View from our boat today.
View from our boat today.
Did not expect this in 2025! Bloc Party: Tiny Desk Concert - YouTube
I need to not stay in that space where teaching takes up most of me. Because that doesn’t fill me in the ways I need to be filled, in order to go all in.
❤️
Is there an engagement crisis?
Aside from attendance issues, this is the bit that always interests me
Let’s get our definitions straight. Engagement might mean behavioural engagement: turning up, doing what’s asked, looking the part. Or emotional engagement: feeling interested, enjoying the activity, liking your teacher. Or cognitive engagement: the holy grail, which involves sustained effort, grappling with complexity, and sticking with tasks that stretch the mind.
The trouble is, we often collapse these meanings into one another. A student who looks busy is assumed to be learning. A smiling child is read as motivated. But as Dylan Wiliam reminds us, “Anyone can think up interesting and engaging activities that will occupy students in classrooms, but unfortunately such activities do not always, or even often, result in valued learning for students.”1
Are they even learning anything?! How can I tell?
James Acaster Reacts to Bo Burnham’s ‘Inside’ - YouTube
Everyone’s been trying to do content about lockdown. Everyone’s failed. He’s just nailed it. Let’s all quit. What the fuck is the point? Um, and yeah, and I I there that was I I I definitely don’t feel like that now, but I don’t remember when I stopped feeling like it. It was quite a while.
It’s not a competition but how often does it feel like one? I feel like this as a teacher, sometimes, fine, all the time. This thing that this other teacher has done is so good, I didn’t do that. Therefore, I should just quite. I’m clearly not good enough.
When Bring Me The Horizon release a lofi album. I liked it.
At the beginning of Able’s epiphany, he verbalizes the problem:
…and care and care and care and care. — You have to! They need you! — as if this caring was a sort of payment, virtue as its own reward, and not, in fact a type of fee, or toll, taxing me and drawing me down.
Is the cost of caring too much? Why should Able (or any teacher) care when educators are constantly lambasted for complaining too much, not doing enough for students, and showing ingratitude? Teachers should push that boulder uphill, keep our mouths shut, and be happy. If teachers don’t like it, they should quit and get a real job.
Holidaying in a place where using cash is normal. At home, I scan a QR code and I’m done. Here, I have to count out the money. Feels more expensive.
Similarly, here it is normal for you to give the cashier more to make it up to an easier amount to give change for. So much maths, that I don’t typically do!
Reserved seats on the flight. Two sets of two seats next to each other.Then after I’d done that. I realised it says a and c. I teach 5 year olds so I m let those are not consecutive letters. But apparently they are consecutive seats.
PROJECT HAIL MARY Trailer (2025) YouTube
Excited to see that, though it makes me want to read the book again.
Why carry one device when you can carry 4!
9pm to 5:30am
Maybe today will the day I finally do the thing I’ve been saying will.
Need a snack? Muji in China has got you covered!
Ruck to the park. Do some pull ups and dips. Ruck home. Getting something in before work as am planning to have a beer after work.
I love his writing. It bounces around a little between present and past but the ending was fun.
Finished reading: Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway 📚
Y’s “tower of rainbows”
I’ve always wanted a dog but not with our current arrangement. Today, had fun with this little car while the kids did archery.
We had the magnetic letters out this week. This one is true, sometimes.
‘Scuse the lighting. I’m end of term tired. But also, want to appreciate these last couple of weeks with our class and colleagues who are leaving. A difficult balancing out.
I think like the job of being a teacher is just this incredible sense of responsibility. You’re constantly putting yourself under this microscope of going, am I good enough? Do I deserve to be in charge of making decisions that will impact young lives for a long time, even if I didn’t intend it to? And so I think the least we can do is provide educators with a space where they feel trusted and cared for.
I keep wanting to write about this podcast episode because it’s stuck in my head.
The teacher asking “Am I good enough to shape these young lives?” is exactly the teacher we want in our schools.
It’s a discussion we have a lot, that we’re forever too busy to find the time to consider if what we’re doing is good enough. And it feels like schools are often saying that that what they want but, teacher’s don’t feel it.
And it’s not going to change. So we are forced to choose.
It’s “funny” how the talk of footballers and tennis players always being ask to do (play) more resonates as a teacher. That they consider it too much. Similar eh?
Do not like how similar the Coke bottles are now.
Mental health involves having feelings that are appropriate to a situation and having the coping skills to be able to manage those feelings. And the way kids develop coping skills is through practice. They need to feel sad, frustrated, and uncomfortable in order to learn to recognize and understand those feelings and to figure out what kinds of coping skills work for them.