When I first started teaching, I used to reprimand tardy students and tell them, “You’re late!”. Nowadays, I ask, “Are you OK?”. The Lord of the Rings is still the best thing I have ever watched on the telly. Not that new Amazon TV series tripe, I am talking about the Peter Jackson trilogy. The […]
Another invitation arrived this weekend (compliments of the bots feeding my social media feed) offering me another packaged AI solution to mark all my student essays. Here’s the title: The #1 AI Essay Grader for Teachers And here’s the hook: Reduce grading time by 80%. Grade your entire class’s essays in 2 minutes or less and […]
At the end of every school year, I feel it: the compression. Teachers are finalising reports, marking exams, writing references, and preparing next year’s curriculum and timetables. Parents are emailing. Students are burning out. What should be a celebratory end to a fantastic year starts to feel like siege warfare. Everyone is trying to get […]
When I left school, we weren’t told to find our purpose – we were told to get a job! I wasn’t sure that would go down too well as the central theme of my own Closing Address this year, so I tweaked it a little bit and ended up sharing the three hopes that I […]
I’ve recently had two wildly different – yet strangely connected – conversations with teachers. One teacher expressed frustration after asking his Grade 9 class to write 400 words—by hand—in their exercise books. Within minutes, students anxiously asked, “Can we bullet-point this?” or “Can we use our laptops instead?” The idea of sustained writing felt overwhelming. They’re struggling with basic […]
Princess Leia Organa, arguably the greatest rebel of them all In search of a perfectly average teacher Driving to the airport on the way to an overseas recruitment trip last week, I made a fairly innocuous comment in a conversation I was having with my kids about a teacher who had recently left our school. […]
I am trying to decide whether I have read a lot of books this year or not. Not that it matters, of course. I’m not counting. It’s just that I know that reading is a great place for me to “be well” and that does matter. As much as I would love to have a […]
“Who’s doing the washing up?” The answer to this question might be significant. If it’s you, you might behave one way. If it’s not you, you might behave another way. Take, for example, my friend’s domestic predicament. He and his partner have a long-standing rule that when one cooks, the other will wash up. They […]
There’s an old English saying that I often mutter when I’m being worn thin by seemingly excessive demands: “Do you want the moon on a stick?” This week alone, the question has crossed my mind on at least five occasions in conversations I have shared. They (parents) say They (teachers) say They (parents, teachers, students, […]
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