Sometimes we need to step back in order to move forward

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 up with the Jones to a certain extent, but more than that, I allowed myself to open up to too many possibilities at once and as such I lost my way.

I've spent the last 3 - 6 months figuring out what I want direction I want my teaching to take, where I see myself being a few years down the line and I guess I need to fettle my interests a bit in order to come out of the other end a better and more accomplished teacher, learner and leader.

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100WCGU wk #20

The prompt this week is to use at least one of these for inspiration. …the powers that be / the apple of his eye / the writing on the wall… It was early in the Autumn When she took herself away. The trees in our orchard cried leaves for her; She was the apple of their eye , their Mistress. She said it was, "Inevitable". Powers that be had deemed it so and so it was Fruitless to pursue it. Her one way trip. The marks of her passing are writ large on the cold orchard wall s. They are writ larger, though, in me.

100 WCGU wk 21

This week's challenge is a picture prompt. I quite like picture prompts, they allow so many tangents. Our classrooms are windows. Children's views are shaped by the pictures we paint, the opportunities they envisage. We are responsible for the window's upkeep: treat it with consistent care and attention and it will open seamlessly to worlds that are beyond their wildest dreams; leave it untouched and those worlds will remain forever out of reach. The window is open to the world to view, some outsiders simply point out what is missing from times they spent inside. Others like to castigate and deride. Most smile knowingly, remembering with fondness the people who opened windows for them. People like us.

Independent Learning

This evening on #ukedchat, the discussion was about 'independent learning' or 'IL' and it's importance in the curriculum. In my opinion IL is an umbrella title, one so multi-faceted that we probably need to invest a lot of time determining the rationale behind it. One point that came across was from Miles Berry that Independent Learning is something innate, present from birth as a survival mechanism so teaching it is contradictory. This is something that I agree with and yet we are in a system that has institutionalised our lives to the point where children are taught out of this. They become so reliant on being told what, when and how to do things, that they forget what they are genetically programmed to do. And there's my mistake. I'm talking about these children in the third person. The point is that we have all fallen into the habit of providing knowledge as teachers. There is no blame associated with this, we are as caught up in the status quo as

I am MisterJim

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