Reports. Graduation. Student Council Elections. Preparing to pack to move classrooms. Yearbook. New computer purchase. Buying furniture for our new BER Building. Christmas Parties. Christmas Concert. Booklists. Grade Lists...And there's how many weeks left till holidays?

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.”

In reading Doug Belsaw’s blog on how he uses technology each day which led me to read Cory Doctorow’s post What I Do, I felt inspired to do the same. I’ve loved reading what other people use and enjoy looking into if they might work for me. Hopefully this post might inspire you to consider investigating some of these options or your feedback and comments might encourage me to look at alternatives. 🙂

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.

One of the great jobs I have at my school is to be the staff advisor to the Student Leadership Council. Student Leadership has always been, and still is, a passion of mine. (I could easily write a whole seperate post about how I got into it and the work I have done over many years)

This Tuesday, I had the Student Leadership Council present their action plans to our principal team for their feedback and approval. This gave them a real audience to present in front of and a purpose in getting their plans completed.

These plans have been almost a month in the making. They commenced work on them at our Training Day earlier this year and they have worked on them during our subsequent meetings