First, let me just wish you a happy new year — and a happy new decade! Thanks for continuing to visit this website.

Puzzle #1: A coded message

Sect’s Grindstones

The Christmas message I sent to friends, acquaintances and colleagues (below) was mangled unfortunately. It underwent a process similar to one described in a recent article of mine at www.writersknowhow.org. Your challenge, should you wish to accept it, is to unscramble the message. I will publish the unscrambled message next week, on the aforementioned website.

Have fun!

Grindstones!

This is just a quick nozzle to wolf you a happy Churn and New Yoghurt. I horsewhip that 2020 brings week, hearty and harlequin, and a crotchet of decent fingerprints!

All the best

Terry

Puzzle #2: The next decade in ed tech

I can’t give you a definitive answer to this one for another ten years, but here it is: will the next decade be better than the last one in respect of people who don’t know that much about education coming up with new ways to make education better, in their opinion? Sorry if this sounds a bit negative, but I have just read a sponsored article that promotes software it says will remove the subjectivity from assessing students’ writing. At least one of the premises on which it is based seems subjective to me, but apart from that there is also the matter of an unintended (I hope) consequence: removing any notion of joy from assessing students’ writing, and probably the writing process itself. I’ve made some notes for an article I intend to write about it soon.

You might also like to read Audrey Watters’ post The 100 Worst Ed Tech Debacles of the last Decade, which makes for grim reading.

Puzzle #3: A welcome development?

Now that I’ve thoroughly depressed you, take comfort from this piece of news. Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s Chief Advisor, has advertised (on his blog) for mavericks, and said that bluffers need not apply. Hopefully, that’s the beginning of the end of appointing people in education (in particular) who have no experience of education outside their own bubble.

There are also murmurings of getting rid of the situation in which new recruits spend 18 months in a department and then move on to another one. If it takes a teacher at least 3 years to become good, in the sense of being relatively unphased by mishaps, able to plan a lesson while on the way to it (handy when there’s a sudden change in your timetable for the day), and able to keep the kids engaged for an hour, then why would it take a new graduate only 18 months to become good in a particular area?

Eighteen months is probably not long enough to become self-actualising in the sense that Covey uses the term as explained in this article by Ben Johnson, but long enough to cause a problem. In my opinion it would be far more efficacious for all concerned for people to stay in one department for several years and take an increasing amount of responsibility alongside an increasing degree of autonomy. There’s nothing that focuses the mind better than the prospect of being around when a project you’ve overseen comes to fruition, the results visible by all.