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Maths is not a GCSE

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, 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. On 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 recent years
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Recent posts

Who is school for? The parent?

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 p
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Who is school for?

 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 where the schoo
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Musings of an educational nature.

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
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Why crumbling foundation?

I'm not a builder and as far as I'm aware the house is fine, so why crumbling foundations?   Well, too often of late I've found myself mired in the muds of procrastination and have totally failed to achieve a single personal goal in any given week.  That's not to say I've achieved nothing, work and family-wise I'm doing okay but personally, not so well. To this end I'm going to try and post something at least once a week, be it pictures of my latest miniatures project, a short story or even a film/book review.  Let's see how long it lasts. ;-)
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