Tonight is Burns Night and ex-pat Scots all over the world will be eating haggis and toasting the bard. I can’t help but wonder what that gloriously irreverent poet would have made of all the mad trappings of a classic Burns Night.

Anyway, enough of my babble! If you want good resources for using Burns in school you could do worse than start with

The National Burns Collection.

Lovely resources, download-able packs for different key stages, virtual tours of various Burns Museums.

The National Library of Scotland

Lots of images and scans of original materials, chronological account of his life in various places, audio available.

Family myths about Burns

One of my ancestors (a Kirkpatrick) attended the first ever Burns Supper in Burn’s birthplace in Alloway.
My grandmother (a Wilson of that ilk) in a fit of ‘cleaning’ before moving to a new house in 1958 threw away a ‘Kilmarnock edition’. (1786 published by John Wilson of Kilmarnock only 600 copies ever printed “Scottish Poems by Robert Burns”)

My Memories of Burn’s Night

When I was a child my parents used to disappear to Caledonian Society ‘doos’ on the Saturday nearest Burns Night. This usually involved my father donning his kilt, (not the dusty coloured one that smelled of bracken that he occasionally wore from choice when we were ‘up home’ on holiday) but the ‘dress Lindsey’ one and a velvet jacket. My Mum wore a white frock with a sort of sash of tartan over one shoulder, (a plaidie - but a sort of fake one, no use what so ever in the North West rain!) a big fancy broach with an purple stone pinning it to the frock.

My dad said he felt a bit silly in that get up, though he was usually gallant enough to say my Mum looked lovely. He wasn’t a Highlander after all, but a Lowland Scot. Just like Burns himself. Still Burns liked to romanticise the noble Highlander and I suppose he’s partly responsible for the spread of the belief that that’s the true version of Scottishness. Most of it came later with Queen Victoria and all that Balmorality but Burns was there at the start of it.

All that tartan, all those formal speeches! If I believed in an after-life, (slipping quickly past that topic!) I’m sure he’d be wetting himself laughing at what it has turned into.

Original source Courosa

I was always the one playing with the cardboard box, wonder what that says about me?

It’s a serious point though. I used to get annoyed by learning facilitators saying:

“That’s an interesting site (and/or) application - how could we use it for education?”

Now I find myself wondering the same thing, rather than just getting on and using whatever it is.

I’ve just discovered a paradox though. Although new things come and go, I’m pretty faithful to my chosen tool set :

• Flickr (I’m soooo Old Skool!) I’ve had an account since Sept 2004
• Blog - I’ve had blogs on Blogdrive, Edublogs and here. I’ve blogged continuously since Nov 2003 (eek that’s a long time!)
• NetNewsWire Lite- my RSS reader of choice since 2004
• BlogLines - RSS reader for when I’m away from the mac - since 2003
• VoodooPad - my choice for a personal off-line wiki since March 2004
• Furl - social bookmarking since Nov 2003 (I use del.icio.us more now but furl is still where most of my bookmarks are as it saves a copy)
• gmail - for my email since July 2004
• MediaWiki - for my teaching resources for usefulwiki.com since Feb 2007

Starting to think I’m a dinosaur except for the most recent addition:

Twitter - microblogging since March 2007

The first thing I heard on the radio this morning was the announcement that 30 new adventure play grounds were to be created. I instantly thought of an old friend, currently languishing as a OFSTED inspector, who really has to be part of this. My second thought was something like …”Hmm, they are going to need lots of trained play-workers again”

Comment is free: Getting serious about play
It should fund improvements in every local authority, alongside the creation of 30 new staffed adventure playgrounds, innovative approaches in 30 “pathfinder” areas, and high quality training for 4,000 playworkers.

I learned my first really valuable lessons about informal learning long ago as a play worker. We didn’t ever get an adventure playground, we just had the basement of an old library and a big playing field. It was great!

We did all sorts: art activities; cooking; helped with health issues and personal problems; got tied to trees and had buckets of water thrown over us. We all learned to play New Games where “nobody wins, nobody looses and everyone has fun”. We borrowed circus equipment and then had to chase people on unicycles all round the estate. Who knew they’d find them so easy to ride? We painted up old band stands, helped organise free Rock in the Park concerts. We went on coach trips to May Day Play Days in far flung places, like Skelmersdale. Played with giant earth balls and took the kids to A&E when the inevitable sometimes happened. I never worked so hard, or so long and it was all so real, vibrant and filled with learning.

Now lots of new people are going to learn play working skills. I’m not sure anyone will give them as much freedom or let them take the kinds of risk that we did, but still, I might be interested in getting involved the training.

Dy/dan fell in love with the design aesthetics of this hand written worksheet and started to question our obsession with the word processor:

dy/dan » Blog Archive » Careful now.

I saw this in a pile of forgotten masters while walking by the copier. It was love.

Check out the clear hierarchy. The single, legible font. The single style for emphasis. Margins tightly aligned. The second lines indenting just as they should. Spacing is evenly distributed. The kids know exactly where to look, where to go for their next question, and where to find important information.

Somewhere, until quite recently I still had all my hand written masters for worksheets. They were done in the far off days of the banda machine. Everything came out blue, very dark bluey/purple if you were lucky or, almost unreadable, light blue, if the ink was running out. Your hand writing had to be clear otherwise there was no chance of the children reading it. You had to use weight, bullet points and underlining to make things stand out.

Pupils were used to reading cursive script and they loved worksheets. It was so much easier than squinting, copying notes off a blackboard. We were taught at Teacher Training College that using blackboards full of notes (as many of the teachers in our TP schools did) was very poor practice and the banda worksheet was the way forward. I think the word ‘personalisation’ might even have been used!

I looked through those old worksheets before I threw them away and realised they were from a time that shared many ideas with where we are now in schools. The tasks they set were differentiated by “must, should and could”. They often sought personal responses and gave scope for extended writing. They even included some line drawings and diagrams or asked for a pictorial response ( my subjects were Middle School English and Comparative Religion - does anyone still teach that?) They were then my very best attempt at helping my pupils to learn and I was still proud of my 20 year old self for having made a good job of them. But I binned them anyway.

Now I question the value of worksheets, how ever well designed. After all, as Adrian says

* In years to come will you be stopped in the street by an ex-student and they will bow down before you and thank you for all the exciting worksheets they gave? I don’t think so!
* Please challenge your students and teach them to think.
* Please give your students a 21st Century Literacy skillset.
* Please hang this poster next to your school’s photocopier.

POP Quiz-Text Version
POP Quiz 1
Do you know the true art of questioning? (If Students Wrote the Quiz)

Can you answer “NO” to all 5 questions?

* Do you put our names at the BEGINNING of directed questions? If you put names at the beginning of a question, the rest of us will tend to ignore your question, since you have already chosen who will do the answering for you! Wouldn’t you, too?

I can mostly answer No to this one, but it’s good to be reminded

* Do you ask “whole group” questions like, “Does everyone understand the difference between…?” Hope not, because it is simply an invitation for a chorus of “yes” responses and the 2 or 3 of us who do not understand probably would not let you know because, “everyone must have understood it but us!” Instead, ask, “Who would like for me to repeat those directions?”

Oh - yeah, I knew that but I’ve still caught myself doing it a couple of times

* Do you repeat student answers? If you do, then you’re teaching us not to listen to each other, because we know the answer will be repeated by you! Instead, try other responses such as “Tell us more,” or “Someone else?”

Ouch! Guilty as charged Need to watch this one!

* Are you always the “answer-giver” in class? If you turn our questions back to us, you will encourage us to do our own thinking and learn to answer our own questions. For example ask, “That is a good question. What do you think?” After giving us a chance to state an opinion, the question can then be directed to the class for discussion. At that point you can add your comments to ours.

Ok I get an A+ for this one, I’m smiling again:-)

* Do you practice less “wait time” for the slower students than you do for the smarter ones? Researchers have clearly demonstrated that teachers typically wait less than one second after asking a question before calling on a student, answer the question themselves, or make an additional comment! Increasing wait time results in dramatic improvements in the overall quality of class discussions.

I’ve been working on this one, counting up to twenty elephants in my head. Adults need thinking time too especially when English is their second language.

There’s lots more good stuff on this site.

What aids do you use to reflect on your teaching?