mr C does math -- badly

I was going through my file today and I stumbled on something that I had been working on whilst subbing maths in a local grammar school. While I was there I was inspired to break out of the little box that constrains me, that stamps the label ‘literary arts and humanities’ on my forehead. I wanted to do something that would shatter the boundaries of perceived consciousness forever. I wanted to be the first English teacher to discover a modern mathematical law.

For too long we have been told that there are those who are good at creative tasks, those who are good with their hands, those who are good at seeing the big picture, those who are good at problem solving, those who are good with people, those who are good with shapes, those who are good with numbers, those who are good with words, those who are good with money, those who are good at spending money. Can we not shave off harsh corners and become more rounded individuals? Can a mathematician not write a sonnet? Can an artist not paint a scientific truth? A sociologist not gaze in wonder at a rock formation? A Historian not appreciate the idiosyncratic features of a foreign language?
Can a writer not master calculus?

If Leonardo Devinci teaches us anything it’s that we can multiskill. A painter, a mathematician, an inventor, an anatomist, a sculptor, an engineer, a botanist, a technologist, a musician, a linguist, a scientist, an author… Now he would have made a damn fine substitute teacher.

So I set about creating a formula that would change the world – and possibly make carbon neutral space travel a reality. I sharpened my pencils, looked out my most accurate rulers, protractors, compasses… and began

So there we have it. Mr C’s law of… well, I don’t know what it’s a law of. I only said I’d come up with it – I didn’t mention actually suggesting what it does. However I did take a stab at explaining how it works for those who, like me, feel more comfortable in the realms of literary classics than mathematical genius

And for those who struggle with my infantile scribbling:

The quality of κ is not constrain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from the hypothenuse
Upon the adjacent beneath. It is twice factored;
It factors the χ that adds and the ў that subtracts.
‘Tis greatest in the versin; it becomes
The triangle better than cosine;
His right angle shows the definite integral, 2α + κν;
It is enthroned in the hearts of trigonometric functions;
It is an attribute of Leibniz himself;
And mathematics pure doth then show likest Leibniz
When trigonometry doth season calculus. Therefore literaturalist,
Though poetical prose be your plea, consider this:
That in the course of geometry, none of us
Should see polynominals. We do pray for prime numbers
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render…
…The ratio of κ (to ½π²)

I thank you.

then they came for me; and there was no one left to tweet

I have to thank Mike & Alex for drawing my attention to this article on the BBC website. I hadn't heard about it before and, once you've taken a scan through it you'll understand why I found it a bit unnerving.

To paraphrase viciously, a young teacher in Scotland is being investigated because it was discovered that she had been updating her twitter page with messages, some of which referred to her classes and pupils.

The secondary teacher in Argyll and Bute is understood to have posted up to 38 updates a day on the Twitter site. One said: "Had S3 period 6 for last two years...don't know who least wants to do anything, them or me."

'The fool!' I thought when first I read about her. 'Every teacher knows that you can't publish information about pupils without explicit parental permission. She must be stupid to do that.' Except as I read through some examples of what she had actually written it began to dawn on me that she wasn't actually posting anything more revealing than I have here.

"The thought of having some of my S4 beyond exam time doesn't bear thinking about - for them as well as me I suspect."

In fact I imagine I have occasionally been a lot less anonymous in my musings than she has. She doesn't mention pupils by name, her comments seem fairly generalised and focus more on her than on the pupils she is teaching. So what is her crime? It gets worse for her:

Argyll and Bute Council policy states that teachers may access professional blogs which have educational value but are not allowed to have their own blog. However, the teacher in question has a blog on which she said she had been too busy using Twitter to update it recently.

For those who, like me, have remained immune to the lure of the tweet let me explain. Twitter is just a way to deliver mundane details of your life to many friends at once. Through Twitter you can develop followers who regularly check up on your feed. It's basically a way to make your stalkers feel more involved. I care nothing for Twitter. But blogging...

"Teachers are not allowed to have their own blogs." Um.

So, unlike the teacher in question - I don't tweet (or whatever it is) - I don't really see the appeal. But like the teacher in question, I do have a blog. Like the teacher in question, I occasionally mention anecdotes from my life as a teacher online. Like the teacher in question, I have been known to express dissatisfaction in life. Up to this point I have never been told that I was not allowed to do so. It seems if I were working in Argyll and Bute I would be breaching official guidelines.

And quite honestly that is ridiculous.

Now clearly I haven't read everything that this teacher posted. I'll be first in line to point and make disapproving facial expressions at her if she has been commenting on identifiable pupils. I will shake my head slowly if it turns out she has been bringing her school and its good name into disrepute. But if it's simply the case that she has been uploading her thoughts and feelings in a pointless, if slightly narcissistic webby kind of a way then what is she doing that it so different from all the twitter users in other professions? Exactly how has what she was doing impacted on the educational wellbeing of pupils in the Argyll area? How was it having any impact on anything until someone thought it necessary to bring it to the attention of the press? Absolutely ridiculous.

But it has had an impact on me. And that might be a good thing. It's been a wake up call about the comments I make. I need to take a lot more care when talking about school. I need to put more effort into making my comments more general and less personalised. I need to increase anonymity on many levels.
This annoys me.
When you work in education you soon find that your life revolves around a constrictive regime. You become bound up in targets and paperwork to the point that sometimes you need to poke a hole through which to breathe. We spend so long living by someone's rules that the idea of finding a place of our own where we can express our own expressions, where we can breathe in air that hasn't been passed through a committee process and risk assessment survey first.

Am I worried about what is happening to that teacher in Argyll? Yes. I really am. I would hate to think that other education authorities would feel the need to follow suit. If the situation arose where I was told that I shouldn't keep a blog then TOASNT would be gone quicker than... well, quicker than it went when I accidentally hit the delete button last year. How I hope it doesn't come to that. But from now on, in any effort to avoid names I will no longer mention Dave - he will now be 'the Welsh Castle Sketcher', Mike and Alex will become 'London's Bushmills Residents', Kylie - you are now 'the Sporadic Antipodean', Karen 'Florida's vg Bridget Jones', and Brazen Teacher (as if that isn't anonymous enough) will henceforth become 'Another Teacher at risk of being put under investigation because it seems we can't be trusted to update blogs without passing out sensitive information and ruining the lives of all those around us.'

Council officials were investigating whether she had put sensitive information on public display and whether it was during work hours.

"Council policy states that teachers may access professional blogs which have educational value but are not allowed to have their own blog." Wouldn't you love to live in a place where public workers aren't allowed to express personal opinion? You now have the choice of China or Argyll it seems.

a convenient mist

A ghostly image has been snapped at a museum prompting speculation that the spirit of the English scientist Edward Jenner could be haunting his former home. A photograph seems to have captured a hazy image of a man sitting on a chair in the attic of the Edward Jenner Museum in Berkeley, Gloucestershire.
-Huddersfield Examiner

I love a good story of things that go bump in the night. And this one has it all - good historical location, famous dead person, mysterious smokey apparition, cynical photographer who 'doesn't believe in ghosts' themselves but just can't explain what he's captured on film... Oh yes, all the ingredients.

Edward Jenner was a famous scientist who was resident in this particular house when he lived in Berkeley back in the 1700s. He is probably most famous as 'the father of immunology' and I remember being taught about him in school assemblies back when I was a wee lad (not in the 1700s) He pioneered a smallpox vaccine turning it from a fearsome disease which killed large numbers of people into an historical anomaly. If I remember correctly he noticed that milk maids didn't seem to get the disease as much as everyone else, then he reckoned it must have something to do with cows' udders. Instead of prescribing national milking service he deduced that the milkmaids were contracting a much less harmful strain of pox from the cows (cowpox) which was boosting their immunity to smallpox. And now, because of the humble milk maid and her cow-pox-pus oozing-blister-covered hands we no longer have smallpox. Genius.
If I am not mistaken Jenner was also the first person to note that when Cuckoos laid their eggs in other birds' nests, the newly hatched cuckoo chicks would push the rival eggs out of the nest. Something like that anyway.

"You can basically see through a doorway what looks like a figure reclining in a chair, only there is no chair there. Who knows whether it is Jenner himself?"

But back to the mysterious photo. It certainly looks the part, no? Unfortunately I remain unconvinced. I think perhaps I would be less sceptical if the photographer who took it wasn't in the process of taking publicity shots for the Museum's new 'Ghosts in the Attic' exhibition. A photo of a ghost in the attic when they're having a exhibition about ghosts in attics? It's all a little convenient, n'cest pas?

back to SNT

It's been so long since I've done any special needs work for any length of time I've almost forgotten what it means. But a couple of hours covering a special needs class this morning showed me just how much I miss it. I absolutely loved every second. And let me tell you why:

1. Working in an atmosphere devoid of any subcurrent. So often I am on edge when I teach - always worried about saying or doing anything that can be misconstrued. Sometimes I feel as if I have to view everything I say from every possible angle before actually saying it. Today everything I said was taken at face value - there was no cynicism, no posturing. It was such a refreshing change from the lesson I'd had before it where a pupil had confronted me. He knew he was wrong pretty quickly into the conversation but he couldn't lose face by backing down. I think I did an alright job of diffusing the situation - but it would have been wonderful not to have to.

2. In general the pupils love what they are doing. Our targets/assessment obsessed education system often makes me feel like I am training pupils to pass tests rather than actually educating them. And you can't inspire someone through paper 1 section B. People are inspired by feats of ingenuity - wonderful literature - art - the way the world works... not by 'you should spend no more than 45 minutes on this question. It is worth 18 marks.' In this class I was teaching the pupils what we needed to know - and they could see why they needed to know it. True they had forgotten most of it by the time I'd said the second syllable of lunchtime... but...

3. I miss the downright cheerfulness of a special needs classroom. Here there are no allusions to prison cells. The windows are huge and bar free (and sport a couple of rather beautiful stained glass designs I note - impressive), The motivational posters are colourful and... well, motivational. Even the over sized pencils and triangular big nib pens make me feel somehow better about the world.

4. The small class sizes must be a huge consideration. You simply cannot compare trying to control and teach 30 people, all with different priorities, in a cramped, airless classroom to this. My life is normally so filled with racing to cover all the objectives for all the pupils in thirty minutes that it is a joy to be able to spend time with individual pupils - helping them with their individual needs. What a relief it is to be able to take more time over a particular issue because some pupils seem to be struggling with it, safe in the knowledge that there aren't half a dozen pupils getting fidgety at the other side of the room because they're finished the task and are getting bored waiting to move on

I know this is all just temporary. I know that tomorrow I will be back to porridge - but let me take one more deep breath and enjoy it while I can.

talking of names...

Talking of names... It only just struck me today, as I was passing out classwork books to my year 11s...

...actually let me start a bit further back. One of the sub teacher's magic tricks I have yet to master is the ability to learn 300 names in a week. I am rubbish with names and my pupils know it. The trouble kids I (ironically) have no trouble with. I usually know their names in 30 minutes - but the quiet ones... usually i have just about learned their names by the time I leave to move on to a new school. Right now I rely on a less than reliable pupil to help me fill in the register for my form class every morning.

I do try. Really I do. One of the little things I do to try and memorise is making a point of handing out classwork books myself - it gives me a chance to relate the name on the book to the face on the pupil and where they usually sit in the classroom. It adds a minute or two to the beginning of the lesson but it works for me. But names are still a problem for me.

I've also come to realise that pupils are obsessed with names. Namely christian names.

'what's your name Sir?'
'mr Campbell.'
'your first name.'
'mr.'
'nawwwh... what's your real name.'
'why do you want to know?'
'we know all our teachers' names.'
'well then, let me be different.'
'why?'
'because it's important to be unique.'
'yeah - but what's your name?'

I have no problem with pupils knowing my name - I just have problems with the inevitable few who love to push boundaries. Maybe if I didn't make such a big thing of it they wouldn't care less. I've tried that though and it still results in a couple of mindless comedians yelling my first name across the playground to... actually I'm not sure why. Maybe they have their reasons.

Today as I was handing them back their work, the books had arranged themselves into an order which made me notice something I hadn't spotted before:

Matthew... Mark... Luke... Jonathon...

I made some comment about the names, how I had a biblical name too; which led to them asking what it was,

'1st and 2nd Corinthians'

For some reason they didn't laugh.

there's creative and there's insane

Sometimes parents bemuse me. Actually a lot of the time parents bemuse me - sometimes they make me freeze in utter shock. And one of the things that never fails to amaze me is the utter disregard they have for their child's future when naming them. Would you trust a lawyer called Sunbeam? A doctor called Fifi trixiebell? And cute as it may be when the little one is crawling about the floor at play group, they face a world of pain from the other pupils when they reach school.

I blame celebrities. They have now become the official role models of society and as such pretty soon I should expect to have classes filled with Apples and Peaches and Moxie Crimefighters and Audio Sciences and Sage Moonbloods. The Edge called his child Blue Angel and Nicolas Cage gave his child Superman's real name (Kal El, not Clarke Kent.) How can I respect men who could do this to their own flesh and blood?

Copying celebrities can be extremely dangerous. After David and Victoria named their son after his place of conception (Brooklyn) one couple followed suit - they tried to call their son Busstop.

Yes while Celebrities can be odd, regular folks can be downright cruel. Consider life if you were called any of the following: Nasdaq, Confidenze, Orangeyello, Stallion, Batman Bin Suparman, Number 16 Bus Shelter, Violence, Laurel Hardy, Russell Sprout, Skye Rockett, Chris Cross, Mary Christmas, Barb Dwyer... the list is huge. You can check out a few that TheBabyWebsite.com found if you want more.

Some countries have laws against things like that. I remember a while back a Court in New Zealand removing a girl from her parents because they had called her Tallulah Does the Hula in Hawaii. They claimed it was a form of abuse and made her a ward of the state until she could have the name changed. That was extreme but I can understand why.

So what brought this on? Why am I suddenly so worried about names? Well this morning I encountered a pupil called Robert Sands. And anyone who calls their son that, then sends him to a Protestant School in a loyalist area of Northern Ireland clearly must be insane.