Laugh at yesterday (The Beach Boys)

Photo by Rohan Makhecha on Unsplash

Right here, right now: first day back at school for the sprint finish to the year, Term 4. Well, for the seniors anyway. Basically they have three weeks of school and then go on exam leave.

The revision trick is all about focus. Qui Gon-Jinn's phrase is overused by me, I know, but it's so apt: your focus determines your reality.

To help focus I offer these great ideas from an Edutopia article on 'brain breaks'.

I've heard our students use this term but they regard it as a break from study and not a sharpening of their focus.

There are some great activities in the article. Read it! What have you got to lose? And you could gain some focus. 

It's within your grasp!

Let the sun climb, oh, burn 'way my mask (Pearl Jam)

Teacherpreneurs. 

I stumbled on the word while proofing an essay by one of my colleagues - let's call her 'Mandy', who's fighting her way towards a Masters degree in educational leadership/management, bless her little cotton socks.

Anyway - I noticed the word and quietly choked on my peanut butter encrusted crusket. I am NOT a fan of these buzz words.

For a sec I thought she may have coined it herself but, no - she assured me that it was a thing. To prove it, Mandy gave me a book called 'Teacherpreneurs -Innovative teachers who lead but don't leave'.  Oh my.

Coincidentally, I read an Edutopia piece on it and, lo - it does, alack alas, appear to be a current thing.

What is a T*r? Well, according to the three people who co-wrote this book, it's a teacher (doh) who has 'time, space, and incentives to incubate big pedagogical and policy ideas and...execute them'.

These lucky t*rs spread new ways and approaches as mentors, action researchers, blah blah blah. While still teaching. 

Really? As a concept, it all sounds a tad forced to me. 

While reading the book, it was tough to get a feel for how a T*r is different to a decent Specialist Classroom Teacher (shout out to Greg) or a Director of Innovation (shout out to Toni) or an expert teacher who has cool ideas (shout out to Ange, Mandy, Greg, Amy and on and on).

I guess their definition wipes out a lot of worthy teachers who don't have the luxury of 'time, space, incentives' to innovate. Of course provision of these things can allow expert teachers to shine, to be innovative. Not rocket science, is it!

Ultimately, it appears that t*r is a bit like mercury - just when you feel like you have a bead on it, it changes shape on you and becomes liquid - like that quicksilver like dude in Terminator 2 who goes about morphing into other things.

I suppose I just don't see the point in the label. 

Maybe I'm being too harsh. After all, I guess it doesn't do any harm. If you are involved in thinking how things can be done better while putting in the hard yards as a practitioner, frinstance: maybe you're part of a change action group in your school, then - hurrah - you may very well want to give yourself a teacherpreneur label.

Or you could be really innovative, and just get on with it.

Newspaper taxis appear on the shore (The Beatles)

Here are the next 5:

1 Multiple Intelligences
This one is from the mighty Edutopia people. It's a self assessment tool that I researched and used for my Homeroom mentors. 

I have my doubts about this as a thing but there is no denying how much fun these kinds of tools can be.

2 Bill Gates
A youtube clip of Bill extolling the virtues of online learning.



3 Newspaper clippings
The image at the top of the page was created by this nifty little newspaper generator. Confession time: I didn't delete this bookmark! Cos - it's rilly cool!

4 Teacher speak
This one is quite a cool dictionary of terms that 21st century teachers use. That may not sound terribly amazingly cool for cats but trust me - we are so keen to use jargon in education that we all forget what things actually mean from time to time. This site gives succinct run downs on the terms and language we use.

5 Snip
Not Snipping Tool - which is also awesome (thanks Toni for introducing me that) but Snip. This one allows teachers annotate and do all sorts of cool stuff (we are a simple bunch really - this sort of thing REALLY excites us).

BTW - this is another one I won't be deleting!

And that's it till next time.