(In Parenthesis

There I am. Up there. It’s difficult to tell whether I’m staring out to sea, or watching my son making dams and channels in the sand. I was about to write that you could bet your life I wasn’t thinking about teaching. But there’s the thing, you see. I may well have been.

There, actually, is the heart of what  this blog is about.

That picture was taken at Whitby during an Easter holiday. Much of that break was spent marking GCSE coursework (and writing, and responding to emails about GCSE coursework).

This is a job that occupies a huge amount of my mental space. The fact that I was emailing kids and responding to them on my mobile phone and that much of the work I was marking had been sent online, and commented on using the ‘add comments’ feature of Word, shows that relative to some of my colleagues I’m pretty ‘cutting edge’ as regards technology.

But I’m all too conscious that if I am cutting edge, it’s often been a pretty blunt edge. And that more creative and energetic colleagues are doing things that are much more interesting and organised and dynamic than I can often manage.

So, how do I turn productivity tools into productivity, and teaching ideas into learning opportunities?

And how do I balance the voracious nature of this profession with being husband and a dad and a me.

That’s what this blog’s about.