Are you a lifelong learner?
I have been a teacher for 35 years. Some students enjoyed my classes and some didn’t, but that is par for the course. Whether they thought I was good or not, I know that I made the most of whatever ability I have by being a lifelong learner. No teacher can remain as effective as they possibly can be unless they continue to learn themselves. If they stop learning about their subject and other areas of knowledge their lessons calcify and become pointless for both parties.
I remember many of my teachers at Secondary school going through the motions and serving up lessons that never inspired. Others, however, were able to make you interested in their subject through continuously refining their lessons. I didn’t realise that at the time, but I do now through the prism of my own experience. I have taught with colleagues who were still learning in their late 60s and, in one very specific outlier of a case, with a colleague who was 22 and had already decided that he knew enough and was going to run his own language school with money from his girlfriend’s father! What is interesting is that the learners are endlessly interesting outside the lesson and those that have stopped are thoroughly boring to talk to. That younger colleague was the least interesting person I have ever met in the staffroom purely because he had nothing new to say.
Outside of teaching, the same rules apply. Whatever job you are doing you need to be continuously looking to improve and innovate. You should also be looking to learn about things that are unconnected with the job in order to hone your skills within your field of work. My most interesting colleagues outside of teaching have shared the thirst for knowledge that I have.
Let me be clear on one thing. I am not talking about book knowledge or formal knowledge. That’s just as well because very few of us have the ability to devote ourselves to full time work and formal learning at the same time. This is the problem for so many students at universities nowadays and perhaps the main reason for the increase in AI usage. TV documentaries, Wikipedia articles about factual content, effectively prompted ChatGPT, and books that you pick up for a reason other than education are all viable sources of knowledge.
Keep learning throughout your life and keep teaching formally or informally with the example you set.
What do you think gets better with age? The fact that I started with a pun that probably only 70s kids will fully understand gives you an idea that I have gone a fair way through the ageing process! It’s fair to say that I am not a fan of many aspects, but I am […]
Opportunities Knock
Update on last year’s post. My daughter and I saw The Last Dinner Party at the end of last year and Lola Young last month. Last night I went with both my daughters to My Chemical Romance at Wembley Stadium and it was amazing! The experiences pile up and the feeling is more special as I get older and appreciate how lucky I am to have them.
The Story The second story of Season 8 is a 6 part story that features two strands. The first features the Doctor and Jo at Stangmoor Prison where they are observers for a completely new type of rehabilitation approach for violent prisoners. The Keller Machine, named after its creator, removes the evil impulses from the […]
Doctor Who Re View The Mind of Evil
I got the Series 8 blu ray of Classic Doctor Who and decided to do some reviewing to reflect my response as an adult to one of the most important parts of my television childhood. This was the first Doctor Who story I can ever remember watching and it was a delight to revisit it. When I start doing TV and film Re Views again I will definitely focus on the other Pertwee blu ray in my collection and then probably move back to the William Hartnell boxed set I have. For the moment, click on the link above, particularly if you are a fan of Classic Who. The rest of the series can be found in the category Doctor Who Re View.
What’s one habit that has improved your life the most?
When I first saw this prompt I thought in terms of specifics, whether that was meditation, yoga or exercise. Then I realised that the most important habit I have learned, particularly in recent years, has been layered development. That’s my own phrase for embedding one new habit at a time before moving on to the next. I have called it Layermaxxing because you need that suffix these days to give it proper social media traction 🤔 🤣!
Joking aside it has worked extremely well. I have gradually transformed my approach to life by doing this. The first layer I added a few years back was meditation and that was a struggle at first because I was trying to change a number of things at the same time. Eventually I focused on the Calm App and was able to introduce it as a nightly part of my routine. This year I added morning exercise and yoga to my repertoire by focusing on the discipline of doing one or the other before breakfast, whether I was teaching or not. Since I have been teaching this time around I have managed to fit in one or both around my schedule very effectively because I have made it such an integral part of my routine. It doesn’t feel right for me not to do exercise although I do give myself one morning off a week just to make sure it’s not getting to the stage where it’s a chore. I listen to my body to decide when to take that break, another habit I have introduced recently and is now ingrained.
So, that’s Layermaxxing. Now can I make that ‘a thing’?🤣🤣
What time do you go to bed and wake up currently? I got brought up with the idea that staying in bed past a certain time was unacceptable. When I was on scout camp, my Dad, who was our Scout Leader used to wake us up with the greeting, ‘The sun’s burning your eyes out!’ […]
Catching the Worm?
This was written a year ago today and to be honest not much has changed, although I had started to sleep in regularly until nearer 7 every morning until I restarted teaching this summer. Tonight is one of my late nights as I’m going to the My Chemical Romance concert at Wembley Stadium!!
