Archive for the ‘books’ Category

So, I had this idea. If you read this blog at all regularly, you’ll know that I consider @alomshaha a friend. As well as writing, making films and teaching science, he should be credited with getting me on to Twitter two years ago. Thank him later. Right now, I’ve something more important for you to […]

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I tweeted a while back how frustrating it was many of a class of fourteen year olds seemed incapable of reading for fifteen minutes without distraction. I could understand it if I had handed out copies of The Origin of Species, but they choose the reading material. They can bring in their own books or […]

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Students – and so schools – clearly benefit from having well-trained, informed staff. The problem is not so much money as time. There has been a shift recently to offering training out of school time, partly because of ‘Rarely Cover’, and partly because of more general financial constraints. Fine – except that it’s still working […]

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New planner? Check. New timetable? Check. New class lists? Well, depends on how well organised your school is. Pile of coursework to mark? Probably. Schemes of work to tweak ready for September? Probably. Now think carefully about this one. Have you got the important jobs sorted out? Yes, I know those jobs are important. Like […]

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Book Busking

10Jun12

Where possible, I buy local. We have organic meat and eggs, for welfare reasons rather than concerns about pesticides or whatever. Chocolate, coffee and bananas are fairtrade. And yet, for a long time, I bought an awful lot of books through Amazon. I really shouldn’t have needed the recent revelation that Amazon are evading tax to encourage […]

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The paper for Week 9 of SciTeachJC was Johannes Met­zler and Ludger Woess­mann “The Impact of Teacher Sub­ject Knowl­edge on Stu­dent Achievement: Evi­dence from Within-Teacher Within-Student Vari­a­tion” IZA Dis­cus­sion Paper Num­ber 4999 (2010) (.PDF link) The main conclusions of the paper were that higher teacher expertise in their subject resulted in a higher level of […]

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I managed to make it to the 2012 ASE Conference for just one day, the Saturday. My plan is to blog it in three chunks for the sessions I attended, in order. We’ll see how it goes. These will be edited versions of my Evernote summaries of the sessions and my commentary (in italics), although […]

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Bah Humbug

18Dec11

Even in my secret identity as mild-mannered reporter teacher I’m not a huge Christmas fan. I mean, I understand the ideas and all, both those based around the solstice and the way the traditions have been pinched more recently by the Christians, but I just don’t like it much. (For those of a Christian tradition, […]

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I’m sure most people have quite clear rules for their classrooms, but one of my new (school) year’s resolutions is to build a more constructive relationship with some of my more challenging students. Don’t worry, I will not be describing specific difficulties, as I feel it would be unprofessional (as well as potentially being stupid […]

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Hopefully the posts this week have given a few ideas about how to make the teaching of evolution a little more interactive – it is, after all, fairly hard to show evolution happening in a school science lab. Today I’m going to share a few resources that have not featured so far, split between books […]

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