The Education Fables

Rejected ideas for ‘Get Into Teaching’ Christmas adverts

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Christmas advertising, we are told, has “hit a record high” this year, with a unparalleled £6bn being thrown at advertising agencies to produce that perfect television commercial for high street stores.

In recent years, these ads have become less like the 30-second showcase of a few tinselly gifts that they used to be and more a kind of feel-good mini feature film that tugs on our heart-strings so hard that our ventricles end up in our bladders and we need to spend Christmas drinking enough to float them back out again.

Not wanting to miss out on this gravy train, teaching authorities recently asked advertising agencies to “get us in on that John Lewis Christmas misty-eyed pap bandwagon” and make them an advert of similar oily charm.

Subsequently, a number of pitches were made by agencies to try and create an advert that leaves the general public all weeping so hard that they’ll quit their comfortable jobs the very next day and start banging on the doors of initial teacher training providers demanding to “get me some of them teaching hugs”.

Eventually, they chose to take a different route with their campaign, but we’ve managed to get hold of a couple of the speculative scripts, which we are sharing with you below. Enjoy. And have a very merry Christmas.

Pitch #1: ‘Board pens’

Pitch #2: ‘Sweets’


The Education Fables

The Little Book of Tycche: The Finnish Art of Wellbeing in Teaching

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So, you’ve read all about hygge, lykke, lagom and ikagai, and followed all of the guidance but none of these things have made a dent on improving your work/life balance in teaching, right?

 

 

 

That’s because they are all fads. Now if you want to make a real change in your life, the principles of tycche are what you need.

Tycche is a Finnish word that is used when one has achieved the perfect work/life balance. It is simultaneously an art, a practice, a feeling and state of being. It is something that you achieve, you do, you feel and you are. You can’t buy it. But you can buy a book about it, priced at £14.99. In fact, you need to buy the book to have even a vague idea of what it is. You probably still won’t be entirely sure after you’ve read the book, though, such is its nebulous quality. This means we can probably whack out a few more volumes to sell to you before you get bored of it.

There is no literal English translation for the concept of tycche (pronounced tee-chuh), but it is often used to represent a combination of various ideas – ideas such as: surviving, coping, getting by, feeling a fleeting sense of confidence or achievement before it ebbs away, balancing on a tightrope, not giving up just yet, marking, and cake. It’s widely believed that the word comes from the old Sami phrase tycco lek che – literally “sod this, I’m having a sit down”.

Tycche can be achieved through a set of simple daily rituals, both in and out of the classroom. Here, we’ll take you through some of the things that you can do to feel, achieve, do and be tycche.

TEA/COFFEE

The key to drinking your way to tycche is in embracing tepid as an acceptable temperature for drinks that other (normal) people might call ‘hot drinks’. Once you see lukewarm tea and coffee as not only acceptable but actually desirable, you will no longer feel that deep melancholy that you currently feel whilst tossing back unpalatable gulps from the mug on your desk. You will instead feel a sense of satisfaction. That feeling is tycche.

EMAILS

So you’ve been teaching all day, been on duty, had a meeting, and now you have planning and marking to do. But before you do that, you think you’ll just check your emails and spend a couple of minutes dealing with replies. And then you see it: 42 unread emails. How can you possibly deal with this much information? The replies alone will take about half an hour. Half an hour which you haven’t got. This is where the principles of tycche can help.

According to the laws of tycche, rather than spending time replying to your emails now, you should flag the most important emails for reply later. You must promise yourself that you will definitely reply when you get some time. Don’t worry, you won’t actually reply later, as there will be another 42 emails in your inbox by then and these first emails will have magically (that’s the power of tycche) disappeared onto the second page to be forgotten about until someone sends you a reminder at some point. But the key is in truly believing that you will reply: your good intentions are important here. Tycche will take care of the rest.

HOBBIES

In order to achieve tycche you need to ensure that you have hobbies – that is to say, pursuits that you undertake in your spare time. However, the problem that many teachers have is that it is difficult to find that spare time when snowed under with excessive workload. But that’s no excuse because: as it is a central tenet of the practice of tycche, one must undertake hobbies. The balance is easily met though, by simply making marking your hobby. By taking on marking as a pastime, you are able to enjoy your hobby every single day and complete your work. The perfect work/life balance.

CAKE

The key to finding true balance is for you to visualise all the sources of your current stress sitting on one side of a set of weighing scales. Go ahead, do it now. On the pan, you place every repetitive email, every piece of marking using excessive criteria, every data dump, every exhaustive spreadsheet, every lunchtime detention… put it all on.

Now, you just balance out the other side of the scales with cake. Lots of it. Fill the other pan with chocolate brownies, Battenberg, Viennese whirls, jam tarts,  millionaire’s shortcake, sponge cake, cream cake, red velvet cake… then drizzle it all with salted caramel until the scales are perfectly balanced.

This isn’t just an act of visualisation, though. To truly find tycche, you must eat actual cake every time your workload increases, every time someone dumps some extra work on you. Have to reply to some emails? Eat a Jaffa cake. Need to mark a load of mock exams? Eat some iced buns. Need to go to the photocopier? Take a chocolate Swiss roll with you. You must keep workload and cake in perfect balance with each other: that’s tycche.

WINE

If you are struggling to make the work/life balance of tycche through  any of these practices, simply open a bottle of wine. About half a bottle in, you’ll feel it: tycche.

The Little Book of Tycche by Skinni Lahti is available from all good bookshops for £14.99.*

*Spending fifteen quid of your hard-earned money on this book, plus spending 6 hours reading it are actually both in contradiction of the rules of tycche and will throw your life back out of balance. Luckily, that can be remedied with the The Second Little Book of Tycche, which will be out in hardback in time for Christmas at £20.99.

Teaching

Teaching: if you aren’t dead yet, you aren’t doing it well enough

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So another World Teachers Day has come and gone. All the build-up, all the excitement, and it just seems to go by in a flash. One minute we’re all hanging our stockings up in the classroom ready to be filled with gifts from our generous pupils, the next minute we’re all sick of spending the week eating leftovers from the big World Teachers Day feasts laid on for us by our families and friends.

I love all of the traditions of World Teachers Day: chugging a yard of tea, the enormous full-sized teacher-shaped chocolate cake (bagsy the heart – it’s the biggest bit!), marking under the mistletoe, pinning the grade on the lesson observation (blindfolded, of course), being allowed to go the toilet, the Airing of Grievances, the singing of teacher carols (“Mark! The Herald Angels Sing”), the Returning of the Glue Sticks, and – the best bit – all the inspirational memes.

The memes range from the uplifting to the banal via the truthy, just the way we all love them. But some memes tap into a well-worn trope that does more damage than good: that of the teacher as self-immolating martyr. See exhibit A:

Quite often promoted by non-teachers, this trope says one thing: good teachers kill themselves for their jobs.

The valorisation of teaching as a form of ritual suicide is subtle but pervasive. Once you realise it, you begin to notice it all around. It appears when the Chartered College of Teaching platforms speakers telling us that “teaching is a way of being, not just a job.” And it’s in motivational posters telling us that we should “give meaningful feedback on students’ work even if [our] pile of books seems endless”.

What of those teachers who aren’t prepared to give their whole self over for their job? Those teachers who put their family first or who want to have energy left at the end of the day for other interests? Maybe they should just accept the fact that they aren’t good teachers? If they simply won’t consume themselves to light the way for others, should they feel guilty? Why aren’t they prepared to throw themselves on the funeral pyre like all the other good teachers around them?

The thing is that people don’t share these sorts of ideas because they want to attack teachers. The intentions are actually good; it’s just that such ideas are also completely unthinking. People assume that it flatters teachers: “anyone who is prepared to self-destruct just so that every child understands quadratic equations/oxbow lakes/pointillism is truly an angel.” But this kind of hagiography actually damages teachers. It allows the system to tell teachers they should always be doing more. It allows the system to say: this is what teaching is; this is what you have to live up to if you want to feel you are doing enough.

We really need to shift this narrative that teaching should be all-consuming and that self-destruction is part and parcel of our job. We can’t complain of workload issues at the same time as promoting this harmful shibboleth.

Perhaps years ago I might have seen the ‘candle’ meme above and not noticed the deleterious subtext. I might have seen it as a celebration of our job. But after years of full time teaching, I realise how unsustainable this attitude is, how damaging it is.

And this realisation means that I should probably throw away all of these old memes I made years ago when I thought I was celebrating teaching too. Silly, silly old me.

Teaching

“This debate doesn’t happen in schools”

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Ah, the good old debate around traditional and progressive philosophies of education. An important debate for some and one that such people tell us has given them enlightenment and understanding about what they do in the classroom.

Except we all know it isn’t important, no matter what they tell us, don’t we? And you know why we know it isn’t important? We know it’s not important because it isn’t a debate that happens in schools. It all plays out on the internet. And of course, things said on the internet aren’t really real. Those aren’t real people telling us this is important to them. They are just floating avatars spewing out the same rubbish day after day. Probably Russian bots or something. We should ignore them. If the trad/prog debate is something we don’t talk about in schools, it’s obviously not important at all.

Okay, that may be an extreme characterisation, but it is the crux of a particular argument: the trad/prog debate isn’t something that happens in schools so it is not important. The fact it isn’t spoken about in schools is largely true. Walk around any school and you’ll rarely see people having this debate. (The lack of the debate will be even more starkly obvious if you don’t actually work in a school: if you’re a consultant and you visit lots of schools, you will be able to report with confidence that in absolutely none of the schools you visit people have had this debate.*)

I think we’re all agreed then. If we aren’t discussing it in schools, it’s irrelevant. It’s unimportant. And if we aren’t discussing it in schools there’s really no validity in discussing it anywhere.

So let’s all agree that the trad/prog debate is an irrelevancy and let’s disregard it.

But if we disregard on this basis, then in the interests of fairness we should all agree that anything we don’t really talk about in schools is also irrelevant and should be disregarded.

So out goes the trad/prog debate. See ya!

But we’ll also need to say goodbye to the mental health of teachers. That can go too. According to this TES article, “The one place you won’t hear much talk of teacher mental health is in schools.” Well, as we all know, not talking about it in schools makes it irrelevant and unimportant, of course. Bye bye teacher mental health!

Another unimportant issue we should disregard is violence against teachers. Again, in the TES: “I think this issue of violence against teachers is actually a taboo in our occupation. We don’t talk about it.” Well if we don’t talk about it in schools, it means it’s not important. Duh.

And our feelings too. We don’t talk about the emotional labour of teaching and the impact this can have, according to the Washington Post.  Who cares? If we don’t talk about it, it’s obviously of no import.

There’s a whole host of other things teachers and commentators tell us “we need to talk about” more in schools : the joy of learning, financial education, the dangers of pornography and sexting, healthy eating… all of these things are unimportant precisely because we don’t have enough conversations about them, right?

It’s a kind of cognitive dissonance that uses “we don’t talk about it in schools” as an argument to disregard some things and suggest they are utterly irrelevant, and yet sees the same “we don’t talk about it in schools” statement as a valid way to highlight that some things are unfairly undervalued.

Of course, I don’t think that any of the things above – mental health, violence, healthy eating, etc. – are unimportant. I think we should be talking about all of them. And I think the same about debates in education – no matter how unfamiliar the debate is to your daily experience, it is still a debate that people are having and to tell them it’s unimportant because it doesn’t happen in other arenas is ridiculous. The first reason/excuse people will give for any of the topics above not being talked about enough in schools is lack of time. Where do we find the time to discuss mental health of teachers, etc? We are so busy, that we just don’t find the time. Well, the same goes for the trad/prog debate. Where in a busy teacher’s day do they have the time to have deep discussions about philosophies of education? Somewhere between getting a cup of tea and going to the toilet before heading back to the classroom to set up their next lesson? Schools aren’t really the place for many topics that need unpicking at length. So what do teachers do if they want to discuss anything they don’t get to delve into in the school day? They use social media. And when they do, they get told: if you aren’t having this discussion in schools, then it’s an invalid discussion here too.

The whole this-debate-doesn’t-happen-in-schools response is an extension of the “you aren’t living in the real world” argument: teachers who debate and discuss the philosophies of education (a debate that has been going on for more than a century, by the way) on Twitter aren’t living in the real world of schools where, as we’ve established, nobody talks about this.

Jeffrey Israel, a lecturer in religion and political philosophy, argues that, amongst other things, the accusation that someone’s opinions aren’t from the real world is narcissistic. He defines narcissistic here as being “characterized by an inability to perceive the lives of others as anything other than examples of one’s own idiosyncratic preconceptions.” In this way, we might see those suggesting that the debate around education philosophies is insignificant (“because it doesn’t happen in real life”) as lacking the ability to attach value to anything that is beyond their own worldview. The debate may not be happening in schools, but it is happening on social media and in blogs and articles and thus it is real and it is significant to the people involved in it and to many reading about it. It might be seen as narcissistic to disregard it on the grounds that it isn’t happening “in real life”.

In fact, there really is no distinction to be made between beliefs held in different domains. Believe it or not, people discussing something on Twitter are real people. As Israel succinctly tells us:

“Everyone who is living is living in the real world.”

And whilst they aren’t having lengthy debates about philosophy in the real world of schools, they are having debates with real people in the shared world of social media.

There are plenty of examples of people who have developed or had their thinking shaped as a result of the debate online. Indeed, I wrote about my own experience last year.

 

Here’s a couple of tweets from real people telling us that the debate changed their minds:

 

Is the debate invalid because these people are choosing to discuss it on social media rather than the staffroom? Are they not living in the real world?

It matters not where the debate is happening. If it is happening, it is real. I am happy to listen to any arguments against the debate, but the argument that it isn’t valid because it doesn’t happen in schools is a very, very poor one that simply doesn’t stand up.

 

(*If you are a consultant and you think that visiting lots of schools and never experiencing something means it doesn’t exist, you are sadly mistaken. You are the least likely to actually experience it as your relationships with the people you come across every day, whilst I’m sure are useful and beneficial to the school and you, are largely of a fleeting nature. The context in which you would be a more able judge of whether something exists in a school is to work at that school. I should also add that you also aren’t privy to the conversations about consultants that undoubtedly happen after you’ve left. They do exist even though you don’t witness them. And they’re always entirely complimentary, of course.)

The Education Fables

An art history of back to school

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Ever since I published ‘An art history of school inspections’ a few years ago, studying the way that art has portrayed schools has been somewhat of a hobby of mine. In this post, I’ll take you through the ways that artists throughout time have interpreted that key moment in a teacher’s year: going back to school.

To begin with, one of my favourites is this classic from the Dutch Golden Age by Jan Steen, which depicts teachers in the midst of the summer holidays.

‘Teachers on Summer Holiday‘ (c.1655-65) by Jan Steen

In Steen’s painting, entitled ‘Teachers on Summer Holiday’ (c.1655-65), you can see the teachers really throwing themselves into relaxing. The teachers featured in this painting were very keen to explain that the artist captured them at the moment they were “taking a short break between reading some books, eating healthily and working out at the gym”.

Another painting depicting the leisurely mood of teachers during the holidays is Lucian Freud’s ‘I Might Even Get Dressed At Some Point Today’ (1950-1), shown below. You can tell from the way that the light falls that the moment captured is around 4 o’clock in the afternoon.

‘I Might Even Get Dressed at Some Point Today’ (1950-1) by Lucian Freud

The pastel shades and relaxed mood of Freud’s painting is often contrasted, by critics, with the dark ominous colours of Isaac Israels’ ‘One Week In, The First “Back to School” Shop Window Display’ (1894).

‘One Week In, The First “Back to School” Shop Window Display’ (1894) by Isaac Israels

Israels’ somewhat sombre painting shows the portentous moment when the idyll is shattered and the thought of having to go back to work at some point comes crashing down on the teachers stood at the window, as they stare at the display.

Moving on to the painting below, we are introduced to one of the key themes of back-to-school art: school nightmares.

‘The Back to School Nightmares Begin’ (1886-7) by Théodore Roussel

This classic of the genre is Théodore Roussel’s ‘The Back to School Nightmares Begin’ (1886-7). Here, the painter portrays the dream of a teacher in the days just before the autumn term begins. The teacher dreams that she is in the staffroom looking through the staff handbook. He captures the dream in the moment just before she realises that she has forgotten to put any clothes on and will wake up in a state of sheer panic. This particular genre has been the source of many works by a range of artists, notably Bosch’s ‘I Dreamt My Voice Wasn’t Working and None of The Children Were Listening to Me’, and Vermeer’s ‘I Think I Just Said **** In Assembly’.

‘Sorting the Classroom and Putting Up Displays’ (1964) by Richard Hamilton

The above piece of artwork, by British pop artist Richard Hamilton, is entitled ‘Sorting the Classroom and Putting Up Displays’ (1964). A famous piece of contemporary art, it shows the teacher in her classroom in the days before the pupils start back at school. The teacher has spent hours making the classroom look nice and freshening up the wall displays, and here she takes a moment to look around her and absorb the room, disheartened by the knowledge that it will never look quite as nice as this again for the entire year.

As the day of return grows ever closer, such preparations truly begin in earnest, as we can see below.

‘The First Week’s Lunches’ (c.1620-5) Sir Nathaniel Bacon

Sir Nathaniel Bacon’s ‘The First Week’s Lunches’ shows a well-meaning teacher preparing her daily lunches for her return to work. She has optimistically bought lots of vegetables and fruit for various healthy meals, the sheer volume of which suggesting that her intentions are to continue in this vein. Yet the real genius of this painting is in the detail: note how the artist cleverly depicts a look of uncertainty on the teacher’s face, showing us that even she knows she’ll be eating chips from the school canteen by the second week.

There are many paintings that depict the reality of the first day back, but none are more well-loved than George Elgar Hicks’ ‘You Have to Go In, Dear, You’re the Headteacher’ (1863), below.

‘You Have to Go In, Dear, You’re the Headteacher’ 1863 by George Elgar Hicks

In the painting, the headteacher tries to pretend that it is still night-time by covering his eyes and making it dark. His wife is deploring him to pull himself together and get into work as she is sick of coming home from her tough, high-flying job in the city only to find that he’s been lounging around watching Netflix all day and hasn’t done any of the jobs around the house that he’d promised to do.

‘These Are the New Guys’ 1766 by Benjamin West

The first day back has finally arrived in Benjamin West’s ‘These Are the New Guys’ (1776), which depicts the moment when the school’s new staff members are introduced in the first staff meeting, and the entire faculty stare back at them. The new staff members hang their heads and blush as every current member of staff looks at them, some with a sense of envy at their youth, and some with a sense of pity at what these new guys have let themselves in for.

‘Memories of Empty Roads’ (1998-9) by Julian Opie

Contemporary British artist Julian Opie turns his attention to the daily commute. Opie highlights the misery of sitting in traffic every day by presenting it in relief: ‘Memories of Empty Roads’ (1998-9) cleverly shows us not the gloomy traffic but the clear open roads enjoyed by everyone during the previous six weeks, starkly reminding us all of happier, carefree times.

‘End of the First Week Back’ (1856) Henry Wallis

Perhaps the most famous image in the whole of the back-to-school genre is Henry Wallis’ ‘End of the First Week Back’ (1856). Here, the clothed teacher is bathed in early morning light, showing that he has fallen asleep in his clothes, such was his fatigue. The peaceful look on the teacher’s face is in contrast to the ripped-up paper on the floor, which is the result of various shredded worksheets that he has printed and then subsequently realised are riddled with spelling and content errors, due to his sheer tiredness. One should note that the exhausted teacher shown here is actually positively vibrant when compared to how he will look some eight weeks later.

I hope you have enjoyed seeing some of my favourite pieces of back to school art – I’m sure you’ll agree that the genre has inspired some great works throughout the centuries.

 

Teaching

A Timeline of Literature (with GCSE texts)

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The links below will take you to an easy to print version of a timeline of English Literature. Alongside other important moments in English Literature and the English language, it includes the dates of the monarchs of England and Great Britain, key literary and artistic movements, stages of the English language, as well as the dates of production/publication of Macbeth, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, An Inspector Calls, and the poems from the ‘Power and Conflict’ cluster of the AQA Anthology. Obviously, you can edit these texts to fit with those that your pupils are studying.

The dates of the movements are up for debate, of course, as different commentators will put different dates on these periods. You can change them as you see fit.

You can also add any more key moments to the timeline. I kept it to these as I didn’t want it to get too ‘busy’.

This is for a display of landscape A4 sheets measuring 7 x 4 (28 sheets in total).

This resource takes ideas from displays shared with me over the years by colleagues, so I don’t claim originality.

I’ve included links to an uneditable PDF version, as well as an editable Powerpoint version. If you want to use the editable version, the fonts in use are Gill Sans for most of the text, and Mexcellent (regular) for the literary movements.

PPTX: Timeline of Literature

PDF: Timeline of Literature

If you notice any errors, aside from arguments over dates, please do let me know in the comments below. I’m looking at you, History teachers.

NB. As with any of the resources I share, I stipulate that I don’t give this freely to anyone who chooses to sell resources anywhere online. If you are such a person, I ask you kindly not to download this. Obviously, you can ignore this request as I have no way of monitoring this. But if you do, shame on you for ignoring my request. As for anyone else, thanks for keeping the sharing of resources completely free. You are wonderful people.

Teaching, The Education Fables

A Glossary of U.K. Education (Vol. 4)

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We present Vol. 4 of our glossary. For previous volumes, please follow these links:

Vol. 1

Vol. 2

Vol. 3

biro

/ˈbʌɪrəʊ/

noun

apparently one of the most explosive materials on earth, with a level of volatility somewhere between uranium and hydrogen.

collaboration

/kəlabəˈreɪʃn/

noun

the positive action of working with other likeminded people in order to produce something or promote an idea; this is one of the most important things one can do in education and is widely encouraged, unless of course the thing that is being produced or idea that is being promoted is one with which you disagree, in which case it isn’t collaboration, it is a neoliberal conspiracy.

data

/ˈdeɪtə/

noun

a substance that is difficult to control and can wreak havoc unless it is captured cleanly; it increases its potency as it gets more and more out of control, bouncing back and forth throughout the environment; it is vibrant green in colour and goo-like in its consistency. (Wait… this is the definition for Flubber, isn’t it? Oh, what the hell, I’ll just leave it here. I’m sure nobody will notice – Ed.)

Didau, David

/ˈdeɪvᵻd dɪd… er… dʌɪd… um…ˈdʌɪə… oh say it however you want/

noun

former All England Hula Hoop Champion and prime antagonist of everything you know about education.

dog

/?/

?

iono, is it even a word?

Festival of Education

/ˈfɛstɪv(ə)l ɒv ɛdjʊˈkeɪʃ(ə)n/

noun

like Glastonbury, though with more toilets, less beer, but exactly the same number of Tinie Tempah main stage appearances.

further education

/ˈfəːðə ɛdjʊˈkeɪʃ(ə)n/

noun

an education that is at a greater distance from one’s current location than other educations under consideration.

glue sticks

/ɡluː stɪkz/

noun

the most valuable currency in schools; should you find yourself in possession of a reasonable number of functional glue sticks in the summer term, it is advisable to have these valued by an expert, insured, and locked away in a safety deposit box in the vault of a high security bank.

OECD

/oʊ iː siː diː/

noun

the official Finland fan club.

PISA

/ˈpiːzə/

noun

the Eurovision Song Contest of education, the prize for which is the legal mandate that the winning country must be mentioned in every single education speech or panel for the next few years; could be made better with an irreverent commentary by Graham Norton.

Six Thinking Hats

/sɪks ˈθɪŋkɪŋ hatz/

noun

a system designed by U2 frontman Bono as a tool for discussion; each of the six coloured hats represents a particular way of thinking: blue = lewd thinking; white = try not to think about anything (it’s hard, isn’t it? give this hat to the member of your group you want to keep occupied); red = think like a socialist (make placards, etc.); black = harness your dark thoughts, give in to them, strike me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete; yellow = what would SpongeBob do?

sports day

/spɔːtz deɪ/

noun

either the hottest or the wettest day of the year.

Teacher, The

/ˈtiːtʃə, ðə/

noun

your magazine from the NUT; you know, the one that you don’t even take out of its plastic wrapping; yeh, that’s it, the one that sits on the side for a month before you decide to throw it out; you don’t even know how often it’s published, do you? Is it monthly or quarterly? Nobody knows. Nobody.

TEDx Education

/tɛdɛks ɛdjʊˈkeɪʃ(ə)n/

noun

conferences for new media types who hated school themselves but think that schools might be a way for them to monetise their ‘creativity’ whilst simultaneously avenging their own schooldays; talks from these ‘thinkateers’ are interspersed with the occasional actual teacher to give the conference some credibility.

textbook

/ˈtɛks(t)bʊk/

noun

a pejorative term for a pre-printed large collection of sequenced subject resources (cf. individual resources which, due to the fact they are unsequenced, uncollected and you have to spend time creating and printing them yourself, are far superior).

toilet break

/ˈtɔɪlɪt/

noun

a luxury for teachers.

Teaching, The Education Fables

A Glossary of U.K. Education (Vol. 3)

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Following on from volumes one and two, here’s the latest edition of our education glossary.

Bennett, Tom

/bɛnɪt, tɒm/

noun

Scottish outlaw and folk hero; known colloquially as ‘Tam’ Bennett, he formed the researchED clan and led the VAKobite Rebellion against the neuromyths laying claim to the throne of pedagogy; he ultimately overthrew the House of Brain-Gym and restored evidence to its rightful place.

Bloom’s taxonomy

/bluːmz takˈsɒnəmi/

noun

a hierarchical model of classification which organises learning into six levels of complexity: remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create; once you have overcome all of these levels, you must ultimately defeat the end-of-level boss: obfuscate.

Blue’s taxonomy

/bluːz takˈsɒnəmi/

noun

a hierarchical model of classification which organises items on a scale of least irritating to most irritating, based on the members of the boy band Blue: Simon Webbe (least irritating), Duncan James, Antony Costa, Lee Ryan (most irritating); e.g., “The consultant delivering that CPD was absolutely Lee Ryan.”

caffeine

/ˈkafiːn/

noun

life-force of teachers; they can cut our budgets, they can freeze our pay, but if they come for our coffee and tea, they’ll have to prise it from our cold, dead hands.

Christodoulou, Daisy

/krɪˈstɒduːluː, ˈdeɪzi/

noun

the only prominent educationalist who is most commonly referred to by their first name alone.

fair funding formula

/fɛː ˈfʌndɪŋ ˈfɔːmjʊlə/

noun

unfair funding formula.

grade descriptors

/ɡreɪd dɪˈskrɪptəz/

noun

occult apparatus used for supernatural divination; a form of cleromancy in which prophets will look over a document and then interpret it using the grade descriptors to guide them to a grade, which will then be challenged by another prophet who used the same descriptors to come up with an entirely different grade; a process of debate will follow until the prophets can agree on an interpretation of the descriptors that angers the spirits the least.

Hirsch, E.D.

/hɛːʃ, ˈiː ˈdiː/

noun

educationalist and academic; be honest, you think his name is Ed, don’t you? I mean, maybe not consciously, but subconsciously, you sort of think of him as Ed Hirsch, don’t you? Yeh, you do.

interactive whiteboard (IWB)

/ɪntərˈaktɪv ˈwʌɪtbɔːd/

noun

a large interactive

display that,

when written on with an

interactive whiteboard pen,

displays the writing wherever the                                               hell

it

wants.

Even after calib

ration.

Mantle of the Expert

/ˈmant(ə)l ɒv ðə ˈɛkspəːt/

noun

educational approach in which novices spend their time pretending to be experts so that they can remain novices for longer.

Slough of Despond

/ˈslaʊ əv dᵻˈspɒnd/

noun

the filthiest, most festering, fungus-ridden mug in the staffroom, as mentioned in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress: “This miry Slough is such a place as cannot be mended; it is the descent whither the scum and filth […] doth continually run, and therefore is it called the Slough of Despond.”; it is traditionally discarded in the waste bin at the end of every term, only to magically return in another form within a few weeks of the following term.

snow

/snəʊ/

noun

the gift given to tired teachers from the benevolent gods every few years as a reward for their hard work in educating the children (cf. wind, which is a punishment handed down to teachers from the vengeful gods for not keeping up with the marking).

Summer Holiday

/ˈsʌmə ˈhɒlɪdeɪ/

noun

1963 British film starring Cliff Richard, in which he plays a character who wanders about feeling utterly purposeless at the start, then writes himself a to do list of household jobs he’s been putting off all year; he goes on to read a couple of books, binge watch some boxsets, fall asleep in the afternoon a bit, and he finally goes into work to put some displays up on the walls; just as the credits roll he suddenly realises that he hasn’t done any of the household jobs on his to do list.

Teach First

/tiːtʃ fəːst/

noun

charity which focuses on giving bankers hearts.

wind

/wɪnd/

noun

powerful chemical catalyst; just one part wind mixed with 100+ parts children will cause uncontrollable agitation and ebullition of said children.

wine

/wʌɪn/

noun

a form of neuralyzer (the memory-wiping device made famous by the Men in Black film franchise); it is used by teachers on themselves each night in order to forget the ignominy and upset of being told to “!@$# off” or that “your lessons are boring”; sometimes these things are even said to them by pupils.

Teaching, The Education Fables

A Glossary of U.K. Education (Vol. 2)

5 Comments

Volume One of our handy glossary of commonly-used terms in U.K. education was such a success that our publishers have rushed out the second volume. We hope that you find this a useful tool in navigating the debates and discussion around education, both online and in real world situations.

assembly

/əˈsɛmbli/

noun

the action of gathering a group of children together in order to watch a short video of an athlete doing something inspiring to uplifting music.

Bjork, Robert A.

/bjɔːk/, ˈrɒbət ˈeɪ/ 

noun

cognitive psychologist, famous for his work on learning, memory and forgetting, and for his hit single “It’s Oh So Quiet”, which spent 15 weeks in the U.K. singles chart in 1995; he was hoping you’d forgotten about that.

cake

/keɪk/ 

noun

main fuel source of teachers during the latter weeks of a term; as a child, cake is something that someone buys you on your birthday; as a teacher, cake is something that you have to buy for everyone in your department on your own birthday; how did that happen?

Chartered College of Teaching

/ˈtʃɑːtəd ˈkɒlɪdʒ ɒv ˈtiːtʃɪŋ/

noun

see General Teaching Council for England (GTC).

Dead Poet’s Society

/dɛd ˈpəʊɪtz səˈsʌɪɪti/

noun

elaborate teacher recruitment video from the late 1980s; data shows that the two-thirds of teachers who remain in the profession after five years only stay on in the hope that their pupils will one day stand on their desks and declare “O Captain! My Captain!” at them.

detention

/dɪˈtɛnʃ(ə)n/

noun

punishment given out to teachers whereby they have to give up their break time, lunchtime or after school to spend time with someone who has previously been rude to them or otherwise ignored their instructions.

enquiry learning

/ɪnˈkwʌɪri ˈləːnɪŋ/ 

noun

for a clear understanding of the way that enquiry learning works, see entry for inquiry learning.

GCSE results day

/ˈdʒiːˈsiːˈɛsˈiː rɪˈzʌltz deɪ/ 

noun

the second most exciting day in the school calendar, after stationery order delivery day.

growth mindset

/ɡrəʊθ ˈmʌɪn(d)sɛt/ 

noun

a powerful incantation used as a magic word; legend has it that, if SLT and the board of governors hold hands in a circle with their eyes closed and chant the words ‘growth mindset’ three times, when they open their eyes the DfE will have made further cuts to their school budget.

inquiry learning

/ɪnˈkwʌɪri ˈləːnɪŋ/ 

noun

for a clear understanding of the way that inquiry learning works, see entry for enquiry learning.

lunchtime duty

/ˈlʌn(t)ʃtʌɪm ˈdjuːti/

noun

(Oops, sorry, I totally forgot to do this one – Ed.)

mastery

/ˈmɑːst(ə)ri/ 

noun

a Rorschach inkblot, often associated with a curriculum, which can be interpreted to mean absolutely anything a person sees in it when they look at it.

mindset

/ˈmʌɪn(d)sɛt/ 

noun

the mental attitude or disposition that predetermines a person’s responses to and interpretations of a situation; according to psychologists, there are three types: fixed and growth (Dweck), and dirty (Freud).

red pen

/rɛd pɛn/

noun

principle weapon of torture, used by teachers who don’t take children’s feelings into account (cf. the marking pen chart below, showing the range colours preferable to use when marking); red pen is also famously mentioned in the old adage of teacher lore that goes, “Red pen at night: normal. Red pen in the morning: I fell asleep doing my marking last night.”

Spectrum of colours preferable to use when marking children’s work, in order to not cause unnecessary anxiety. ‘Sensitive White’ is a popular choice.

retention deficit disorder (RDD)

/rɪˈtɛnʃ(ə)n/

noun

an employment disorder that can be found in the U.K. education sector; it is characterised by a person openly lamenting teacher turnover whilst they are simultaneously creating the conditions that cause teachers to leave their jobs, e.g., “Justine Greening spoke earnestly about the ‘challenges on recruitment and retention, but also on workload’, just before she announced a funding formula that will see 98% of state schools’ funding cut.”

self-assessment

/sɛlf əˈsɛsmənt/

noun

process in which children show that they have had enough of the topic being studied; this is sometimes done by the pupil displaying an emoticon of a smiley face, or through the use of traffic light colours, but is more commonly achieved by the children putting their thumbs up, as pioneered by Scottish pupil James Krankie in the late 1970s (see image below); however, it should be noted that Krankie is still at school some 40 years later, which may be an indication that this method is a flawed way of gauging a pupil’s learning.

James Krankie, eternal schoolboy and pioneer of the thumbs up method of self-assessment

 

 

 

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