A no preparation technique to encourage creativity

I find that when learning the law students get very few opportunities to be creative. Most times there is a right or a wrong answer, the law is the law and it must be learnt accurately, a small distortion of an offence, for example, can completely change the meaning. I understand that accuracy when learning is a skill which can be invaluable but it's not always the most exciting thing in the world and I love to give my students the opportunity to be more creative.

For teachers of older students creativity often means making a spider diagram on A3 sugar paper with coloured pens. Now I won't have a bad word spoken about this technique, it can be a great way of injecting some interest, especially when it comes to revision.

The revised Blooms taxonomy puts 'creating' at the top of the hierarchy of skills meaning taking existing knowledge and reorganising it into something new and it is from this perspective that I took this new approach which I try to use as often as possible.

Festive walk at Olton Mere

Beautiful carrots

This year we had a go at growing carrots. As our veg patch was, until only a few months ago, under several tonnes of gravel the soil was no where near smooth enough to plant in the ground so instead I made up two 56 litre potato planting bags with a 50/50 mix of potting compost and sharp sand for good drainage and lot of wiggle room for the developing root system. I was paranoid about carrot fly so I kept them under a light mesh in the greenhouse.

The seeds germinated pretty quickly but then failed to mature. At the end of November I did a big clear out of the greenhouse because it was the end of the growing season. I honestly thought that they'd failed so I turfed them out of the greenhouse to die back so I could use the soil for mulching. I was a bit disappointed with the failure of the experiment.

I was amazed when I went back last weekend and found these beautiful little carrots. I was so pleased and I'd consider starting them much earlier next year and possibly keep them outside so I could do more containers.

Church Christmas tree 2015

Teacher - no internet

This might be an odd moment to write a post bearing in mind that the college computer network is all but dead at the moment.

It started yesterday morning when I arrived at 7:10 to find that my laptop wouldn't connect to the college wireless so, no internet, no documents, no registers, no printer. This isn't overly unusual, things occasionally go wrong over night and it's almost always fixed by about 8:00 but this wasn't the case this time. In fact it's now more than 24 hours later and there's still no internet.

The good
Lack of room to procrastinate has been really good. I've got on to a machine that still works, done the few things I need and got off within about 15 minutes.
In the rest of the time I've been forced to do the less interesting things like filing, marking and paper based admin.

The bad 
Lack of easy access to my documents is problematic. I'm not overly concerned about losing documents as everything I have is stored in the cloud with Google Drive where as those who store everything on the colleges storage system are starting to get that creeping worry about what happens if you never get it back.
I'm not able to choose the order I do things, it's been dictated to me and I'm not finding that very convenient.
I also miss the possibility of the natural segue into a related topic quite restrictive. Yesterday there was a spontaneous discussion about the different uses of the word "squat", most understood it just to mean the hideous gym based exercise and not many had heard of it as a place where people bed down without permission. A couple of quickly thrown together images from Google would have really helped but I couldn't do that and I felt it was an opportunity missed.

The ugly 
It's currently observation season at college and people are fully expecting that 8:30 email to say that they are going to be paid a visit. No internet is causing mass panic as people aren't able to get to their planning, use their whizzy smartboard resources or even access the email to tell them that they are coming.

Overall, it's been an interesting experience. I've found that having my autonomy to choose what order I do things is frustrating as I've ended up with a big to do list of things I must do the next time I can get to a computer. On the other hand, I've also found that I've done everything far more quickly because I'm less distracted and so I've got through the big to do list.

I'm certainly considering having a no-tech day once a week, but I wonder whether I'll actually do it once the WiFi comes back on.