 Posted by: Lois Lindemann on: January 7th, 2012  Posted in: 5. Random Musings | Uncategorized Tags for this post:  As an educator, when I saw that #ReasonsWhyIHateSchool was trending on Twitter, I clicked through to see what was being said.
It was a depressing experience. I was faced with an overwhelming number of Tweets, most of them filled with frustration and unhappiness. I haven’t made any attempt at a formal analysis, but I have picked out some that seem typical.
There were quite a few who wanted school to be like the movies:
Actually, I’d like school to be like the movies, where the hard-working teacher wins over the hearts and minds of all their students, so that by the final scene even the most disaffected have achieved amazing things. Who wouldn’t want that?
I wasn’t surprised to see criticism about the behaviour and attitudes of teachers, but I was taken aback but some of the comments:
It wasn’t just teachers though:
Getting up too early in the morning was a frequent complaint – which won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has worked with teenagers. I’m convinced that a later start to the day would benefit many of my students, especially in Y9, 10 and 11:
Boredom was mentioned so often I’m surprised that wasn’t trending too:
One word said it all on this topic:
No surprises there!
The thing that left me feeling the most frustrated of all was the number of Tweets expressing the pointlessness of it all – especially in my subject:
I don’t think many teachers would be surprised by any of these complaints, but the sheer number and vehement negativity of the comments staggered me. It’s inevitable that a hashtag called #ReasonsWhyIHateSchool will expose negative attitudes, but there were almost no dissenting voices. I find that very sad.
I’m just going to share one final Tweet, the one that stopped me in my tracks:
Wow.
I’m left thinking about my own classes. I wonder to what extent this stream of Tweets reflects the feelings of my own students? Obviously I’d like them to be happy at school, but I wonder if they really are.
Posted by: Lois Lindemann on: January 2nd, 2012 Posted in: 5. Random Musings Tags for this post:
Jim Docherty, assistant secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association, told BBC Scotland that teachers should follow his advice: "First thing is don’t bother telling anybody else about your social life. Nobody is interested about your social life and it doesn’t help.
"Secondly, never make any comment about your work, about your employer, about teaching issues in general.
"There is always a possibility it will be misinterpreted."
from ‘Teachers warned over Facebook and Twitter use’ on bbc.co.uk
Earlier today I read Jim Docherty’s advice to teachers, warning us not to discuss either our personal lives or professional issues online. I have no doubt that Jim Docherty offered this advice with the best of intentions, we have seen some horror stories about the misuse of social media. No one would suggest that it is ever acceptable for students to be the subject of derogatory comments, neither would anyone suggest that it is ever acceptable for teachers to be harassed.
I have no doubt that as assistant secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association, Jim Docherty has teachers’ best interests at heart.
Unfortunately his advice is misguided and I hope most sincerely that no-one takes it seriously.
Facebook and Twitter are simply channels via which real people communicate. I accept that online communication is not the same as face to face communication, but the same is true of other publicly visible media – are we also expected to stop publishing comments about teaching issues in the TES or in academic journals, lest we run the risk of being misinterpreted?
Social media are not inherently dangerous, but they do provide teachers with opportunities for high quality professional development that simply do not exist elsewhere. How else could I connect with inspiring and innovative educators like Tom Barrett or Dan Meyer or Simon Job? How else would groups of educators collaborate effectively to organise and deliver high quality, free professional development? How else can I share resources and ideas with teachers from around the world? How else can a network of teachers from across the UK ‘meet’ to debate current issues and share good practice – and do so for free?
Whenever I drop into my digital world, there are teachers online discussing, debating and sharing. The fact that thousands of teachers are writing considered, reflective blog posts or Tweeting about education rarely seems to get mentioned in the media. I don’t expect to see ‘Teacher gets brilliant idea for teaching stem and leaf diagrams from colleague 100s of miles away’ hitting the headlines any day soon.
I cannot see any valid reason for suggesting that educators should avoid engaging in professional dialogue, but what about the personal stuff? Jim Docherty stated that “Nobody is interested about your social life”. Is that true? As educators, should we confine our blogging and tweeting to educational matters only?
When I meet up with colleagues face to face, we don’t restrict our casual conversations to professional matters. Chat about holidays, families or our social lives is normal human behaviour. It builds personal relationships and is part of what bonds us together as a team. Why should my relationships with colleagues in the digital world be subject to different rules or conventions to those in the analogue world? Of course I’m interested in what colleagues from my online network do outside of the classroom. We are using a digital medium, but we are people, not automata.
I don’t believe that guidelines about acceptable use of social media are necessary. Do we really need guidelines to tell us not to call our students rude names? Do we really need guidelines to explain what we should or should not say in front of students or parents? Would guidelines actually have any effect on the individuals who have engaged in unprofessional behaviour? Somehow I doubt it.
If individual teachers behave in a way that brings our profession into disrepute then that needs to be addressed on a case by case basis. Unprofessional behaviour exhibited by a minority of educators should not be used as some kind of justification for an attempt to ban the entire profession from using the social web appropriately. Administering a group punishment for offences committed by individuals is never acceptable.
As a professional teacher I expect to be able to participate in debate and discussion about teaching issues, whether it’s considering the purpose of education, discussing an ethos for teaching my subject or sharing ideas and resources.
As a professional teacher I don’t intend to stand idly by whilst well-intentioned people suggest that our profession should abide by a voluntary gagging order.
As a professional teacher I am angered and disappointed by Jim Docherty’s comments and I urge him to withdraw them.
Posted by: Lois Lindemann on: January 2nd, 2012 Posted in: 4. Reviews and Reflections Tags for this post: I don’t usually do end of year retrospectives, but looking back on 2011, I find myself in a reflective mood. It has been quite a year.
2011 was always going to be a busy year for me – I was still in my first year working at a new school and I had finally embarked on studying for a master’s degree. Everything started off well; I was enjoying my job and my studies. Then things got a bit complicated.
In May my Mum was taken seriously ill, a month later Mr MTM fell and broke his leg – badly enough that he required surgery and an external frame and pins to hold it together [pictures via that link may not be suitable for those of a squeamish disposition].
However I count myself lucky. Both my Mum and Mr MTM received very high quality care from the NHS and both of them have now made excellent recoveries. The head and my colleagues were incredibly supportive when I had to take some time off to care for Mr MTM when he first left hospital. People covered my lessons with the greatest goodwill you can imagine – including when Ofsted turned up. My colleagues are fantastic. I even managed to finish and pass the first module of my MEd – I only just made the deadline date for the final assessment (which fortunately was at the end of the summer holiday), but I made it.
It’s not surprising that the second half of 2011 represented something of a digital drought for me, with very little posted here and several extended absences from Twitter. I was too busy in the analogue world, riding the roller coaster of life.
I’m looking forward to 2012. I’m looking forward to trying out new ideas. I’m looking forward to enjoying my MEd studies again, rather than racing to meet every deadline. Now that normality has returned to my analogue life, I’m really happy to be resuming my digital life again. I’ve missed blogging and picking up ideas from the amazing network of educators on Twitter. It’s good to be back.
Posted by: Lois Lindemann on: September 26th, 2011 Posted in: 1. Learning and Teaching | resources and ideas Tags for this post: One of the things I like about returning to topics that I’ve taught many times is that I can predict what misconceptions my students are likely to have and try to address them. Sometimes that’s not so easy, especially if the nature of the misconception isn’t clear to me. This is the case with substitution, I know that a significant number of students have trouble with this. I know that many of these students don’t understand what to do, but why are they unclear? Explaining wasn’t working too well, so it was time to try something else.
Footballers know exactly what substitution means: one player gets swapped for another. In the past I’ve tried telling students that it’s pretty similar with algebra, but instead of footballers, a letter gets swapped for a number. This wasn’t a great success, so I decided to stick with the football metaphor, but try a slightly different approach that involved doing, not telling.
I made some pictures of footballers, I gave a ‘blank’ footballers to the students and stuck some with letters to the board. I told the students that these footballers were a team, which was my slightly spurious justification for putting the addition signs and = T.
The students also had a mini-whiteboard. I asked the students to suggest a substitution. I picked someone who had written their suggestion in the form a=n and held it up (in the style of a substitution at a real football match). I had to look a bit baffled to reach the stage where this happened, but comments like “I can’t see who you want to substitute” or “That looks really complicated, can you make it a bit simpler?” got the students started.
We had a bit of fun with this, blowing a whistle once I picked a suitable substitution, then getting students to come out to the whiteboard and swap their player (now with a number on their shirt) for one of the players with letters.
Obviously we could substitute any numbers (my students picked some really tricky examples!), but here’s a simple example:
I selected a student who held up a = 3, another who held up y = 7 and one who held up c = 5. We ended up with this:
This team is worth 3 + 7 + 5 = 15
We did a few like this until they got the idea – I was very strict about substitutions being written in the form a=n, since that’s what they will encounter in written questions. Then I introduced a few super-players, such as player x, who is so good we had to write a 2 in front of him. We had a couple of injuries as well – at the suggestion of the students – so we ended up with starting formulae like a + y – c = T, or we subbed a negative value (I’m sure every local football team has an off-form player we could nominate for that!)
The football metaphor obviously gets a bit shaky, but it addressed the central problem: my students understood what they were being required to do. Sure, once we moved onto the textbook style questions, we still had some problems, but mainly with BODMAS and minus signs, not with the idea of making a substitution.
At the end of the unit, when I asked students what they had enjoyed, a large number mentioned this activity. I didn’t have the foresight to do any baseline testing, but I was happy with the number of students who could do the substitution questions on the practice exam papers. I’ll be trying this activity again.
Download the files:
Word file with images of footballers (doc format)
PDF file with images of footballers
Posted by: Lois Lindemann on: September 22nd, 2011 Posted in: 1. Learning and Teaching | 2. Events and Happenings | resources and ideas Tags for this post: Here’s a nice maths activity for European Day of Languages: BODMAS / BIDMAS bingo.
So far I’ve made four versions: French, Spanish, German and Italian.
To play you will need:
- Bingo grids
- A list of the numbers from 1 – 10 in the language that you are using. The lists include pronunciation guides.
- A PowerPoint with the questions.
How I run the activity:
I give out the grids and ask students to fill in the numbers from 1-25 – the numbers can go anywhere. I find it minimises confusion if I say “Write 1 in any square, now write 2 in any square, now write 3 in any square. You get the idea – keep going to 25.” They should end up with something like this:
| 10 |
14 |
25 |
2 |
11 |
| 22 |
1 |
7 |
23 |
18 |
| 17 |
8 |
12 |
5 |
13 |
| 24 |
21 |
15 |
3 |
19 |
| 4 |
9 |
20 |
16 |
6 |
A line of 5 in any direction (vertical, horizontal, diagonal) will win.
The questions are on PowerPoints. I usually start by counting to 10 with the students, then we play the bingo game. There are also links to sites where you can hear the numbers if you wish to.
You may spot certain similarities between the questions for each language (find and replace is a wonderful thing!) Some questions involve using the rules of BIDMAS / BODMAS. The questions are written numerically, together with the correct answers in the speakers’ notes. If you get carried away and want to run two games, just shuffle the slides around.
Prizes are optional – although a round of applause for the winner is obviously nice.
Download the files:
Blank bingo grids (8 grids per sheet) as a Word file (.doc format)
List of numbers. These are Word files (.doc format). I usually print A5 size by choosing to print two pages per sheet, that’s why there are two identical pages. Maybe not the most efficient way to do it, but it’s the simplest way!
Question PowerPoints:
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Welcome! Hi, I'm Lois Lindemann - welcome to my blog!
I teach maths at Dronfield Henry Fanshawe School, a secondary school in the UK. This is where I'm planning to share links and explore ideas that I find useful or interesting - hopefully other educators will also find something of interest here.
Thanks for dropping in. Feel free to comment.
NB: Any opinions expressed here are those of the author or commenter; they don't (necessarily) reflect the view taken by Dronfield Henry Fanshawe.
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