That's right, I'm still here! It's been a long time since my last confession. I've been wanting to get back into blog wr...

I'm about to say something that all teachers are going to hate me for. I think we should abolish the summer holiday. It's m...

September 2017 sees the launch of the new Maths A Level course. All the other A Level courses changed a year or two ago, but the Maths chang...

After school today we had the first round of this year's 26 leaving speeches. They were entertaining as usual, and mercifully short, and...

I tried to write a blog that has nothing to do with chess but I did not succeed.  I'm an emotional person. I cry after bad lessons whe...

This week I've been thinking a lot about resilience. It's become a very trendy word for teaching and learning experts to throw aroun...

As teachers, we work so hard to prepare our students for their exams and we put in a lot of time and effort to make sure they get into a goo...

I loved High School Musical when I was a teenager. It had singing, it had dancing, it had Zac Efron... What's not to love? But I recentl...

Teaching 30 students at a time, 4 or 5 hours a day, with your free time spent with the hustle and bustle of 2000 students in the near vicini...

Our school system is designed for extroverts. Learning takes place in large groups, with participation and collaboration not just encouraged...

I recently read Susan Cain's book  Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking  and felt like I finally under...

I was marking mock exam papers this weekend (in fact that's pretty much the only thing I did this weekend - whose idea was it to introdu...

Gretchen Rubin is the author of The Happiness Project , Happier at Home , and Better than Before . These books are all about getting to kno...