I am MisterJim

From the title, I expect you think this post is all negative. That's logical, based on the failure element of it, but it's wrong. This was a magic moment that happened with a parent the other day. Her child - a bright girl - has done really well with me this year but, as I keep saying, I've not really done that much, it was all her own efforts. Her mother responded by saying something really interesting, in my opinon, which is paraphrased below: Every year we've been told how well she's doing, how she's brilliant at everything and is top of the class. You've told us how she's all of those things, but also how she can move forward and what we can do and why we should. You've put her in positions where she'll fail, where she can't rely on her academic intelligence and watched her struggle and then explained why it's okay to feel that frustration and how to overcome it. Thank you, Mr Maloney, for helping my child to fail. This comment...

"Now children," began Mrs Jobs, smiling, "today we have a very special visitor. His name is PC Harvester and he's going to talk to you about car safety." “Reme...” As she spoke, the door opened and PC Harvester walked in. "Good afternoon, children." exclaimed PC Harvester. "I have a question. Does anybody’s Mummy or Daddy drive quickly?" Hands shot up and a voice from the back squeaked, "My daddy drives fast, he has a Ferarri." "Golly," said PC Harvester, "and does your Daddy wear his seatbelt?" "Only when the bas***d coppers are around." ...out of the mouths of babes...

It's been a while since I put fingers to keyboard and wrote something on my blog, or any blog for that matter. I think it has less to do with workload & more to do with overload. Social Networking on various levels had begun to take over my approach to a lot of things, most noticeably my work, but it had begun to encroach on my personal life as well. Frank, educational discussions were taking place after clocking out time, I would lie awake at night and follow a hashtag stream from an earlier Twitter debate. I would be sitting on the sofa with my wife, ostensibly watching the TV, but my head wasn't. I was actually becoming so obsessed with all things that were educationally cutting edge, that I was beginning to neglect my marking, assessment and correcting my planning where necessary. In essence, my desire to push the boundaries was threatening to impact on the children in my care. But how did it get to this? Honestly, I don't know. I suppose I was trying to keep ...

I was looking for inspiration for my class blog. One of the children had written a story and I posted on twitter. Richard, a boy in my class who was 'allergic' to writing in detail, had posted a story off his own back and was developing his own style. I wanted to share this - for him. He isn't the most confident of children and I knew that if he felt that he was valued as an author, it would encourage him to write more. I didn't expect 13 comments. The response was overwhelming and it got me thinking. We should do this more as a class, but I only know a few blogs made by other schools. So I tweeted again, using a hashtag of #classlinkup to encourage other teachers to share their blog addresses and therefore provide a comprehensive list of blogging schools for everyone to use. This was taken up by a lot of people, who added their own class blogs to the list. Evolution. Then a chance comment by Oliver Quinlan @oliverquinlan  got me thinking. I...

Beginnings I’ve always liked using the web to find tools that help my class to learn – even if at first the learning takes a back seat to the playing! I first discovered BrainPOP at BETT in 2010; where a fellow teacher, Tom Sale, was exalting its merits on their stand as a BrainPOPer. If I’m honest, there was a lot I didn’t understand or chose to ignore at first. I spoke to Chris & Eylan, two fanastically enthusiastic people, who convinced me to go home and trial it. I left BETT that day dazzled by the array of talented teachers that BrainPOP had invited onto their stand to simply talk about the impact it had had on their respective classes. With their testimonials & Chris’ sales pitch, I vowed to use it straight away. I went back to my school, walked into the finance manager’s office to find there was no budget left until April (the school was in the final phase of rolling out laptops across all classes & with a school of 570 kids, there wasn’t much left). I also had th...