Is this just another post about a teacher during the Covid-19 posting about what they’re doing during “remote teaching”. Probably. Actually, there is not real point to this post. But I haven’t written for 6 months and also am feeling a bit down about education (because of the situation we’re in at the moment)

Look, this is Season 6 of Buffy, where the bad guy has is 3 nerdy kids who seem to be able to use Zoom. . and when all my friends are posting on facebook about how they’re “home schooling” and then doing cooking and fun games and watching tv programmes – the rational person in me knows they are doing their best and working round difficult circumstances – but the frustrated teacher in me wants to throw something at the computer screen. And then I read twitter how people are doing loads of CPD, looking after children and delivering live lessons… or then others who are taking up new hobbies and not doing any work (seemingly) and I am in wall to wall meetings.

So, what am I doing. Like many Maths teachers I’m using Hegarty Maths. The problem is that my students don’t like engaging with it… they claim to struggle with the videos (but I know generally when they put them on, don’t take notes, and then have a go by guess work for the most part)

I am not a fan of homework. I think that homework shouldn’t be practicing skills, because if people practice skills wrong then you are building in misconceptions into your learning. I prefer knowlege based homeworks where they learn facts which they can bring to the lesson. A student who does 30 homework questions who isn’t going to want to go back and re-do them – and worse, they have practiced this skill wrong and you’ll have to do 60 right to be able to correct that (i’m better at chosing random numbers than cognative science). Hegarty Maths is good… becuase it tells you straight away if you’re wrong (or if you can’t round in the case of many of my students) . Which is great, it gets round this issue, but because i’ve never used it before and never really appreciated homework my students aren’t as well trained as working from home as they should be.

This also means that the student’s aren’t used to doing the videos, of watching a stranger (and they do hate people they don’t know speaking to them) tell them how to do maths. So what i’ve done is to work around that. I’ve probably made more work for myself, and I’m not sure that many of my students are engaging – but my bottom set year 10s (there are 6 of them in total and they are all awesome) but all but 1 have had a go, have messaged me and spoke to me about the work, have sent me maths gifs (which isn’t helpful, but it’s good connection). They may not learn a lot – but knowing that I care about their learning is probably just as important.

What I’m doing

A 20 minute video for every lesson. These started as an hour – but there’s no need. 20 minutes gives me a chance to do some knowlege retrieval, for them to hear my voice and to show breif notes. Then I complete the Hegarty task on paper as a visualiser. Basically, I’m modelling what I want them to do. My videos are not as good as Colin Hegarty’s – but they have one thing that his don’t. They have me doing it – and for many of my students who are feeling as long , that means a lot. The students can layout their books like mine, they can watch me do the work and then they can do it themselves. Since I’m mainly doing revision rather than new content, it also means the way I show them is the way they’re used to which jogs their memories about the way it is done – which helps. The doing the work, the tracking, the marking is all done via Hegarty. I put the work up on Google Classroom because show my homework (although good) has a dreadful way of showing the work. Great for normal times… shows them when it’s due, but unfortuantly, we want them to see when it was set – which it doesn’t do well… calendar view on a laptop works, but not on the app.

Look – this might be season 6. This might be the battle of the nerds, a laboured love affair between Spike and Buffy, no Angel (due to social isolation), but we have Dark Willow, we have Once More with Feeling and we have the realisation that Buffy may not have been in hell to come. So we need to learn lessons about our practice for when we go back. Especially since Season Seven has Faith and Caleb to look forward too.

How I will change my practice

I will probably use Google Classroom as standard. Not as a learning aid, but as a way to catalogue what i have taught, and to support people who are ill. To put copies of worksheet up there and keep a track of the work I set. Mainly because I shouldn’t need it – but if a student ins ill and off for a long time then having a resource that they are used to is key.

Most importantly I will use Hegarty properly. They will write out the questions in a book that I’ll look at – and I will be massively strict about making sure it’s done, to train them into workign through it. Because if we don’t train our students how to use these resources and allow them to see the benefit, then what’s the point. Will I use it for the work I’m doing in class – maybe. But probably I’ll use it for recapping previous work, to make sure that they are still remembering it properly rather than new content. new content isn’t best learnt at home, but allowing to reinforce prior knowlege and help memory of those skills is great.

Mainly though, I’m going to stop kicking myself that I’m doing a bad job at the moment. Stop judging others and comparing myself to them – and just do what I can do, for my students and for myself. It’s a bad season, but is that a reason to give up… or keep going and see what comes next.