Trivium 21c ltd.

Grid of Posts 3×2

  • Teaching Creativity? There’s Nothing To It

    Instead of ‘teaching’ students to be creative, teachers should look to the ultimate creative act for inspiration. The film is my first foray into the video form and is thanks to Leon Cych and his online Teacher TV project L4LTV I hope to be a regular contributer. Read more

  • Why Educate? To Expand The Self, Rather Than Narrow The Self.

    I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent… Samuel Beckett, Endgame. I like students to learn about things that are outside of their everyday experience. Once  I arranged a trip for my class to see Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. After this bleak, Read more

  • Teacher Talk: Sounding Into Ears

    In the early middle ages “instruction came from didactic grammarians who taught in repetitive and boring ways… the one way catechism (literally ‘to sound into ears’) by which the master instructed his pupil.” Trivium 21c p45. When I was at school (not quite back as far as the middle ages) we had a history teacher Read more

  • Monkeying About: A Roy Hodgson moment

    Reading about Roy Hodgson’s ‘space monkey’ joke and how it has caused a furore reminded me of an incident in school about five years ago. I was walking through a corridor when a white year eight girl went past me with a little, and he was very little, black year seven boy who she had Read more

  • The Battle of the Blob

    Michael Gove has  deblobbed in Austria. Now, with evangelical  zeal, and the rhetoric of social justice, he wants to irrigate the flabby educational colon of its sticky blob. This blob values Marxism, fights excellence and tries to prevent the poorest children from getting the education they need. In the same way as the Athenian State, which came to see Read more

  • From the Me to the We: Making Group-Work Work!

    In ‘The Importance of Teaching‘ Michael Gove says: “All too often, we’ve seen an over-emphasis on group work – in practice, children chatting to each other – in the belief that is a more productive way to acquire knowledge than attending to an expert.” Of course he is right, group-work done badly is bad. I Read more