(In Parenthesis

This blog has, yet again, like almost all of my projects, fallen prey to the yawning gap between my vision of what is possible – of what I would like it to be – and what I feel I can actually produce. I have watched with a combination of increasing admiration and personal inadequacy as people like David Mitchell and James Mitchie, who’ve been hanging around the edublogosphere a shorter time than I have, develop an amazing online presence for themselves and their students, which is also clearly having a transformational impact on their classrooms and schools. And there’s my problem: I have watched, and admired, but barely acted. With regard to this blog, the longer I leave it between posts, the more it seems that my next one should be a work of genius, and that I should fill in the gaps before I post it. Hence the months of blogging silence and the fragments of started blog posts in my Google docs and buzzing round my head.

Having started to read a little more about ‘productivity’ I increasingly recognise that this is a common (and deadening) phenomenon rather than something unique to me. Even this post itself was nearly derailed by the 10 minutes, otherwise invisible to you, that I just spent searching for the perfect quotation to illustrate that point (there are loads, it turns out: just google perfection+procrastination).

Recently, I shared with some of my students one of my favourite poems, Eliot’s Four Quartets. The penultimate stanza of East Coker feels as though it could have been written for me, and it rings even truer for me now more than twenty years (Twenty years largely wasted) since I first discovered it:

every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate

So I find myself at the beginning of the school holidays, at a time when I would normally still be in bed even on a school day, trying to make another start. Another thing I’m coming to realise is that starts are relatively easy. I’ve done loads of starts at all sorts of things. The tricky bit is sharing my starts with others, so I have the motivation to continue, even if I don’t know how to finish.

(So I’ll share this now, unfinished though it be

My union, the National Union of Teachers, has this weekend called for a 10% pay rise. Of course the union’s spokesman interviewed on the BBC yesterday had to admit immediately that there was no chance of such a demand being successful.  If the idea is that by starting with an unrealistically high starting position we are likely to get an increase to offset the real-terms pay cut of recent years, then I think it is a badly misjudged strategy.

Unsurprisingly, the press backlash is already underway, with the Mirror proclaiming ‘Outrage as teachers union votes for huge pay increase’, and there’ll be plenty more where that came from.

The last time the union called a strike on pay (asking for a much lower increase, before the credit crunch hit), it divided members. We lost our school union representative as a result, and now are left without an in-school rep. I supported the strike, somewhat reluctantly, feeling that there are more pressing issues, such as the anti-Sats campaign, on which public sympathy might be gained. I feel that if you are in a union, then as the name suggests, it is vital that you support the collective decisions of that union, or leave.

I think the time is coming, after 18 years as an NUT member, when I may have to leave.

What’s the relationship between learning and doing?

My Twitter bio said, until this morning, “Soaking up learning and oozing it back.” I was thinking of a sponge that, once it’s soaked up a certain amount of water will start to leak it back out. If you hold a sponge under a tap, pretty quickly it becomes saturated and makes no difference to the rate, and little difference to the direction, of flow.

I feel a bit like that sponge. Sitting in a flow of information and knowledge, big and bloated, scarcely able to move under the weight of all this stuff, desperately trying to catch some of the things that are floating past but I’m just too full. Learning loads, but doing relatively little. Indeed, maybe doing less than I should precisely because I’m overloaded with new information and ideas. It feels like I’ve got some kind 0f e-ADHD.

I’m no marine biologist, but I suspect a living sponge is rather more active in regulating its intake, and then making use of what it takes in. Not just oozing it out, but processing it, making new things from it, using it to grow and reproduce.

Blogging (and micro-blogging) can be one way of processing stuff, both for self and others, and my early posts on this latest attempt at keeping a blog have been useful in helping me to order my thoughts and think more about sharing ideas rather than just taking them in.  I’ve been motivated to see the reality of that by some retweets of information I’ve shared that I thought was pretty mundane common knowledge. As someone once said, it is in giving that we receive.

Even though I’ve not got round to blogging on some of the things I’ve been thinking about over the past week or so, I’m determined to put that right with the breathing space of the Easter break, and hopefully get into good habits that I can continue.

(Other people in similar circumstances manage it, so why shouldn’t I?…