Dickens

With great power comes great responsibility: an apology

2014-06-25T20:51:07+01:00December 8th, 2013|blogging|

Every now and then I'm faced with the realisation that I can be a bit of a twat. I'm sure I regularly upset people by making carelessly forthright assertions about what they should or shouldn't be doing, but this week someone chose to write a blog post about it to let me know how they felt. They accused me of a "thoughtless and unnecessary abuse of [my] status", and described me, with some degree of irony I'm sure, as "the esteemed and highly regarded teacher, blogger and author of The Perfect Ofsted English Lesson". I want to make it clear that [...]

Creativity, analysis and comparison

2013-09-22T15:22:20+01:00February 11th, 2012|English, literacy, reading, writing|

English teachers have a tough gig. We need to constantly hone the hard-edged skill of analysis whilst simultaneously encouraging the fluffy stuff of creativity. There’s a lot said and written about creativity these days, much of it by Sir Ken Robinson. Basically, Ken's argument goes along these lines: schools should value the Arts more highly and find ways to foster creativity in those subjects where it doesn’t necessarily appear naturally. We should do this because creativity (the ability to have new ideas which have value) is increasingly important in a world where jobs that don’t require creativity have disappeared or outsourced to [...]

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