I love quotes. I have a huge collection of quote images stored in my google photos and a database in Notion of quotes from books I have read, videos I have or podcasts I have listened to.Throughout the school year, I post a daily quote on our staffroom TV display along with our daily staffing absences & replacements along with staff duties (yard duty, first aid, staffroom) for that day. Sometimes these spark interesting conversations amongst staff over recess and lunch breaks.

It is with a sense of disappointment and disbelief I learned that the Department’s literacy and numeracy coaching program was to be scrapped in schools. I have been fortunate enough to work with both literacy and numeracy coaches in my classroom over the last few years and can attest to the value of this program.

Earlier this year, I posted about some challenges and frustrations I was having with the way I, my team and my school was going about the teaching of Mathematics.

To summarise:

“We teach Contiki Tour Maths”, I proclaim.

I go on to explain. “The way we teach maths is just like travelling on a Contiki Tour. We climb on a bus, travel around, take a look round and the good stuff and before you know it, we jump back on and move on to the next town. That’s how we teach Maths. We pick a topic, do stuff with it for two weeks then move onto the next topic.”

It’s a Thursday morning and I am working with my numeracy coach.

It’s nearing mid-year report time and I want to confirm my judgements about students on the topics we have covered earlier in the year.

I run my eyes over the students assessments. Many of areas are blank. Many of the areas we had “covered” Topics we had covered early in the year.

“We teach Contiki Tour Maths”, I proclaim.