What are we on now? Blog no. 17?

I've sort of lost count I'll be honest with you. I've been asked to write a travel blog for a company. For nothing. Yeah alright then may as well. Watch this space

Actually I don't WANT to teach a three part lesson thank you...

Most of you who know me will be well aware that I don't subscribe to usual schools of thought. The conventional bores the shit out of me and I have a very short attention span.

The "three part" lesson plan was a structure taught as a planning tool in my PGCE, which I think was introduced by the DfES in 2003.

The idea of a three part, or bookended lesson plan was to structure a lesson according to some common framework, so that pupils would have a consistent learning experience. By structuring a lesson in terms of Starter, Main activity and Plenary, the idea was that teachers would deliver consistently brilliant lessons time after time.

Yes you can already hear the cynicism dripping from me.

Initially the three part lesson plan served as a nice scaffold in which I could plan a meat and two veg lesson, where concepts could be easily introduced, then expanded upon and concluded. A nice tool for a beginner.

After a while, it started to become clear by the way that the schools I worked in would INSIST on three part lessons that they had decided that there was really only one way to teach. Yes "research" shows the three part lesson to be an effective delivery method, but the examplar lessons I saw were all a bit dry for my liking.

Some stores in Sweden have these tills where the staff are not allowed to touch the money, they just feed it into a slot and the change comes out as calculated by the machine.

In my opinion, the experience of teaching a three part lesson is pretty similar to sitting on the till and feeding the money into the machine. The school has decided it can't trust you to use your professional judgement, and has thus denied you access to the alternatives.

I failed my last two observations because I deliberately avoided employing a three part structure in my lessons. Dicing with death? Maybe. Educationally sound. yes they were.

The fatal flaw with the bookended lesson is that it ends. Each lesson is a self-contained unit of knowledge that must be introduced, investigated and closed. The plenary sees to it that the pupils leave the room with closure having ticked all the objectives.

But science isn't like that.

Science is a huge subject that seeks to investigate and explain the world we live in and if you truly understand the topics taught in class then you should be taking your learning outside and applying it to everything you see. The idea of science starting and ending within the confines of the classroom walls is as absurd a notion as trying to say that teaching should only occur in a single pre-defined style.

So I will often start a lesson with a demo of something unusual, say the egg in bottle

(I've removed the video as it has my pupils in it)

then I'll set them a bunch of questions on the particle model and have them running around imitating particles to get the idea.

At the end of the lesson, instead of concluding and saying "well now you know everything there is to know about particles" I do a huge bang like this

(Video removed again - sorry!)

and then say

Next lesson I want you to use the particle model to explain what you have just seen.

...then I watch as they walk off, talking excitedly about the demo and trying to work out what happened.

It's not a three part lesson. It's in the wrong order. The main part is at the end. The explanation bit is in the middle as the main activity.

And the kids learn more.

So I'm sorry if I don't fit in with the lesson structure prescribed. I just happen to think there's a better way to do things.

Think about that for a while...

It's alright I escaped the Hitman Monkey!

It took a lot of shaking but I've dealt with his type before...

mini-Andy

Hmmmm I wonder where mini-Andy has got to?

I hope he hasn't been kidnapped by Islamic Jihadists.

God I fucking hate Kuwait...

Fucking typical

Just days after blogging about how crap Qatar is, I go and get offered a bloody good job there. Fuck it.

Now I have to choose between making a crap decision, spending a year going out of my mind with boredom and taking the money or continuing getting paid very little and having a lot of fun somewhere else.

Why does it always boil down to choices like this...

Pussy Magnet

I've been looking into a job in Vietnam for next year, so I says to Rafa,

It'll be great. I'll be like, English and Vietnamese and based in Vietnam. I'll be a pussy magnet!

to which he replied

You already ARE a pussy magnet Andy. Just with your poles reversed.

Bastard.

Learning Spanish

I was asked the other day by one of my mates here if I had a set of Spanish CDs and it just so happened that I did have the set on MP3, so he gave me his Creative to stick them on over the weekend.

When I got home, my mischief side came out and I copied 28 copies of Rick Astley's 1988 hit "Never gonna give you up" entitled Spanish Grammar 1, Spanish Grammar 2 etc.

That probably explains why I've got a broken nose...

By the way, have you seen this cracking Muppets video...

Whoops. Seems I pissed the management off again...

Remember kids...

You don't have to be GOOD to be a manager.

Am presently looking for jobs in the Far East and South America. As Rafa says (Congrats by the way)

This train terminates in Vietnam...

Qatar

I was just chatting with Matt online. He's back from a 5 day assignment in Kuwait, poor bastard.

however, maybe because he is white or maybe it's because he expected to end up in the shittiest place in the world (he did) he came back online and said,

Dude don't hate on Kuwait. It's not as shit as Qatar

Personally I don't think that the fact that a place is not as shit as Qatar is reason in itself for liking it. From what I've heard herpes is not as bad as Qatar but I still don't want it.

Double standards

Somehow I find myself in the rather absurd position that tomorrow I am being observed by another teacher, using the Virtual Learning Environment to teach chemistry. I was nominated as an "excellent practitioner" for my innovative use of IT in the classroom.

However, earlier in the term I managed to fail an observed lesson, observed by one of the senior managers who hates the way I teach. At the end of the same lesson, one of the pupils told me that I had delivered the best explanation that she had ever heard.

Go figure.

So tomorrow I guess I need to cover myself by telling the teacher observing that she should just ignore the crap teaching part and keep her eyes on the screen. That should do it.

Putting the twit in twitter (or Why you shouldn't blog too early...)

Regular readers may have noticed the twitter display in the top right hand corner of my blog, which changes throughout the day.

I added this as a little extra sub-blogging gadget for when I can't be bothered to write a full blog, but still want to say something.

The cool thing about Twitter is that it not only updates that thing up there in the corner, it also updates my own twitter page and my facebook status all in one and I can use this very cool Firefox plug-in called Twitterbar to quickly post up updates.

So these days, rather than just posting a few blogs a day I post up a tweet every few hours as soon as anything less than mundane happens in my little world.

So on Friday, I went out to the local bar with Rich the flatmate. In the bar there is the most amazing looking Romanian barmaid, who I've fancied since I first got here. I've had her number for a while but been too geekshitscared to ever call, but on Friday I was in pretty high spirits so I asked her if she fancied coming out to El Hombre Rana's gig on Saturday night.

To my great surprise, she actually said yes and I spent most of Saturday shiteing myself and wondering what sort of a mediocre time I could treat her to.

I called to confirm that she was coming out and we arranged to meet at 8pm and head out.

With everything confirmed I raced home to do what any self-respecting nerd with social aspirations would do and updated my twitter so that it read

is worried that he is going to lose his geeky credentials when everyone sees who he's taking out tonight...

Obviously I wasn't showing off. Oh no not me. I was just genuinely concerned that when I walked in with some sort of technobabe, no-one would die of shock.

Havin arranged to meet at 8, I was there at 7:50, probably a bit keen, and I waited.

...and waited

...and waited

With 25 minutes gone I figured I'd best give her a call as she may have been sleeping or something.

And that's when reality hit.

I'd been blown out. Bugger.

So now with the scene set for a smug entrance on the arm of some uber-babe, all my facebook friends and blog reading mates now expecting me to walk through the door with Claudia Schiffer, I turned up like a twat on my own.

As I walked through the door, expectation heavy on my shoulders, Steph just HAD to ask,

So, erm.... Where's the date?

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

It's ME!

Thanks to xkcd, which gets better and better every day for this one.

Spanish in half an hour

Oh christ.

I am meant to be meeting a girl to practise talking Spanish in all of like half an hour and I haven't looked at a Spanish book for months. Am now desperately digging through the books so I don't look like a complete prick.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

This is the moment that my French teacher warned me about

Waging war on terror

A few years back, when I was there, there was an incident in Kuwait that wasn't widely reported outside of the country, probably cos it would have made the inhabitants look like a bunch of morons.

As you may have guessed, Kuwait has very few attractions apart from getting blown to pieces by fundamentalists. I guess it's the only fun they get and most Kuwaitis are born mentalist so it's not a big stretch.

So there was this story of this woman jogger who was nearly kidnapped and bundled in a car by fundamentalists. They wanted to behead her, cos at the time that was fashionable.

But she just happened to have been quite cautious (there were a spate of kidnappings going on at the time, including Kenneth Bigley)

So when they tried to bundle her in the car she pulled out a knife and stabbed the guy in the head. Typical Kuwaiti attempt to do anything. It went wrong. Fuckwits.

But that's not to detract from the jogger. Hurray to her for fighting back against fundies! Yippee!

And that got me thinking, that the War Against Terror needs to start at this level.

So do the world a favour and stab a fundamentalist in the head today!

Taking the dog for a walk in Casa de Campo

Well known as a haunt for the prostitutes of Madrid, the police seem to turn a blind eye to the putas out here in Casa de Campo, as it takes them away from the centre of town where they make the city look bad.

It's one of my favourite haunts on Sunday (NO NOT BECAUSE OF THE PUTAS!) because you can just walk and walk and see nobody for ages.

It's also a haunt for gay men (again NOT the reason that I like the place!) and a few months back, I was out jogging in the park when a guy jumped out of a bush TOTALLY NAKED, with his wanger hanging out!

Yuck!

Now THERE'S a reason to keep running!

As for the picture of the dog chasing the car above, that was seen in Casa de Campo too. Someone had casually taken their dog out, chucked it out the car and it was running along behind as the car went down the hill! Great stuff!

Bottoms up

One of these days I will figure out that senior management don't generally take the request to insert given tasks up their arse particularly well.

I suspect it may be due to them having so much up there already.