(In Parenthesis

Reading this the other day, led me back to the source whence it flowed, thereby reassuring me that it’s not only my ‘pet peeve’, but also confirming what I’ve always felt: that even though it’s not useful in itself as an analytical term, its use by students nearly always reflects the sense that they are grasping at something important and worth saying, but do not yet have the conceptual tools and critical vocabulary to define and describe adequately.

My A-level students will also notice that one of the examples used by David Jauss is an extract from D H Lawrence’s Odour of Chrysanthemums which uses stylistic techniques very similar to those used by Lawrence in a passage I nearly always use towards the beginning of the course (it’s the first paragraph here ), and which I contrast with extracts from Hemingway and Austen that use very different syntactical structures, and also ‘flow’ but in very different ways. (I think I first saw those extracts juxtaposed in an early English Language  resource book called Some things to do with English Language.)

(Anyhow, both articles are well worth a read, I think.

Pope John Paul II’s beatification this weekend reminded me of the surprising impact his death and the funeral had on me. I was in a fairly barren period in my faith, yet I recall being profoundly moved by coverage of the events.

When Cardinal Ratzinger was announced as the new pope, I was pretty downcast, I recall, having swallowed the ‘God’s rottweiler’ line. I mentioned this recently on a blog thread marking the sixth anniversary of his election, then the next day, while looking for something else, I came across a verse I’d written dated 25/4/05, just six days after he became pope, and the day after his inauguration mass:

Benedict -
Fine speech
Sound words
Good talk
Flow from the God we listen for through you;
Those words, that breath they settle on, infuse
Us with a hope that now we may renew
And say with certainty “The Church is Alive”:
The Church is Alive: alive with love,
Alive with peace, alive with restlessness not ease;
Alive with stirring for the unity we seek;
Alive with yearning, seeking justice for the weak;
Alive with mission, dead to what’s dull;
Alive to life, that we may have it to the full.

Yesterday we had an Inset day, most of which was on the Catholic Ethos of the school. We were led in this by Fr Paul Farrer from Middlesborough who specialises in youth ministry. After the darkness of  last half term, with its tragic deaths of two of our students, the diagnosis with cancer of a year 9 student whose mother is a member of staff, and the death by cancer of a much loved colleague, it seemed fitting to focus on our distinctively Catholic ethos.

Fr Paul emphasised the meaning of Catholic as ‘universal’, and I remember thinking last term that I would like to have been able to take those who see faith schools as necessarily divisive into our community on the morning after our two students died, or on the day we held mass for them, or in the after school liturgy we held for our colleague and friend, Jo.

I understand the objections that some people have to state funding of faith schools. Yet, especially at times of grief, crisis and celebration, but also in both the still small moments of calm, and the daily bustle, the Christian focus of our school offers something of value that I think is perhaps impossible to find outside a faith community, and which I think is worth preserving – and it is not only people of faith who can see that.

At one point during the morning we were asked to consider, among other questions, WHY we do what we do, rather than how we do it which is so often the focus. This links for me with the wider purpos/ed discussion that was kicked off last month, in which I was not the only person to suggest that ‘love’ might have something to do with it.

At the end of the day, the words of St Teresa of Avila were used. Those words had prompted me to write a morning briefing prayer several years ago:

Christ has no body now on earth but ours
No hands but ours, nor feet; no pair of eyes.
Only compassion should we radiate
from eyes that on the world we cast Christ’s gaze;
Only good actions should we ambulate
with feet that tread their footfalls in Christ’s ways;
Only soft blessings should accumulate
from hands that offer Christ’s work in this place.

Last week I delivered an after school session about the value of developing a Personal Learning Network (PLN) to a handful of colleagues who had signed up. I had considered doing one as part of our CPD programme last year, but bottled it. Towards the end of last academic year when the call came for volunteers to deliver sessions (we opt in to three twilight sessions in lieu of a disaggregated Inset day) I bit the bullet and put myself forward for a session on Building a Personal Learning Network using Social Networking. In retrospect, maybe I could have thought of a snappier title.

I was more anxious about it than I know rationally I should have been. It’s just that I’ve sat through enough sessions thinking “Who does s/he think s/he is?!” to imagine that nobody would be thinking the same about me, and I’m thin skinned enough for that thought to really bother me.

Anyhow, nine colleagues turned up after school on Tuesday. I hope I got across the fact that I hadn’t put the session on as a “hey look how great I am” ego-fest, even though I did chuck in the handful of examples of webby things I’ve done with kids that seem to have gone down well. I felt it was important to show some of the things I’ve learned from developing a PLN that have made on impact on classroom practice to give a context and sense of purpose to the session. I also introduced Edmodo as an immediately practical tool that can be used for networking with students, and because I thought for the very un-techy ones it might be a bit less alarming way in than immediately putting something out there in public in the way Twitter does. You can see some of what went on that bit of the session here (just to betray that sense of security!).

The Prezi that I used is below. Some of it may be a little mystifying without my accompanying commentary. I’m adding bits of explanatory text  here and there as I come back to it now and again.

So, was the session a success?

A couple of colleagues have started using, or re-using Twitter, (@emsiwemsi & @Nad1neB) while @antmcride and @mariedarwin signed up but haven’t tweeted yet. Maybe you could give them a tweet and see if it wakes them up! @mbelleini by contrast not only began to use his new Twitter account, but was also moved to write his first blog post: http://mbbamused.blogspot.com/

Of the nine participants, six filled in the feedback and their evaluation was largely positive:

Of course the three who didn’t return the form may have found the session useless for all I know, but I’ll take “It has reignited my joy of teaching” as an indication it was worth the effort.

If nothing else, it’s given me a bit more confidence to start sharing more of what I’m learning from my external PLN with my colleagues in school.

(The big question now, is ‘how?’

Back in 1992, I applied for my first teaching post, and wrote the following:

Usually, I think I can still stand by what I wrote back then. Part of me, though, thinks it sounds mealy-mouthed, and evidence of a fence-sitting mentality that may have paralysed my effectiveness as an educator. I often joke that if there are two sides to an issue, I can see all five, and am usually unable to make decision among them.

I guess my dichotomy is encapsulated in the two tweets I put out on the day purpose/ed launched:

and

On the one hand: a sense of what education could and should be, and on the other:  deep unease about the structure and functions of the education system. Similar reservations recur in many of the purpose/ed contributions so far. I was particularly struck by the link made by Lou McGill between parenting a child who was failed dramatically by state education, and the sense that “capitalist societies want educated populations to operate the means of production, but don’t really want people who are able to question the very structure they are living in.”

I have always felt out of place as a schoolteacher, but rarely as a teacher. Perhaps this can be traced at least in part to the fact that when I made the application above, I was still testing what I felt to be a vocation to the Anglican priesthood. A couple of years later, my wife and I were received into the Catholic Church, which rather put paid to that idea. But though my faith has often wavered, and my ideological convictions vacillated, the sense of pursuing a vocation has never left me. Even when I’ve wanted it to.

Underpinning that sense are notions that do not depend on the sort of religious impulse that gave rise to it in my case. It is there in Stephen Downes’ assertion that “education is sufficient to lift a person into a life of self-awareness and reflection. It is the great liberator, and even should an educated person never rise out of poverty, that person will never again be poor.” It is there in Ewan McIntosh’s idea that “the desire to learn is woven into the concept of contentment and that, for me at least, is the basic purpose of any education system.”

So: the challenge of liberation and the security of contentment; these, for me, are joined in that greatest purpose of education (because it is the greatest purpose of life): love. Not the emotion we think of as the calendar rolls round to Valentine’s Day, but the disposition that chooses to go beyond self-interest, because to do so is for the greater good of others, which in turn leads to greater self-fulfilment.

(We may not get ‘love’ into many policy documents, but surely the highest, most deeply personal, and most profoundly relational of ideals should inform all our thinking about what we actually do to shape the purpose of education.