Made it..

…to the end of term. And I am still kind of reeling – not helped after a sleepless night with a sick wee man 😦

Today I am thinking about flexibility and chance – partly having to change plans due to a sick wee man, and partly due to what happened yesterday.

Yesterday (Easter Sunday) we went out to Victory beach. And it was lovely. We climbed up the pyramid, bumped into another family doing the same thing (and the dad in that family was a colleague from years ago when I used to work at the uni), walked in the sun and played in the sand. Until we got back to portobello and I realised my wallet and phone were not in the back pack. Trigger massive panic stations.

So I left Al and Ollie and raced back to the car park – and started to look frantically round – when the colleague poked his head out his car and said, are you looking for your wallet? He had found it on the beach, and had bought it back with the plan to e-mail me, and I had arrived back just as they were about to pull out. 30 seconds either way and we might have missed each other. So I will be dropping of a big box of choc on Wednesday at the uni.

I went back to portobello, and into the cafe, and there were two other colleagues sitting there (they work for education perfect), having stopped in for a coffee on their bike ride. So we got chatting, and we had a really good discussion about learning, education, freedom and assessment, and what I see the pitfall being, and because they are those types of thinkers, we talked about possible ways around the pitfalls. So forgetting my wallet on the beach seemed a strange chance for a great conversation. And a reminder that I had promised to look over some chem stuff for them….. which I will do later today

The upshot is – why do teachers, parents and even student cling so desperately to the old? Here is an example from my recent experience.

When I arrived in my new school, I arranged the tables in groups. The students hated it, and after 2 weeks I shifted them back into lines. On the last days of term I played tetris in my heads – how could I fit 30 students into the room with the desks I have so that they aren’t all in lines, and more importantly to me, so I don’t get trapped at the front. When I go into school next week, I am going to play tetris for real, and make it work, and the students will just have to live with it this time, and I realise I should have been stronger at the start of the term. But it still amazes me when I think back, that even the students who are supposed to be much more relaxed and adaptable, even at year 9, couldn’t cope with the chairs being arranged differently.

This term they will just have to!

So this term, along with joining in the #hackyrclass challange I am going to try very hard to embrace change. And think positively about what change can do. And try to be adaptable, flexible and most important, not afraid of getting it wrong.

Except about the chairs. They are coming out of the lines.