JJJ Hottest 100
This year my votes in the Triple J Hottest 100 went to:
- Birds Of Tokyo – Plans
- Bliss N Eso – Addicted
- Children Collide – My Eagle
- Children Collide – Jellylegs
- British India – Avalanche
- Evil Eddie – Queensland
- Girl Talk – Down For The Count
- Girl Talk – Steady Shock
- Tame Impala – Solitude Is Bliss
- Tame Impala – Expectation
I’ve loved Children Collide’s album this year especially, and so my early pick for Number 1 is My Eagle:
The HSC again. and again.
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, HSC, reflections, school on December 16, 2010
In NSW yesterday Year 12 school leavers got their HSC results back. And again, we reflect.
so-and-so got x amount of Band 6s this year…should I teach more like them?
my kids didn’t go as well as they had hoped…did I fail them?
there were some great successes at our school…what pressures will this bring next year?
The dizzying heights…the devastating lows.
I’m sure this post / these tweets should have some ‘IMHO’s peppered through them, but stuff it – the HSC is an evil device.
I’m so proud of every HSC student who got through the year, and was beyond excited for my ex-students who got the results they sought (I always will be). Motivation, goals, mastery, achievement, I believe in them all. But the HSC provides them too sparingly, for students and their teachers.
And now it’s time for recovery. again.
Congratulations one and all – bring on 2011…
IFTE Conference Seminar 2011
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, education, english, university on December 2, 2010
In April 2011 the International Federation for the Teaching of English is holding its triennial conference in Auckland, New Zealand.
I’ve proposed the following seminar – fingers crossed it’s something they want to see!
The English teacher-practitioner: Re-writing our role
This seminar will weave together two strands of reflection on the nature of English teachers’ work. On one hand the nature of assessment in English will be considered, with a critical exploration of the relationship between standardised assessment and teachers’ capacity to positively engage in providing formative feedback. A central question that participants will be asked to reflect on is ‘how can we reconceptualise our role as a co-practitioner in the classroom and consequently find more enjoyment in the marking process?’ The second line of reflection will be a recount of my own journey to seek an antidote to the processes of ‘school writing’ and recommendations for avenues that other English teachers can explore to stimulate their own creativity and willingness to see themselves as a practitioner as well as a teacher of others.
English teachers: would you want to come to this? If you came along, what would you be expecting/hoping to hear about?
Good News Day
This front page made me smile so much yesterday I broke my usual rule and bought The Australian:
PRIVATE SCHOOLS’ FURY OVER MYSCHOOL WEBSITE
Turns out the poor buggers have found some inaccuracies in the way their finances are reported. It makes it look like they are getting paid WAY too much money for the services they provide, or something totally unbelievable like that.
I say: suck it. Where were you last year when NSW public school teachers and unions were the only ones out there willing to put their neck on the line to criticise the MySchool website? Sitting quietly on their hands and calling us whingers, that’s where.
STATE REJECTS PM’s CURRICULUM AS SUBSTANDARD
Which state you ask? Oh, that’d be NSW. Again. As far as I can see, the only state with the balls to take a stand against ACARA. Again.
Now, I realise full well that teachers in every state and territory think that their curriculum is ‘the best’. But that’s not what this is actually about. This is not just about some east-coast superiority complex. This is about (in the case of English, at least) the inadequacy of the curriculum on offer.
I love my new home in Queensland, but for sheer determination to kick against the pricks, I am proud to say ‘go the Blues!’ On National Curriculum issues, NSW is proving well and truly to be the big sister of Australia – she might not always be right, but at least she’s brave enough to fight for what she thinks is right (inaccurate newspaper reporting be damned).
SIDDLE BLOWS ENGLAND AWAY WITH HATTRICK
OK, so any real Australian knows that this was the only real story of the day.
If you don’t know what a hattrick in cricket is, it’s when a bowler gets three batsmen out in a row. It’s very hard to do. Since the start of the Ashes in 1877 there have only been eight other hattricks, making Siddle’s the ninth. And it was his birthday!
What a good news day!
So, what do you actually do?
Posted by kmcg2375 in reflections, university on November 21, 2010
Recently I’ve had explain to more and more people what I do in my job as a University Lecturer.
This is tough, because no matter how much I try to jazz it up, until I get another ‘big research project’ that I can talk about, the description just sounds like ‘oh, you know – reading and stuff’. And ‘my head is like a giant computer that mostly knows about teaching English’ just sounds a bit loony.
Up until last week I was still in teaching time. This made life easier – I could describe giving lectures and grading essays. But now that I’m on the research clock…well, things are a whole lot less defined.
I saw a great summary in a faculty email today of the three core criteria comprising our definition of research activity:
- publications,
- HDR supervision,
- research grants/consultancies.
That’s a nice list to use I guess. And given that I don’t have any students to supervise yet, or any research grants, I guess that leaves me with publishing over the summer.
So, in terms of what that means I will do with my actual time? With the actual minutes of my day?
Looks like I am up against a lot of computer time, more self-directed learning, lots of getting to know journals in the field, and reassembling bits of old writing into new hopefully interesting things to read…so much to do and so little to talk about, in short. But, so far, I still love it.
I wonder if my blog will get boring?
I wonder if I’ll need glasses soon?
Too Much Reading
Noam Chomsky on the Role of the Educational System
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, politics, university on November 11, 2010
Chomsky argues that schools are a system of indoctrination of the young:
Even the fact that the system has a lot of stupidity in it, I think has a function. You know, it means that people are filtered out for obedience. If you can guarantee lots of stupidity in the educational system, you know like stupid assignments and things like that, you know that the only people who’ll make it through are like me, and like most of you I guess, who are willing to do it no matter how stupid it is, because we want to go to the next step. So you may know that this assignment is idiotic and the guy up there couldn’t think his way out of a paper bag, but you’ll do it anyway because that’s the way you get to the next class and you want to ‘make it’ and so on and so forth.
Well there are people who don’t do that, you know. There are people who say ‘I’m not gonna do it, it’s too ridiculous’. Those people are called behavioural problems.
Thanks for the link Bianca – I love getting angry with Noam.
HSC English
For anyone wondering how Year 12 HSC students in NSW feel about high stakes external exams as a measure of their learning in English this year:
Sorry, I can’t confirm which school it came from…
(PS: Good luck studying for Paper 2 my dears!)
The shape of the Arts curriculum
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, english, social media, technology, video games on October 14, 2010
For those who have yet to check it out, the draft shape paper for the Australian Curriculum for the Arts is now available on the ACARA website.
Given that up here in Queensland the school subject ‘Media Arts’ is separate to the subject ‘English’, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to intervene in the text and see if I couldn’t just find the crossover between the two subjects.
It wasn’t hard.
2.3.3 Defining Media Arts
Media ArtsEnglish is the creative use of communications technologies to tell stories and explore concepts for diverse purposes and audiences. MediaLanguage artists represent personal, social and cultural realities using platforms such as prose fiction, poetry, dramatic performances, television, film, video, newspapers, magazines, radio,video games, the worldwide web and mobile media. Produced and received in diverse contexts, these communication forms are important sources of information, entertainment, persuasion and education and are significant cultural industries in Australian society. Digital technologies have expanded the role that mediatexts play in every Australian’s family, leisure, social, educational and working lives. Media ArtsEnglish explores the diverse artistic, creative, social and institutional factors that shape communication and contribute to the formation of identities. Through Media ArtsEnglish, individuals and groups participate in, experiment with and interpret the rich culture and communications practices that surround them.
As I spend more time in Queensland I find myself having to wrestle with my identity as an English teacher because of this overlap with Media Arts. It’s not that media texts don’t still feature in the English curriculum – they do. But the culture here is that, while student might study visual language and analyse some/increasingly visual/multimodal texts in English, it’s Media Arts you have to go to if you want to make anything serious.
On one hand, it’s like Media Arts teachers get to do a lot of the fun stuff, which kind of sucks if you’re an English teacher from New South Wales!
But on the other hand, I have to admit, compared the rigour in the Media Arts curriculum up here…well, I have to admit that as an English teacher I always seemed to run out of time to ‘do the fun stuff’ anyway (do you know how LONG it takes for students to rehearse and record their own 10 minute version of Act I of Romeo and Juliet? Fricken ages!) And it would be nice, for just a short while, not to have to feel like I am dragging my English colleagues kicking and screaming toward increased multimodal study…now if I need to find a like minded media teacher, I can just go and, well, find one.
Leaving aside the ‘are knowledge silos good or bad’ debate, what thoughts do people have about the picture I’m painting here? NSW people, if you came up to the sunshine state would you want to specialise in English, or Media Arts?
Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, random, reflections on October 7, 2010
I just loved every minute of watching this Valedictory speech by Erica Goldson:
The full transcript can be read at her blog.
One of my favourite section from the speech is this:
School is not all that it can be. Right now, it is a place for most people to determine that their goal is to get out as soon as possible.
I am now accomplishing that goal. I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer – not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition – a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I’m scared.
‘I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme.’
Powerful stuff Erica. Definitely worth a watch!
charlieissocoollike
I just went to post information about the latest ACARA update, including the video message from Prof. Barry McGaw, but it wasn’t working out.
In the meantime, I found this Youtube channel, which I highly recommend – it’s funny, if you like that sort of thing. Guaranteed more interesting than the ACARA update imho…
I watched a few episodes, including this one, which I’m posting in light of my own soon to be 30-ness:
I am like so cool.
Nominated!
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Kelli McGraw 
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