Best Practice

When I was a teacher, one of the things that bothered me most was the culture around criticism. Not the culture that meant that teachers spent half their free time bitching about pupils (though that should have bothered me more than it did). The culture that meant that teachers often refused to accept criticism or feedback. Often their self-esteem was so tied up with their own perception that they were good teachers that they really couldn't cope with the idea that they might not be, or that they might have something to learn from other people. I guess it's a bit like driving – 90% of teachers would say that they are above average.

This was more extreme in my PGCE (teacher training) than in the school I taught at for 5 years. For example, during my PGCE, I wanted to investigate what made a good explanation. My plan was to ask pupils which teachers they thought were particularly good at explaining things, then observe some lessons with those teachers and try to find commonalities. My plan got vetoed by senior staff at the school, because they couldn't stand the idea of pupils being asked who was good at explaining things because that would imply that other teachers were less good at explaining things.

The same sort of thing happens in churches too, though with even less good reason. If church A is very good at youth work, for example, then the response of neighbouring churches of different traditions is (in my experience at least) likely to be one of the following:

• ignoring it
• accusing them of stealing the young people from “our” church
• pointing out deficiencies in the way that church A does things

The better response, of course, would be to get the youth workers from A in to talk about how to do youth work. Don't necessarily accept everything they say – it's possible to build what looks outwardly like a successful youth group on foundations that are distinctly not Christian, for example – but aim to learn from what they do well. Why don't more ceremonial churches get evangelicals in to talk about how to help people to grow through preaching? Why don't evangelical churches get ceremonialists in to talk about the power of the acted word? (With examples of how lives have been changed in both cases of course – it's all very saying how we think God should work in something; it's much better to say how God has worked in something).

As it is, we too often lose that in a haze of politics and pride.

Sharing best practice – good. Obvious, but ignored.

Science Video

So funny...

Ordination and Physics Teaching

I used to be a physics teacher. I'm now training for ordination in the Church of England. People's reaction is often surprise because they think the two are very different. Here are some similarities....

• Both are about conveying truth, even Truth. St Augustine (I think it was him anyway) said "All truth is God's truth". That's quite profound and I might well blog on that soon (along with more creation / evolution stuff).
• Both involve a lot of interaction with and responsibility for people. That was actually one of the key reasons I went into physics teaching in the first place.
• A lot of the thinking skills involved are the same - the way I think about them anyway. There's lots of putting different ideas together needed in both, and lots of explaining one thing by saying it's a bit like something else.
• Both physics and theology often end up taking something really beautiful, interesting and cool and making it seem utterly dull and uninteresting. I aim not to do that.

Being Taught

One of the things I'm spending my time doing at the moment is learning Greek (as written around the Eastern Mediterranean in the 1st century AD). That's good fun, but in a way very odd.

Lectures aren't too bad. OK, I've not been to many in the last few years, but I very rarely gave them. But sitting in a room with 12 other pupils and a teacher, who then proceeds to teach, is very odd, because I've done that as a teacher as well.

It's odd for several reasons:

• I'm automatically picking up on the various teaching skills he uses (and sometimes wish he wouldn't always give me difficult questions)
• I'm now going away and doing homework after setting and marking so much of it, so I get more of an idea of why people sometimes don't get full marks, etc
• I'm a lot more conscious of what I'm doing and why, I understand some of the odd advice (like doing bits of Greek every day rather than just spending the morning on it) better
• seeing how I've changed as a pupil in the 10 years or so since I last had to do something like this. I'm probably less of a perfectionist, but much better at taking the long view. I'm not aiming to get 100% on every test and piece of work; I'm aiming to get fluent.
• bits of Latin grammar keep popping into my head. At least once, I've been asked to translate some English into Greek and the Latin version has just appeared...

GCSE Results

GCSE results came out today.

My class of 18 got 7A*, 9A, 2B, which is almost exactly what my GCSE classes always seem to get (except one time, with a not especially nice class). Of those, i think 13 or 14 got the same grade on the mock as on the real thing, which just goes to show that it's the people who put the work in year round (or get the answers right year round anyway) who do well in Physics. There's the occasional person who stops working after the mock and slips a grade, and the occasional person who really works very well to get up a grade or two.

What seemed to cause most difficulty was the borderline A/A* kids making it over the grade boundary. Really needs a lot of work, that one.

And on the subject of revision, there's an excellent cartoon here.

Teaching Deficiencies

Reflecting on my teaching career, I think there were quite a few thigs I got right. One of the things I think I probably should have done much better is use positive feedback towards the kids / young people - encouraging then when they're doing stuff well, etc.

There are many and complex reasons for it, largely tied in with stuff like self-esteem, perfectionism, wanting to be honest, etc. But I guess it raises a difficult question. Given that most of these people are mixed up, suffering from low self-esteem and so on, how can I be communicating to them a healthy self acceptance?

Given that they aren't Christians, to what extent should I be shoring up their falsely placed self acceptance that's always going to be too fragile? Yes, the ideal psychologically is that they come to see themselves as God sees them, as more wicked than they'd ever feared but more loved that they'd ever dreamed. But if they aren't going to come to that stage, where's the best place for me to leave them? Where they're comparatively safe, or where they are staring into the brink?

It's something I never really got to grips with, and I ended up with some kind of compromise. Do I go down the whole making them feel good about themselves line, because I care about them and want them to be able to function effectively in society? Do I push them nearer the edge and hope and pray that they will see that their position isn't tenable and that their only hope is Christ, because I care about them and don't want them to face judgement for their pride?

What I ended up doing was encouraging people that they could do the subject, but also pointing out that being good at Physics or maths doesn't make you any more (or less) valuable as a person.

When I was doing teacher training, I joined the Association of Christian Teachers. I quit as soon as I could, because they obviously weren't even beginning to realise that kind of question existed. I wish I'd had a good chance to chat through that sort of thing beforehand with more experienced, more thoughtful, Christian teachers. Ho hum - guess that means I should be thinking through it and supporting Christians I know in teaching now.

Why Revision is Cheating

This is one of those things I don't think I was allowed to say back when I was teaching...

Most of education seems to be assessed by exams. Great, I think, as someone who is quite good at them. Exams are designed to test your on-the-spot recall of and ability at answering questions on a subject. It's not all that matters in real-life use of a subject - what you do when you have time to think about it and can go away and look stuff up also matters - but it's an important part.

What you virtually never get in real life though is having to recall all the material you have studied, and getting six months notice that it's going to be at such and such a time, in such and such a place. My pupils didn't give me six months' notice that they were going to ask me about gravity or how batteries work or whatever. They just did it.

So if exams are really texting your ability to think on the spot, then revising for them is kind of cheating. It's a legal kind of cheating, but it's cheating nonetheless because you don't get much notice in real life.

If exams aren't testing your ability to think on the spot, then why not make them open book?

And yes, I know that coursework, especially at GCSE, is an even more flawed system.

Oh yes, another thing. If exams are testing your ability to think on the spot and whatever, they why give some people extra time for dyslexia (literally bad reading)? They don't get it in real life - they have to compete on an even playing field with everyone else. Or if people with dyslexia get extra time, why not give people who can read really well (eulexia) less time? I honestly can't see what the exam system is meant to be doing.

But hey, I was always pretty good at exams, and I've got a load more to do. And yes, I'll probably revise for them. But I'll still think it's cheating.

Teaching

Apparently, teaching is the least boring job. I notice that being a church minister wasn't on their lists at all.

While I did like teaching, and was rarely bored, it is sad that so many people seem bored by their jobs. I tended to use the priniciples:

• If it's boring, is it worth doing at all?
• If it's worth doing, how can I make it less boring?

Back to learning Greek

One of my objectives over the summer is to improve my Greek a bit more, so next term doesn't come as too much of a shock! I haven't studied any since the new year, and gave myself some tests on it this morning. Thankfully, I didn't do too badly - 90%ish, which is ok, but not as good as it would be if I'd been studying a bit.

But the point of this post is to heartily recommend VocabOne as an easy program for learning vocab in foreign languages. I've set it so that the questions are all posed in one of the Greek fonts, so it asks me a couple of hundred Greek->English questions. I could do it the other way round too, but I figure that I won't be expected to rewrite the Greek NT from the English translation....

Missing School, etc

It's now 3 days since I left. What I miss about school is mainly the people and the high amount of personal contact. When I was there, I'd spend 10 hours a day or so with people, and a lot of that talking to them. Most schools haven't broken up yet, so church is still on term-time with meetings and so on. If I just see people at church meetings and stuff, that's 7½ hours per week, including meeting up with people to read the Bible and pray and stuff. When church moves into holiday mode, that will go down. It's a huge difference...

On the other hand, last night, there were loads of people over here doing a lot more cleaning, etc. I'm still emotionally drained from it - binning stuff isn't easy for me, especially when it's seeing other people binning my stuff... They did a good job of cleaning, mind you, and it's now a case of waiting for the estate agent.

On a related note, I've figured out why I'm often so apparently messy. It's a saving time thing. I want the stuff I use a lot where I can get at it in the minimum time possible. So it's no use having my shredder (for example) on a shelf where I'd need a step ladder to get at it; I want it when I can reach it from my desk. But it's on the high shelf now, and I admit it looks a lot neater there, so I'll probably put up with the whole hassle of getting stuff out then putting it away for a while. At least until the house is sold.