All posts about Teaching
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 Prize, for his poetry collection *Low Flight* (低处飞行)....
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 homework, in the exact format the exam demanded. ...
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 from a management consultancy: flawless grammar, f...
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 terminal window, and typed: "Look at these results and...
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 spreading so quickly. The workload case is genuinely co...
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 pieces of coursework depended on which, and no cl...
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 learn by sitting in on negotiations. Teaching is d...
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 device, working through their own adaptive pathway, at...
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 nothing beyond the fortnight ahead, and spent the year ...
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. But one boy, after a pause, said: "I remember you ma...