Let's Move On From Here...

Since you didn't ask, here are four things I think we are not teaching our kids well enough: What a healthy relationships look like and how to spot an unhealthy one. I'm not necessarily advocating sitting the nation's teens down in front of The Archers, but the Radio 4 audience seems to have had its collective eyes opened by the story of Rob and Helen Titchener. How much misery could we prevent if we taught our youngsters how to recognise the signs of coersion and manipulation and how to raise the alarm?  What real men and women look like naked. Here's the thing: most teens that I know, know that the images they are seeing are manipulated. They know that they are being presented with unrealistic ideals. But that doesn't help when they are looking at their body in the mirror and worrying about the fact that one of their balls is bigger than the other or that their labia are not quite like the ones on Youtube. They need to see that there is a huge varia

I clearly remember my sex educations lessons at school. There was the talk on periods in Junior School where all the girls were gathered together to learn that once a month we would shed our womb linings. There was the Science lesson where a supply teacher (brave, brave woman) who was the first teacher to use the word penis in front of us without embarrassment. There was the RE lesson where we watched a Swedish film in which Eric and Inger ran nekked as the day they were born into the sea togther and when they came out Inger was pregnant. God knows what happened out there, but the upshot was Inger giving birth in a scene so graphic that one boy fainted. Nothing about consent though. Nothing really helpful. Nothing that made sex sound like something you wanted to do one day. If you were gay or questioning there was nothing for you at all. Later there was much talk of AIDS. We were that generation. Sex equalled death.  And yet for all that, we were lucky. We learned about sex in

This blog has been brewing for a while. There are a fair few teachers out there on twitter who like to keep up a steady stream of tweets about how much planning, preparation and marking they have done on weekends and in the holidays. You know who you are. For three very good reasons...PLEASE STOP!  1. You are normalising an excessive work load. We all take work home sometimes, or stay late to make sure that the marking is done. What do you want when you let the world know you are doing this - a medal? They don't give those out for doing your job and they certainly don't give them out for letting the world know just how dedicated you are. If you are looking for affirmation, then that comes from the wonderful moments when your learners make significant progress. Tweeted pictures of your marking stack are -frankly- obnoxious and nobody is going to pat you on the back. The teaching profession has already accepted that we cannot do our job properly without using some of our ow

This has not been a good week. Suffice it to say that having written about things I say in the classroom last week, it's ironic that I lost my voice. Not being able to talk above a whisper might have given my husband a break, but it was really frustrating for me! It got me to thinking though, about the importance of voices in the classroom and what teachers use them for. 1. To gain and hold the attention of a class. I had an RE teacher in Secondary school who went by the name of (and I'm not making this up) Mr Ghandi. He was a lovely man - kind and gentle - and he was probably very knowledgeable. I liked him very much as a person, but his voice was totally unsuited to the classroom. He droned. Nasally. It was like being taught by a monotone crumhorn. The result was that I remembered very little of what he tried to impart and would drift off into daydreams. His classes were quiet because we were comatose. A teacher's voice needs to have variety of pitch, tone and volu