I’m sitting in a departmental meeting at the beginning of term, getting a little bit bored about a lot of matters that do not affect me in the slightest. My mind wanders a bit and moves to a topic that often comes up – why teach? I’ve begun to think a lot about what I want to get out of teaching and more importantly what I can put in. Having moved into education only recently (I still consider myself a ‘new’ teacher even though I’ve been doing this for nearly a year!) and without any formal teaching qualifications, my career so far has been about trying to learn from those teachers around me as well as try to filter as much of the excellence of the brilliant teachers who have put so many resources, blogs, podcasts, videos and more online for the benefit of teachers everywhere! I now want to also contribute to that world and I hope this blog will inspire me to continue to improve and learn as all teachers should!
I’m passionate about improving pupils experience of mathematics and trying to ensure ALL of them come to classes happy and willing to learn (maybe a high expectation but I believe happy pupils will learn better!). I am also very interested in using existing and new information technology innovations to improve both the teaching and learning process. So far I’ve employed a scattergun approach – trying lots of different things in order to find out what works and what doesn’t! I feel I’m now in a better place to judge whether something is worth incorporating into my teaching or whether it just adds another technical challenge to an already busy working week.
I work at a boarding school in England and jumped into teaching after a career switch from a software engineering background. I’ve tried to get into blogging before but its usually been a “blog intensively for about a month before it tails of into nothingness”. So with that in mind, I am going to try to take the pressure off this one by setting some fairly loose criteria for posts. I imagine most of my posts will be about:
- Teaching plans and practice – things I’ve done in the classroom that have worked or not!
- Technology in education
- Random anecdotes about school life!
That’s all for now folks!
new maths teacher 