Back on the Blog!

Back on deck again so it’s goodbye (for awhile) to all this.

I have had a great break, hardly touched my computer (as you can tell by the blog posts or lack of), haven't read any of my feeds, listened to just a couple of podcasts but its good to be back in amongst it again – lots of people to catch up with, lots of reading to do, finding my feet with another timetable – an extra .2 up my sleeve – if anyone wants that time just let me know. There have been a few things coming up for that time in the pipeline - talk about that in another post. Good to exercise the old ‘grey matter’ again but as Karen Boyes pointed out the other day the brain is only grey when it’s dead – ohh! Yep tell that to Time magazine if u read their January feature 'How to Sharpen your mind' - frequent references to grey matter - uum who to believe & does it really matter anyway! I thought their article MULTITASKING: Help! I've Lost My Focus was particularly relevant to me - and you too if your reading this!

So Karen was in at Stratford’s teacher only day last week – covering Habits of Mind, Learning Styles, a bit of Brain physiology, lots of practical ideas about classroom strategies to promote thinking skills. A lot of similar ground to what we covered in our cluster teacher only day last year, though there were quite a few who weren’t there last year, but enough variety to keep everyone engaged and soaking it up. But as Karen pointed out early in the day there is a difference in knowing all this stuff and actually putting it into practice into our classroom – walking the talk or as Peter Senge describes ‘espoused theory’ – we know this stuff but do we really do it???? "To know and not to do is still not to know" This is a hard one for me not having the classroom time anymore & spending more time reading & talking about stuff with people than actually doing it myself... Some of what Karen has to offer i find a little hard to reconcile - on one hand all the stuff she talks about as i listed above is great but for me it just don't sit comfortably with the use of accelerated learning techniques to assist senior students to learn 'stuff' for exams - i wrote about this last year in "Builder's Houses, Mechanic's Cars, Teacher's Children". So in the words of Forrest Gump "That's all I have to say about that."