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I think that one of the best thing that a teacher can do for his or her students is to provide them with opportunities to engage with authentic audiences. This broadens the school community beyond the classroom walls, and allows students to see their work in a real context. Of course, it needs to be…

Something that’s been on my mind a lot lately has been the issue of reading and how important it is for students to read regularly, widely and deeply. I’m sure I am not alone in thinking that reading will remain one of the fundamental skills for academic success for a long time to come, regardless…

I can’t remember if I’ve written about this before but it’s a topic that I keep returning to. Privatisation – the selling off of public assets to private companies. It’s been standard economic fare for a long time now, beloved by neoliberals and their ilk. The basic theory of it goes a little bit like…

I was listening to Philip Adams on the drive home to work and he was speaking to an economist whose name I didn’t catch. I know that Adams is an unabashed ‘lefty’ – whatever that means in today’s day and age – and most people would argue that he’s hardly impartial about things like the…

The death of Robin Williams caused me to reflect on his work. I’ve always liked him as an actor, but I don’t think I would have ever said that he was my favourite actor or anything like that. To me – and I think this is probably a limited point of view, betraying my own narrow…

This is a little piece that I wrote for fun for a gifted and talented camp that I was on last week. Good fun. The great city of Setmorris was known far and wide for its wealth. Merchants used to say, if there was anything that you wanted, you would find it in Setmorris. Poets…

I was invited to do a whole day iPad training session at a school in Batehaven, which was pretty exciting for me. Liz and I have been talking for a couple of years about the possibility of moving south, getting away from Penrith and buying a place with a little bit of property. I know……

My thoughts about violence and war have been explored in this blog a number of times before; now is not the time to rehash those old arguments. Nor do I subscribe to the belief that I have to conform to my previously stated views in the present: I believe that we continue to grow an…

I’m teaching Junior (Year 7) Geography for the first time in a number of years this year, and I’m looking for a way to liven up the teaching – make it  more student-centered and allow opportunities for creative approaches. One of the topics that we look at is different biomes and ecosystems, and I was…

  Schools can be pretty focused places; it’s not surprising, really. Teaching in the modern age is very much driven by outcomes, standardised testing and measurement of student development. This can lead teachers to be really driven about what is happening at every minute – and I sometimes wonder whether this limits the opportunities for…