Biscuit's Box

Welcome to another 'challenge your reality' rant. The Reality   Teach to test mentally has become so intrinsically intertwined with adherence to National Curriculum that teachers of Mathematics have become institutionalised from the outset of their teaching careers. The Reasoning   It is not their fault, my wife is included in this number and has been teaching secondary Mathematics for 25 years if we include her PGCE placements. However, for myself as a person diagnosed with ADHD, maths has always been a beautiful and wonderfully complex world of discovery, a view that was shared by Pythagoras who built a complete religion around it. In comparison, my own secondary schooling, centred around the new National Curriculum Standards (yes, I'm that old), crippled that passion in me for years until I finally got the opportunity to teach myself. Yes, mathematics is the verifiable aspect of science, the rules and the regulations, but it is also art.  It is why STEM became STEAM in...

Greetings fellow reprobates and welcome to another musing, The titular question is not as simple as it first appears, I want you to consider the actual process you go through when you get angry. Let us first set the scene using a metaphor of high pressure pipes, switches and taps. The task is to fill a bowl with water.  There are two high pressure pipes, one with an on/off switch, the other with a tap, which do you choose? I'm going to make an assumption and paraphrase what you are thinking: "The tap obviously, completing the task with the pipe with a switch is just too difficult to comprehend!" Changing the scenario slightly, you take a new job filling bowls from the pipe all day, every day. Your supervisor has a tap pipe and every day for a week you watch how they fill the bowl then have a go yourself. You watch them turn on the tap, fill a bowl, turn off the tap, get another bowl and repeat the process.  When it is windy the work is a little harder and they have to hol...

Question: Are schools child centric or adult centric? In the majority of primary schools I've visited I would agree that they are child centric, unfortunately most secondary schools are adult centric. What does this mean? Let's start with Maslow's hierarchy of needs and let's forget the triangle immediately.  Maslow's ideas are not new, in fact they are lifted directly from the tenets of the native American tribes he worked with. Is it appropriation? Quite definitely, but credit where it's due, espousing a progressive social stance in the midst of communist persecution in America was a pretty ballsy move. Tier 1 I am secure Access to food, clean water, clothing and shelter are basic physical needs. A stranger to a native American camp would be offered these simple necessities as a courtesy for simply being human, the same applies in Moari culture.  For the kids in our classroom our observations are their safeguarding and why we do the training every year.  For t...

Over the next few posts I am going to break down the three stakeholders in a little more detail. The Child is the easiest label to define as it depends entirely on the child's capability and development. From birth through to adolescence the child will progress from wanting their concerns addressing to achieving autonomy and being the primary decision maker. Over the same period, the Parent (same labelling caveats apply as before) should transition from being the primary decision maker to wanting their concerns addressed.  So who is the Parent?  I've heard an annoyance, a waste of time, over protective, demanding... The School is the most complex, comprising of Teachers, pastoral staff, support staff... I'm ditching these openers.  I ran out of patience too quickly with this one and could not even complete the thought as it riled me up so much. The Parent I am starting here because from experience this has been the hardest position to be in. Years of experience with other...

 Let's forget the automatic responses and actually consider the question logically. We have three invested interests involved in a child's education; the school, the parents and the child.  For ease, the label of "parent" here encompasses all primary caregivers and when discussing "school" it is as an entity not it's component parts so appropriate phrases would be: it is school policy to, the decisions we are making are, the school feels, we feel...   You as an individual be may be opposed to actions taken by the school but the expectation will always be to back the decisions of your management.   With the idea that the School entity is the stakeholder not you, answer this quick question:  Which of these Venn diagrams best illustrates the power dynamic within the school, parent and child relationship? Which did you choose?  If it was either of the first two options you might as well stop reading now.  To be clear, any relationship dynamic whe...

Greetings fellow nerds! Our passions may now have achieved mainstream acceptance, but I refuse to give up a label that so signifies my 80's and 90's trauma. Anyway, the box is reopening but unfortunately for a completely different reason, so feel free to unsubscribe should this pop up on your feed but you are welcome to stay if you find something of interest. As you are no doubt already aware, I finally achieved my degree! I am the proud recipient of a piece of paper authorised by the University of Hull that claims I obtained an upper second class honours degree in Education and Professional Development. Not that I will but I can now add BA(Hons) to my name! I also came to the self-diagnosed opinion that my general weirdness can be attributed to being on the autistic spectrum, who would have thought giving a neurodivergent with well-established masking techniques access to unfettered academic research would produce genuine mental improvements... unsurprisingly I'm fully off...