Tag: work

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Liked Soft fascination (richardcoyne.com)
My ability to concentrate on any task is limited, no matter how much I enjoy that task. Eventually I reach a point where my performance is severely hampered, things take longer than usual, and I make mistakes, become inefficient, less creative, and easily distracted. Sound familiar? Tangle of bare b...

Fascinating post on fascination. It proposes that Soft Fascination will restore out concentration and that this is facilitated by being in nature. I certainly feel it can be easy to become absorbed in the natural world. I was also pleased to read

On the contrary, smartphones may help us get out more, adding to a sense of safety, GPS means you can explore more, there are countless information sources and apps about the outdoors, and there’s the full set of UK Ordnance Survey maps available for download on a GPS enabled app. Photography provides a means of exercising soft fascination and probing the world. There’s a sense in which the great outdoors and what we get out of it is already mediated by decades worth of technology, not to mention presentations via art and the mass media.

I’ve  found my phone a useful tool for navigating the natural world,  not only as a method of finding where I am but of recording that and identifying my surroundings and neighbours. Trails, PlantNet and PeakFinder Are some of my favourites along with the camera and an audio recorder.

hat tip @livedtime

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It’s doesn’t seem that long since I posted about leaving the classroom and now it looks like it is time to go back!

In the latest round of council savings my post has been deleted. In fact the whole team I work has been too (posts not people).

The council’s policy is to redeploy staff and it looks like I’ll be redeployed to a school in August.

Although I’ve just written that it does not seem my current post has lasted long, it does feels like a long time since I was organising learning for a primary class.

A lot has happened in that time. I suspect I need a fair bit of re-skilling, apart from changes in curriculum and practise, I’ve not written more than a few words by hand in the last eight years. Perhaps I should stop blogging and start a notebook to get in some handwriting practise.

I am now regretting the abandoning of resources, notes, lesson plans and the like!

I’ll need to think hard about my use of technology. In my previous school I added a lot to my workload by following personal interests and ideas with a bit too much enthusiasm.

I hope this time round I’ll be able to step back a bit and resist the tendency to spend my evenings preparing experimental tech. It may be a good idea to step as far from the keyboard as I can for a while to concentrate on the many other aspects of classroom practise I need to catch up on.

I do want to use technology for now to ask if there is any tips for going back to school after a break of this length. What have been the challenges? Were there any advantages in having a break?

the photo is my own. Chosen as I found it on searching ‘return’, I am not sure if it is appropriate to this post or not but I reckon that a mix of clouds and rainbows probably hints at my feelings.