foolfillment: the blog

In the second post where I look at my teaching here I’ll outline a problem I’ve been thinking about. When introducing a new topic in Graphics I’ll often break it down into very small steps to get across how to work through that sort of problem. What this means is that I’ll go through a single drawing very slowly and using lots of open questions and time for thinking we’ll eventually get to the complete, correct solution. The idea being that we cover all the important points that might come up in any other drawing.

Then when we move on to other examples the pupils are well prepared and cope very well with similar examples, but, present them with something slightly different or even much easier they are looking for exactly the tasks we worked through as a class. Too often they look at the drawing, but don’t read the question and waste time doing extra work that is asked for.
In graphics drawing speed is so important, so doing work you don’t need to is a killer in terms of the exam. Maybe I need to leave them too their own devices sometimes, make them rely on the question paper and let them make more mistakes – that of course leads to the problem of enforcing bad habits.

A quandary that I’m certain comes up in all subjects taught.

I’ve been conscious that I haven’t been writing much here for a while. Something I haven’t done here for a very long time is to write reflectively about my practice. There are a number of reasons for this, first I suppose is the difficulty on writing about a situation without giving any identifying information for classes/pupils; and second is that there really just isn’t the time, when you get everything else done for school and have some down-time planned in. I remember being so enthusiastic about this reflective blogging malarkey a few years ago. I hope to be able to return to it in some capacity over the next wee while.

The way I teach and deliver lessons has changed so much since I first started out as a probationer. There are certain things I have taught countless times since then – for instance cutting a through housing. I started out really relaxed about how I explained the process – once safety was covered – and relied mainly pupils watching the demo, but now I talk loads about the process but often don’t actually complete cutting the joint. And what difference? Always hard to compare different classes and schools, but there is definitely an improvement in the quality produced. Is it down to the demonstration being of only the key points, is it down to me talking through key points, is it my greater experience now, or is it my eye for spotting people doing things that aren’t quite right?

The great thing about teaching is that each year, each day, each period is different, and how you react to the pupils is different as is how they react to you. Instead of a mechanical process that grinds through each step without adjustment for the people involved, each lesson evolves dynamically. So, some times I might just slip back to teaching like I did years ago, and of course I fully expect that in a few years time I’ll be able to look back and spot more changes that have taken place.

All good fun.