The New Rules

Officially on holidays from today and heading off travelling in Vietnam for a couple of weeks, which will be nice. A final sweep of the Google Reader this morning revealed Will Richardson’s latest piece on The New Rules.  Like a lot of Will’s stuff it resonated with me and I thought I’d post his rules [...]

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Don’t scare the children!

Alongside the box of ‘things schools should be teaching’, a new box of things schools should steer clear from: in this case, teaching about climate change. Apparently, kids run the risk of being terrified by the ‘doomsday’ scenarios that the government is providing in its kitbag of resources for schools.  News.com.au reports:  Australian National University’s [...]

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NAPLAN knows…

I started off all indignant when I ripped Miranda Devine’s latest piece of folksy wisdom out of the Herald-Sun on Thursday but in the end you just have to laugh at the dross that comes out of the conservative media’s best and brightest day after day as if someone is paying them to do it! [...]

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NAPLAN’d Out

It’s been a big week, chock-full of NAPLAN testing, among other things. Three mornings of more paper-shuffling than you can poke a 2B pencil at. And is it worth the effort? Mine, my team or the students? I doubt it. I’ve blogged about NAPLAN before: about teaching to the test, the new lows of league [...]

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Weird Science

Today the Victorian Government announced that it had shelved a $28 million dollar project to invent a “pleasant tasting, attention-sustaining, low-priced drink that enables secondary students to work safely and with sustained alertness all day” because it failed the common-sense test. And yes, I’m pretty sure that Coca-Cola might have already invented it. There’s more [...]

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What’s phones got to do with it?

Okay, I admit I teach in a pretty privileged environment where I don’t face the threat of violence from students on an everyday basis. That some teachers do face threats and intimidation in the classroom and that they can still go and make a difference to their students is an enormous credit to them. So, [...]

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Bipartisan Education Policies (they’re both bad!)

When I posted the above quote from the AGE as a  tweet above this morning it was because Mungo MacCallum’s piece in the AGE this morning, ‘Pandering to Prejudice’, struck a chord with me as to just how narrow the election debate has been, both in terms of the issues raised and the constituents it’s [...]

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Teach for Australia (revisited)

I’m not commenting (I already have) I’m just pointing to this from the AUSTRALIAN today. PROFESSIONALS wanting a mid-career change of lifestyle will be encouraged to become teachers under a plan to ease their entry into classrooms. Under the plan, professionals could be teaching in classrooms after just eight weeks of specialised training. Announcing the [...]

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50 Lines

I promise not to comment on the state of the education debate in the current election campaign. I promise not to comment on the state of the education debate in the current election campaign. I promise not to comment on the state of the education debate in the current election campaign. repeat. But I can’t [...]

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That’s all I have to say about that…

Why not instead finally acknowledge that standardized test scores are a terrible way to decide whether one school is better than another? This is true whether the reform in question is vouchers, charter schools, increased school accountability, smaller class sizes, better pay for all teachers, bonuses for good teachers, firing of bad teachers — measured [...]

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