Using 'the Google'

I had a really good laugh today with a couple of my students. It was really nice to have a chuckle like this. It was a simple moment, one that often passes without any further thought, but today because it was such a miserable day teaching wise, it's worth remembering. It began with a simple enough question: "What's the opposite of 'meritocracy?'" Having spent so much of the last couple months looking at monarchies my thoughts turned to 'aristocracy'. Interestingly though upon reflection I realized that I really didn't know, and like I have been trying to remind myself to do so much over the last couple of years, I mentioned something to the students about using 'the Google' to look it up. Sure enough I was wrong it was a word that I think needs a lot more use in English: kakistocracy - rule of the worst. A fantastic word and one that the students and I thought brought forth all sorts of ideas. Kakistocracy - a great word, one that's worth laughing over, and one that I doubt the students or I will soon forget. (Thinking hard about it, I vaguely remember coming across it once before, but obviously that moment wasn't near as authentic as this moment, clearly I didn't laugh as hard - it was too quickly lost in the mists of time!)

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ - click to view more info about 'Om Google' or find free 'google' pictures via Wylio">'Om Google' photo (c) 2010, @gueamu - license: <a href=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" width="223" style="float: right; margin: 0 10px;" />

Neat experience

I started working at a new school three months ago and it has been a whirlwind of experiences and emotions, as these kind of changes often are! Anyway Tuesday was an interesting experience. My principal stopped by in my class, pulled up a chair and had a seat. I found this slightly unnerving, certainly the unexpected nature of the visit was the main reason for this. To add to the unnerving nature of the experience she then proceeded to pull out a pen and write. So it went for a while with her looking around the room listening to me run a discussion about the Cold War. After about 20 minutes she stood back up walked to the front of my class and left a card on my desk. In the end it turned out to be one of the nicest visits ever paid by a principal to any of my classes. A really nice card with all sorts of wonderful comments from her visit. It struck me that while indeed there are things that could have been improved in my class, she decided to only mention the positives. What an interesting idea, so often we look for the problems and the things that need improvement, I felt pretty good after a few compliments. It reminded me that I need to make sure to tell all of my students what I appreciate about them more often. There's always time for improvement, we just need to make sure we appreciate the positives that so many students bring to us. In addition if I should ever be in a position where I am dealing with others. If you want to build a positive work environment, I guess you need to be positive!

A new place

For the last several months I have been debating a change of location for my blogging thoughts, and while decided to keep my Wordpress blog active, and will get back to it in a little while, when I have more time, I have decided to use this as a simpler blogging location where I can more immediately post some of my teaching thoughts.

Welcome!

A test post

Dsc_0266
This is a test post to see how this works.

About

Twitter