Watch This Space

Mid-February may not be the classic time for a resolution but there's no time like the present, so here goes.

A little word on my motivations: Come the summer I will be 5 years into my teaching career, as my first Year 7s are about to step up for their GCSEs and head out into the world it feels somewhat momentous and as though I should take some time to acknowledge my own growth and learning over that time. I am one of those that came straight to teaching from University, super green and enthusiastic as a puppy, many veterans were quick to warn me of burnout and people would regularly comment on how quickly they'd expect my light to fade. Well, I don't feel burnt out, but I do acknowledge that the light takes more maintenance than I may have anticipated.

Much of what I love about teaching is of course spending my days learning with young people and all the wonderful, weird, clever, daft, and entirely surprising things that they say and do. But I also deeply enjoy the problem of teaching maths: trying to find logical, simple, beautiful, joyful ways to demonstrate and explain the mathematics I love to those brilliant young people. I find teaching maths is much more fun when I'm not rushing the planning, but thinking carefully about the sequencing, explanation and examples, taking a few more risks trying out all those ideas I've picked up at CPL but not quite made time to properly trial in the classroom.

So that's what I'm committing to now, it won't be every lesson or even every topic but my plan is at least once a month to think hard about the how and the why of an upcoming topic, take inspiration from others, make my own resources, give things a go, reflect and share my findings.

My hope is that this will not only improve my practice but also go some way to keeping the teaching buzz alive and protecting that light that makes me feel so blessed and excited to get to school each day.

Watch this space...