Day Two as a Teaching Assistant

A less stressful day than yesterday.  Mostly spent with older children: years 10 and 11. 

The first lesson was IT but the children had been allowed to finish off work from other subjects, and most of them had completed this.  I noticed that some of the boys were surreptitiously playing an online mountain bike game.  One of the girls had a rather unusual first name so I suggested that she look it up on Google and she found a town near New York with the same name.  This seemed to please her very much.

In a later lesson, a group of quite troublesome girls were reduced to complete silence by being shown a video about healthy eating and weight loss.  The teaching assistants didn't have much to do in that lesson. 

Then there was another rather chaotic chemistry lesson, but this one had at least four disruptive boys in it which made things very difficult for the teacher.  It was a practical lesson involving adding hydrochloric acid to fragments of limestone.  I noticed that one table of children had been missed out in the handing out of equipment, and they hadn't complained, nor did they even seem to care, so I gathered up a set of equipment and took it over to them and got each of them doing it.  They seemed to enjoy it but I don't know whether they will remember anything of worth from it. It must be very difficult for children to distinguish what is relevant in an environment like that.  The teacher must seem to be more concerned with keeping the children on their stools, stopping them talking, getting them to write down predictions, and preventing them spraying each other with acid.  For the children, the intended message (the actual chemistry) must be completely swamped by all this extraneous noise.

The last lesson was a complete contrast:  a bright attentive class with an enthusiastic, knowledgable teacher.  I hadn't realized that the history of medicine was an option in the history syllabus, but it does seem to have been an inspired choice to include it.  The lesson was fascinating and took me back to my grammar school days.  Several times I had to stop myself from putting my hand up to answer the teacher's questions myself.  When I become a teacher, I want my lessons to be like that.

A good day.  I caught a bus back into town and only walked the last mile home.  I don't feel so tired tonight.

Day One as a Teaching Assistant

Yesterday was my first day back at school in 22 years.  I shadowed various other teaching assistants as they went about their work.  I saw 4 very different lessons, all involving at least one child that had been identified as needing extra help (providing that help is what teaching assistants are for).  It was all rather confusing for me: going into a class in which the children were continuing some work which had been explained to them in a previous lesson, and me trying to pick up what was going on and what the teacher was trying to achieve.  However, when I get into the job properly this confusion should disappear. 

I started with an art lesson in which the children were assessing each other's work, using checklists that looked as if they had been photocopied from the National Curriculum literature.  It reminded me very much of 'going through the motions' on various software development methods from the 1990's  (CMM in particular).  Then there was a maths lesson on number place value (hundreds, tens and units).  One of the boys several times misread 'four' as 'five' and 'eleven' as 'seven.  I wondered if he wasn't seeing clearly.  He was already wearing quite thick spectacles.  However, he still managed to complete the worksheet and seemed very pleased to have got a complete column of ticks.  Then there was a reading lesson in which the teacher had the children taking turns to read sentences from a rather surreal story about a woman who ran a boarding house but had a laboratory in the basement in which she did experiments in paint technology.  (Yes, this does rather seem like desperate attempt to break stereotypes and promote science both at the same time.)

In the afternoon I was in a chemistry lesson (reactivity series) with older children.  I was impressed with how the teacher coped with difficult circumstances, the room was cold, rather dark, and some of the girls were rather restive.  He seemed to keep control of the simmering chaos in quite an impressive way, and I quite enjoyed this lesson.

At the end of the day I walked all the way home which took me 55 minutes.  Later that evening I suddenly felt very tired and went to bed early.

Darwin's Strange Inversion of Reasoning

The great inversion of Darwin, what McKenzie calls his strange inversion of reasoning, was when Darwin realized that you have a bottom-up theory of creativity, that all the wonderful design that we see in the biosphere could be the products, direct or indirect of a mindless, purposeless process, and this simply inverts an idea that I think is as old as our species, maybe older in a certain sense, and that is what you might call the top-down theory of creativity: it takes a big fancy thing to make a less fancy thing. Potters make pots. You never see a pot making a potter. You never see a horseshoe making a blacksmith. It is always big fancy, wise, wonderful things making lesser things. And so, here we are, we are pretty wonderful: we must be made by something more wonderful still and it's got to be like us, it's got to be the intelligent artificer. It's very scarey for people to give that up, and to begin to think about how our importance doesn't depend on the importance of something still more important. That is, not of that sort. I mean on the one hand I think that a good bumper-sticker recipe for happiness is find something more important than yourself to think about and worry about. There are many such things that we can find to replace the one big important thing which many people think they have, which is God.

Daniel Dennet in this interview by Susan Blackmore  (via The Guardian).

The Glamour of Marine Biology

From a post by Todd Oakley:

Once, I was collecting sludge in Half Moon Bay, California, in an attempt to find Euphilomedes ostracods. A group of 10 or so girls, about aged 11 or so, were having a picnic nearby on the beach with 3 or 4 of their moms. The gaggle of young girls soon came running over toward me, yelling girlishly, and separately..... "Are you a marine biologist????". I paused. I looked down at my sludge, and my wet suit, and then threw out my chest slightly, and lowered my voice, "Why, yes, I am a marine biologist". I had just gotten a shrimp in my sieve, flopping around, and I showed it to them. For that one shining moment, I felt like a rock star.

Multi-Author Blog Annoyance

Two of my favorite blogs, Cosmic Variance and Overcoming Bias,  have multiple authors.  In both you have to scroll to the foot of a post to see who wrote it.  This is unnecessarily annoying: the author's name should appear at the head of the posts in a multi-author blog.