The message of the notice board is not always in the notice


The notice board is not to be confused with the Pin Board

No!

The pin board is excellent for what it is and what it does, but if you want to say something about your school, then you need the proper, full bloodied Notice Board (note the capitalisation). It is (as you will quickly perceive) quite a different beast of the field (or in this case, wall).

Pin boards have a habit of getting out of control as you can see from the illustration below. This comes from a part of the Infinite Corridor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, MA. (And I must admit I am including it as much because I love then name “The Infinite Corridor” as because of what it shows. But even so, as you’ll see, it says more about MIT – or at least this part of MIT, than the notices themselves. )

The pin board, therefore, allows the establishment to take control of the environment. The notice board projects a more ordered way of life...

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Learning to fly, while cleaning up the staff room

If you’ve never been “into” the blues (as we aficionados of the form are want to say) you probably won’t know about Robert Johnson.

But don’t switch off just yet. This is not about Robert Johnson. It’s actually about brooms.

Robert Johnson was the man who laid the groundwork for pop and rock – the man who has been called the most influential blues singer and guitarist who ever lived.

So what, you may ask (unless you have already concluded that I have just entered another universe, and that the best thing would be to leave me in peace for a while and come back next week) does that have to do with brooms?

Well one of the classic Robert Johnson songs is “Dust My Broom”.

For years I puzzled over this phrase, and it was only recently that I found out that it is slang for getting up and leaving for good, shaking off the dust of where one has been living, and setting out for a new town. A real 1930s America concept: I’m leaving for good, you can have my rented room, I’ve gone.

So nothing to do with brooms, broomsticks, witches, dustpans, brushes, dusters – you name it, if it was a cleaning implement, I tried to fit it into the meaning of the song. And failed.

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How to become an inventor...

You might think that inventors are awfully clever people designing lightbulbs and cars that run without petrol and so on. But actually that’s not always true.

If we judge by the way patents are handed out, some inventors have incredibly simple ideas – the sort of idea that you could have sitting at your desk, right here and now.

Let me give you an example. Imagine getting some cork, flattening it out, getting a pin and adding a piece of paper on which you have written something important.

Put the paper on the cork, put the pin through the paper on the cork, and hey presto – the pinboard.

That whole process that I have just described was in fact the invention of the pinboard. What’s more it was patented. And so were the pins.

Obviously cork itself has been known about for ages – the ancient Egyptians certainly had it, and the ancient Greeks used it for fishing net floats

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We can never relax our vigilance when it comes to fire

When I was a young and inexperienced teacher I taught in a small town school in Dorset where the headteacher kept the emergency doors locked with a chain. On days when we had a fire drill he would go and unlock the chains, and then lock it all up again after the drill was over!

When I witnessed that I was too young and inexperienced a teacher to have the nerve to complain directly to the head. I did tell my immediate superior, who told me he would look into it, but nothing was done.

Maybe my inaction was also because my only experience of uncontrolled fire, up to that point, was through history books. I knew, for example, that the Fire of London was actually ended by the use of gunpowder – with whole sections of the city being flattened in advance of the fire, to stop its spread and further. What actually delayed the putting out of the fire is that (according to eye-witnesses such as Pepys) virtually no one tried to put it out.  Instead people just worked on getting themselves and their goods out of the way. Because of this, the piped water that London was supposed to rely on in event of fire, failed, because the giant wheels by London Bridge that powered the water system, were themselves burned, as the fire spread along the bridge itself.

That all seems rather interesting – and that’s the problem, I guess. It is interesting, rather than conveying the horror of the situation.

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How to stop young people in corridors. Buy a mirror.

You always need to take care of mirrors. Indeed breaking a mirror is traditionally considered bad luck. 

But (I wonder) why?  And is it even worse bad luck if you break a mirror in a school?

The bad luck idea probably goes back to the notion before the arrival of glass mirrors that the mirror revealed your soul. Since most mirrors in ancient times actually distorted the image as it reflected it, the mirror was thought to give an image of the twisted soul of the individual.

So when then Romans came along with glass mirrors that could break, they extended the theory and said if you broke a mirror while looking at it, you would crack your soul. The soul would then take seven years to repair itself, during which time you would have bad luck. This would be because the soul would be so caught up with rebuilding itself, it wouldn’t have time to ward off all the chance things that happen to each of us each day. Thus some urgent steps have to be taken.

First, you need to grind the broken mirror to dust so that there is no reflection left, and nowhere for your soul to hide.

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How to make your pupils and students treat their lockers with loving kindness.

Schools that allocate lockers to pupils and students sometimes just give them out with a message saying “don’t lose your key”.

But there is so much more that you can do.  Here are my ten handy hints to help ensure that your pupils and students love their lockers and return them to you in a good condition.

1. Try and get the art department involved...
Much of what follows concerns making the locker a work of art.  If you can get the art department to embrace the idea, life becomes a lot easier.

2. Encourage personalisation...
Some schools go out of their way to stop pupils and students individualising their lockers, but if you permit the painting of the locker, the addition of stickers and other decoration, the more it becomes theirs.  Just add the rule that everything has to be cleaned off at the end of the school year, otherwise they lose their deposit.  (If that doesn’t help, make the deposit bigger).

3. Termly prizes...
To encourage the notion of being able to clean out the locker, run a locker competition each term, with the pupils or students having to clean out their locker and then redecorate it.  Automatically enter everyone for the competition, so that you can inspect every locker each term – which itself can be a beneficial move.

4. Internal decoration...
Don’t just suggest that the students can put pictures inside, suggest they work on a theme rather than having one simple poster on the back of the locker door.  Get them to create a locker that reflects their personality.

5. Contemplate what is being put in the lockers...
If you have a school journal or blog, run the theme “What’s in your locker today?” and get them to answer.  Also  get the English department involved in encouraging students in writing a magazine style article

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Safe storage of your ideas

If you want to store something physical there’s no end to the choices available. There are wall cabinets, split door cabinets, double door cabinets, mesh door cabinets, heavy duty mobile cabinets, wall mounted high security cabinets.

You name it, there they are. Lots of them in fact.

But what about ideas?  Where do they get stored? I think this is an important question, and it worries me. And its not just ideas.  I wonder where recorded games get stored on the iphone. I wonder where my itunes are actually stored on my computer and how they can be transferred to another computer.

And then I worry about the storage of ideas in my brain. I mean, I might have a great idea, but then when I want to come back to it, I find it has gone. But where has it gone?

I was told when studying psychology that the brain actually never forgets anything, apart from where it has put the idea that you want to remember, which when you come to think of it, isn’t that much help.

Of course I can write ideas down on my notepad, but that isn’t really enough, because I can never explain the depth and breadth of the idea when I write it down. All I am left with is a sort of short cut version of the idea, which isn’t always that much good.

So I have started to put ideas on paper in graphic form, and pin them up on the portable partitions in my teaching room...

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She stoops to conquer, I stoop because my back hurts...

In my first few weeks at university I became friendly with Jackie - a fellow student who was on my course. We chatted a bit, had coffees together, puzzled over the essays we were set, and shared text books to save on cash.

The only problem I had with her was that she was extremely quiet and withdrawn.

I don’t mean that she never said anything – but rather that she tended not to open up conversations, laugh at jokes, and join in the fun.  If I asked her something she’d answer, and we could chat together, but she didn’t have that buzz or liveliness that I found in most of my university friends.

Then after about two or three weeks the drama society announced they were holding auditions for their coming production, and Jackie said that she was going to go along and take a look.

She seemed such an unlikely person to be involved with the Drama Society, I was fascinated and said that I’d go along with her, (although I had no particular desire to join the Drama Soc myself. I just wondered how a little mouse like Jackie would cope with the stage).

We found the inevitable group of old hands who had clearly run the club for the past year or two, plus a small nervous group of first year undergrads like ourselves. Together we were told that the play that was going to be put on was the 18th century classic, “She Stoops To Conquer”.

The officers of the Society looked at us newcomers in the way that old hands always do – a sort of combination of the down-the-nose look which says “I can’t see you making any sort of serious contribution” and a half smile that might suggest that everyone is welcome, please do come in.

We were told that anyone who wanted to “act” (the word was said as if it had three syllables) should join in a read through of the play.  Jackie said she would like a chance, while I backed off mumbling about wanting to help back stage...

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How far does your furniture control your behaviour?

I have a confession to make. My partner doesn’t like me putting my feet on the sofa. Odd, I know, but there it is. He doesn’t like me eating pizzas while sitting on the sofa either.

Now you may feel a great sympathy for her in this matter – but the fact is that a piece of furniture is now determining what I may, and may not, do in my own house.

I’m not sure I feel too good about that!

I mean, how far is this going to go? If I buy a pen, is that pen going to control what I write?

It seemed a ludicrous question until I transferred that thought onto the computer. When I am at the computer I have an unending desire to see what emails are coming in.  I am controlled by the forces within my PC to keep checking and re-checking the mail!!!

There are also a couple of news sites on the web that I keep track of through the day, and again I keep feeling this urge to hit the button and see if anything has happened while I was looking at my emails.

You will realise from this that I rarely get any work done at all and that anything productive that comes out of my desk during the course of the day is probably due to the desk, my coffee cup, the desk lamp and my stapler, rather than being down to me...

As I thought of this it all seemed very depressing until I hit on the idea of using furniture to get other people to do what I want them to do...

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Why are there 24 hours in a day?

Time and schooling are inexorably linked.  School starts at sometime around 9am and finishes sometime between 3pm and 4pm.  

But why?  By which I don’t mean why do we start school when we do, but rather, why do we call it 9 o’clock.  Why are there 24 hours in a day?

We all know that time is built on astronomical events – the month is the amount of time it takes the moon to go round the earth, and midday is the moment when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky.

But still… why 24 hours in a day?

I know that 12 is a common number in worldly affairs – 12 inches in a foot and all that.  

For my answer I turned (as one does) to a whizzo professor in a university (Cornell since you ask) and his answer is…

The Egyptians counted in 12s because they counted finger joints instead of fingers. Each finger has three joints, so if you point to your finger joints with your thumb you get twelve on each hand. And 12 is better than 10 at being divided in half, which makes it easier to divide into bits. 12 can divide by two (6) and two again (3). 10 can only do this once (5) before getting stuck...

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