture of the world through the emphasis that I share.   That is not an over-estimation of our own importance - if one calculates the amount to time a child spends i...
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Life is unfair, unpredictable, and sometimes just does not go to plan. Get over it.

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As a child, I once sat through a prize giving speech that was for me at the time novel and exciting - but in the years since I have heard a thousand times in various guises. It is the old "if you can dream it you can do it" theme, which, while exciting (and backed up by countless examples of people who have dreamed of being champions in some discipline or another and then triumphed) fails to take into account the fact that life is unpredictable, unfair, unjust, and sometimes just does not go to plan. Sometimes, despite doing everything right (or trying to) bad things simply happen to good people.   And when they do, it can shake our psychology, our belief systems (If [ insert deity of choice ] is so powerful, why does this happen?), and impact negatively on our wellbeing. We're sort of hard-wired to be negative, and so a whole range of cognitive distortions (these are natural biases or irrational thoughts that come into play in our thinking) can reinforce a spiral of nega...
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Go outside and kick a ball!

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As much as we like to think of education as a forward-looking embrace of the future, much of our educational practice (even in the best resourced, most progressive schools) would be easily recognised by a teacher or pupil from a hundred years ago. We're more conservative than we think we are, and, in fact, so are our pupils.    The introduction of technology into schools has been a real exception to this pattern of behaviour, and schools have, since the development of the internet and the commodification of hardware in the 1980's, been in a constant state of adoption and exploration of various technologies and models of implementation. From the early days of laptops to iPads and other technologies, it has been a given that these devices are 'revolutionising' education, and the ubiquity of devices is of educational benefit.   But something else has been in constant change since the 1980s. While measures of living standards have gone up in this time, measures of the wellb...
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Calculus is great, but true 'educational excellence' is about developing good people.

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There are times as we are attempting to motivate our students that we over-emphasize the instrumental value of education. "Be good at school" we say, "and you will get a good job". By "good job" we imply the trappings of a "good life" - house, car, and happy family, and such like. There are many flawed assumptions in all of that, but most importantly, the "capitalist dream" model that we use (explicitly or implicitly) relegates much more important educational outcomes - emotional intelligence, gratitude, self-control, creativity, flow, and decision making (among a host of other key, life-determining elements) -  to a lesser position in the thinking hierarchy.   Good manners are regarded as quaint, kindness as soft, and selflessness is kept a record of to tick the 'service' box on a CV.    There is something much deeper in each of these things that goes way beyond social constructs.    Good manners are carefully constructed socia...
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"Kidnapped by Aliens" and other erroneous ways to describe the challenge of raising teenage children.

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There is a common misconception that parenting a teenager is a wholly negative experience. To be sure, it is complicated - the journey from childhood dependance to young adult independence is by no means easy. Throw in hormone and relational ups and downs, and one certainly has a heady brew to deal with. 'Entering the tunnel' is one description of this journey, 'they will come out eventually' it goes on.    And don't we 'normal' parents secretly envy those parents whose teenage children are (over) dedicated to their studies and thriving in 'success'. We use them as a benchmark to calibrate our own perceived 'failures'!   To consider such a beautiful journey - that from childhood to maturity (which, as I will discuss later, is different to 'mere' adulthood) - as a 'going away', or 'entering a tunnel' robs us as parents of one of our most significant parenting acts. For in a young child our key role is one of nurturing g...
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Helicopter parents, and other well-intentioned things that damage our children.

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Parenting is - even at its least complicated - a really tough job. And while we celebrate the unique individuality of each child,  that very uniqueness does mean that there is no guide book for parenting - what works for one can be disastrous for another (even when the apparent circumstances seem identical).     In addition to there being no ‘one-size-fits-all’ set of rules for parenting, we each take into our parenting roles all sorts of learned behaviours that are informed by our own childhood experiences, traumas, and psychologies. On top of that still is the fact that our parenting is only one voice in a situational chorus of influences from peers, society at large, and social media. Many of these voices are more influential and exciting than the humdrum parenting voice – they inform the exciting while our voice informs the necessary.    There are all sorts of traps that well-intentioned parents can fall into – living vicariously through our childr...
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Binary Choice, and other intellectual traps that the world sets for us.

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Have you noticed how hard the world tries to make us think in binary choices? I marvel at how, what should be deeply nuanced conversations are distilled into straight choices between, for example, Democrat or Republican, Conservative or Labour,  when in fact, on deeper analysis, there is little fundamental difference upon which to differentiate between them. While the personalities involved are projected as stark choices, beyond the labels there is much more in common between them than one would initially think.    Indeed, the think-tank, focus-group mumbo-jumbo that passes for contemporary global political discourse marks a low-point in our democratic progression, not least because much of it is manipulated by third parties to cynically influence social media trends.    And it is not just politics. How often do we fall into the (intellectual) trap of declaring undying love for one product, and denigrating its obvious (constructed) rival? I am a Land-Rover ...
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There is nothing artificial about AI

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  Once, when travelling, I stayed overnight at a beautiful B&B.  It was a work trip, though, and I was not in the mood for socializing. How irritating, then, when I realized it was one of these ‘shared table’ breakfast arrangements where I would have to earn my bacon and eggs by sitting opposite a complete stranger - themselves chagrined by the set-up - and make small talk prefaced by the dreadfully inane ‘so what do you do’?   It turns out that he actually had a most unusual job. He was an engineer who travelled the world commissioning robots. Not just any old robots, though. This engineer’s life work (for the moment at least) was commissioning robots that would then go on to commission robots without the help of humans. Apart from being complicit in his own redundancy, he was a fascinating breakfast partner as he explained the future of machines, robotics, machine learning, and AI. Far from being worried that these things were threatening his future, he was, in...
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We're drifting. It is time to reclaim the Common Ground.

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“Monseigneur Bienvenu had been formerly, according to the accounts of his youth and even of his early manhood, a passionate, perhaps a violent man. His universal tenderness was less an instinct of nature than the result of a strong conviction filtered through life into his heart, slowly dropping in upon him, thought by thought; for a character, as well as a rock, may be worn into by drops of water.”     ―   Victor Hugo,   Les Misérables   I hate generation theory. The very idea that a generation’s worth of unique souls can be pigeon-holed (and often caricatured) irritates me. It is an intellectual shortcut to generalize at such scale, and I do my best not to do it. That said, there are certainly significant differences in the way that I (and my generation) grew up compared to how a child would experience the world today.   And as tempting it is to get all curmudgeonly and reflect on the ‘good old days’ in a Gen-X kind of way, that is not the point of t...
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We are complicit in the digital damage being inflicted upon our children.

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As a young teacher who had dabbled in 'programming' - harbouring an obsession with evolving computer technologies (that persists still) - I have always been an early adopter of technology. Coming from an era when my first dissertation was researched in a library using microfiche, when my first school reports were type written (on an actual typewriter!) with comments written in black fountain pen - when tablet technology and ubiquitous connectivity emerged in the market place, I (and many others like me) recognised this as a pivotal moment in education. A moment where technology transformed the classroom through connectivity, clever Apps, online interaction, AI, ubiquitous knowledge, and gamification.    Classrooms were transformed into connected places where device use was commonplace, and a whole pedagogy emerged to harness the incredible new tools that we had at our disposal. And it was good - the notoriously slow evolution of teaching and learning took a quantum leap f...
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Disaster does not happen as a single event - it is the final act of a play that started long before the final curtain.

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"We're born with millions Of little lights shining in the dark And they show us the way One lights up, every time you feel love in your heart One dies when it moves away "             All the Little Lights -  Passenger   ( All The Little Lights lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC )   What an incredible gift children are. From the excitement at the first news of conception, the journey of raising children can and should be a wonderful adventure for parent and child. How fantastic the miracle of creating new life, and how awesome the responsibility of creating an environment where children can flourish.    I have a vision of childhood as a sacred, sanctified space. A place where children can feel safe, loved, and capable, and where they can confidently seek out and develop their own unique giftedness. A place where learning is seen as worthwhile, rather than an instrumental means to an end, and where adults and parents, each w...
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