Skip to main content

An award ceremony 'for' or 'by' teachers?

I was thrilled the other day, to watch an ostentatious award giving ceremony for teachers. "Finally!" I exclaimed to myself. I sat up straight and started watching (as opposed to flicking channels in a desultory fashion). Just like we celebrate actors and musicians, isn't is time we added some glamour to the teaching profession??!

 I scanned the crowd to see if I could spot Sir Ken Robinson, Kathy Short, or Sugata Mitra.

Nope. Apparently it was an award ceremony for 'other' people. I didn't really care who. It  was funded by...








For those who drink whiskey, I am sure you would have known from the start.
So much for wishful thinking. Foolish me.





Comments

  1. AnonymousMarch 11, 2012 at 8:26 AM

    Hi Naini! Not foolish at all! When I firsy saw this advertised I came to exactly the same conclusion and was just as disappointed - and I come from much nearer to Scotland (so whisky, not whiskey)!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. nainiMarch 11, 2012 at 9:09 AM

    Can't even spell it!

    ReplyDelete
  3. jamesaMarch 12, 2012 at 5:11 AM

    I shouldn't worry about it - it is one of those oddities of the English language!! Whisky for Scotch, whiskey for Irish!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.

Popular posts from this blog

Classification -Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 1)

In this series, we will discuss how we can design lessons for conceptual understanding. Having recently completed an upskilling course with IB, I felt we may all benefit from looking at some of these strategies and how they might look like in our PYP classrooms. Strategy 1: Classification    Source: Ibo.org In this post, I will be focusing on the research-backed strategy, "classification".  Chadwick (2009) highlights that classification helps develop conceptual understanding by allowing students to organize information, recognize patterns, and understand relationships among concepts.  Here are some examples across several disciplines on how I have used tools to classify. Math Class 1) In my math class (Grade 3) instead of having students simply rote learn the names of the shapes and their properties, have them sort the shapes  based on the number of sides, angles and symmetry. Even better, use the Concept Attainment Strategy (I keep returning to this strategy be...
Post a Comment
Read more

Generalization-Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 3)

This post is the third of our blog post series on how to design lessons for conceptual understanding. Part 1 here Part 2 here Strategy 3 : Generalizations You may have come across Lynn Erickson's diagram on the structure of knowledge. In my IB workshop's I always like to present the avocado model alongside this diagram when I am talking about facts. The intention of inquiry-based teaching and conceptually-driven understanding (or Concept-based inquiry- whatever terminology suits your fancy)  is to enable students to make generalizations. In other words, can they transfer their learning to a new context because they have understood what they learnt.  In order to make generalizations, we need to first plan lessons that help students acquire facts/topics that are interesting  and worth knowing. Bringing in local and global issues that are relevant to the topic help students as they begin to compare the topics and see emerging patterns. Remember, facts and concepts have a syn...
Post a Comment
Read more

8 Strategies to Overcome Math Anxiety in the Classroom

  Have you ever considered what math anxiety may look like in your classroom? As I prepare to begin my lesson, handing out notebooks or math prompts, I look around and observe my students. As the lesson progresses, I continue to look around and monitor their behaviour. Are there some students who take time to settle down or start to talk about  things completely unrelated to math? Does one student ask to go the washroom? Or maybe complain about a stomachache or a headache? Is there a student who may start crying or become angry and indulge in negative self talk? "I am dumb." or "I can never get this right!" and so on and so forth. The more subtle symptoms : Is a student being being extra chatty, taking time to settle down, obsessing about the answer, refusing to answer questions, seldom asking for help, hurtling through work or showing a reluctance to work with others.  A broad categories these symptoms would look like this: cognitive difficulties emotional distress...
Post a Comment
Read more