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Dispatch from the Frontlines of Municipal Madness

Fear and Loathing in Darlington: Dispatches from a Council Chamber Gone Mad There are moments in public life when you realise, with a cold jolt to the spine, that you are no longer observing politics—you are trapped inside it. Not the dignified, pipe-and-slippers version they sell on the BBC, but the raw, twitching, hallucinatory underbelly of it. The kind where logic is optional, procedure is weaponised, and common sense is dragged out back and quietly shot. This is one of those moments. Some of you may remember my previous dispatch, written in the aftermath of my private school shutting its doors—a casualty of the slow, grinding machinery of policy dressed up as progress, aka Labour's Tax on Education. Back then, I made a promise: I would not rest. Not until the people responsible were held to account, not until the direction of travel in this country was dragged, kicking and screaming if necessary, back towards something resembling sanity. And so, fuelled by caffeine, stubbornne...
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Education Man Crush Part 2

 The summer holiday means I am absolutely immersed in my PhD . I mean from 7am to 7pm, reading, writing, reading, writing, coffee and regular two-and-a-half hour trips to London to visit the fantastic Educational Settlements Association archives (quite close to Kings Cross = only one bacon sandwich, hot drink combo from Greggs) and the Workers' Educational Association archives (quite far from Kings Cross = two bacon/hot drink combo from Greggs). At the latter, I discovered this fantastic piece of writing from my favourite education man crush, R. H. Tawney . I think I am going to have to crowbar a chapter about him into the PhD, which means more trips to London and the archives, ah all day in a library during a nice summer day. What can be better? Anyway, enough of my ramblings. Get your pedagogical brains around these beauties, taken from a speech given by Tawney to the Co-operative Movement ... Education has always meant not simply the accumulation of knowledge, or the perfecting ...
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Dumbing Down & Going Backwards?

  The recent report in The Guardian about the BBC dumbing down some of its content got me thinking about my own research. For readers new to the party, my research focuses on adult education in the 1920s and 1930s, primarily working-class adult education. The Guardian report suggests the BBC is set to "redirect its television budget to make “lighter” dramas and comedies in the belief they will appeal to Britons from poorer backgrounds." The report goes on to explain that these Britons are people who fall into the C2 social grade or skilled working class to you and me, the D social grade or working class, and the E grade or non-working. This got me thinking. How did we get from thousands of working-class men and women spending their limited leisure time listening to lectures in cold, draughty halls to the situation we are now in, where the BBC feels the need to dumb down content to appeal to working-class people? I have recently returned from a research trip to Birkenhead, wh...
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Education Man Crush

On my days off I keep on keeping on with my PhD research, I stumbled across a gentleman called R. H. Tawney and I must say I have quite the education man-crush on the chap, have a read of this and if it doesn’t get you all tingly, I don’t know what will: “Thanks to the fact that they (Tutorial Classes) are small, tutor and students can meet as friends, discover each other’s idiosyncracies, and break down that unintentional system of mutual deception which seems inseparable from any education which relies principally on the formal lecture. It is often before the classes begin and after they end, in discussions round a student’s fire, or in a walk to and from his home, that the root of the matter is reached both by student and tutor.” R. H. TAWNEY, ‘AN EXPERIMENT IN DEMOCRAT EDUCATION’,  THE POLITICAL QUARTERLY , MAY 1914. Okay, maybe it doesn’t touch you as deeply as it touched me. You probably just need some background about the man, what he did, who he taught, that kind of stuff. ...
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iGCSE ESL: Note-taking & Summary Skills

  I will be taking over the Year 4 and Yearr 5 iGCSE ESL classes next year. Several students have signed up for an additional EAL class to help them with the note-taking and summary skills sections. I remember from my time in Korea that the lessons I created around David Attenborough documentaries were useful for the students. For any of you who haven't seen the documentaries, they are excellent for Level B1/B2 students. The documentaries are an hour-long, but they are filled with short 5 to 10-minute sections about an individual animal these are perfect for the students to watch in class. Added to this is the legendary narration by David Attenborough, he doesn't talk very much, so lots of long pauses for students to make notes or fill in blanks, and when he does talk, well, every single word is pure gold. My previous worksheets focused on vocabulary, grammar and then some critical thinking questions at the end. These questions would be based on the part 3 questions in IELTS. H...
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Lifelong Learning

    We all know how fantastic MOOCs are and how they are almost as addictive as Kopparberg pear cider. Take a course in Animal Psychology or some outlandish course you wouldn't have touched with a barge pole when you were at uni and try and tell me that MOOCs aren't the greatest thing to hit the internet since that jumping dinosaur game on the google page.      But why am I talking about MOOCs now? Well, the last class I did was about lifelong learning. I created a lesson based on that topic because I was getting a bit frustrated with my students moaning (is moaning the right word? ehm yeah, I think so) about how they are not getting what they expected from their university experience. Some of the complaints were: The low English level of the Korean professors*. Korean professors not being interested in the class, lack of passion.  Classes are a waste of time as students can't understand the professor. Korean professors speaking in Korean for Korean cl...
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What do you need?

     Our last lesson was the  cheating  lesson then we had a break for a couple of weeks due to the midterm exams. During the  transport  lesson one of the students mentioned how he 'needed' a car, in fact, he 'needed' two cars, maybe even three. This information surprised another student from a different country. The exchange between the two students got me thinking about necessities and what our students value, and do different cultures value the same things?  The class was for two hours with international students studying a variety of different majors at a Korean university. All the students have an IELTS score of 5.5 or above. I will continue to use Bloom's   as a guide for my activities. I have 50 students spread over three classes. For this lesson on necessities, I modified, or some would more accurately say, stole ideas from a  National Geographic textbook . The class started with some warm-up questions.  Class 101. The ques...
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