Should Teachers Force All Their Students to Be Ambitious?
I recently read about Wang Jibing, a food delivery rider in Jiangsu province who won one of China's highest literary honours, the Lu Xun Literary Pri...
Teaching
View all →Is Peer-Marking Effective?
Last year I was preparing my Year 4 class for their ISA writing exam, and I built a small machine. Every weekend, each student wrote a full essay for...
Pen and Paper in Class, AI at Home
Every teacher now knows the genre. A student who struggles to write a coherent paragraph in class hands in homework that reads like a briefing paper ...
How AI Coding Tools Can Help Teachers
A few months ago I exported my gradebook as a CSV — three classes, a term of quiz scores, attendance flags, homework submission rates — opened a term...
Is It Unethical to Automate Marking with AI?
Sunday evening, a stack of essays, and a lesson to plan for 8 a.m. — every teacher knows the tableau. It is no wonder that AI marking tools are sprea...
What the Corporate World Can Teach Teachers
Last term I watched a colleague prepare for parents' evening with no record of which students were at risk of missing their targets, no list of which...
Why Is Teamwork So Much Harder for Teachers?
In most workplaces I have known, you can watch your colleagues work. In local government I sat in an open-plan office; at a law firm, junior lawyers ...
Is Personalised Learning Always a Good Thing?
Walk into certain well-funded classrooms today and you will see something that looks, at first glance, like the future: every child on their own devi...
Plan Lessons in Advance, or Week by Week?
Every August, before the students arrive, the same question returns: how much of this year should I plan now? In my first year I planned almost nothi...
What Leo Tolstoy Can Teach Us About Teaching
A few weeks ago I asked my class what they remembered from a unit we had finished the previous term. The content had evaporated almost completely. Bu...
Book Reviews
View all →The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis
So well written — Charles Highway is not likeable, and Amis's sentences are unfairly funny about that. I felt more parallels with my own thoughts as...
Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama
Such a clear diagnosis of where America is intellectually and how it got there — short enough to read in a couple of evenings without feeling shouted...
Adrift in the South by Xiao Hai
A stark reminder of how low the class ladder goes in China, and how privileged my daily life is by comparison. Xiao Hai spent years in southern fact...