Education begins the gentleman

A lot of college time this week, but last lot for a while. I'm glad because I'm kind of champing at the bit to get on with things at the moment. Still, it was a good chance to get hold of the reading for science - now I just have to actually do some of it! Found the phonics session the most useful. It'll be a while until I actually have to teach it but it should be interesting when I get to it - I need to do some lesson observations I think and see how it works in practice.

Interesting experience with year 6. Took a numeracy class where they'd been asked to do a mental maths test and then some problem solving. Marking the mental maths while they worked on the problem solving, I noticed that almost all of them got the fencepost problem wrong. I decided to address it in the plenary and by way of preface, told them that it was a problem I was very familiar with from my days as a programmer. Well, they were fascinated by the fact that I'd previously worked as a programmer - several of them asked questions about it and we went on to go over the basics of the fence post problem. Hopefully quite a few of them will remember that - I wonder if there are other ways to work my outside self usefully into school situations?