Speakingdont use

A friend and colleague asked me last week for some recommendations for useful self-help books. It was a simple question, but it made me think about what these books are actually for. Self-improvement drives a lot of online traffic. Much of it encourages a fantasy of...

Sunday gives me a particular space that the other days refuse to provide. It has done ever since my final year of university, those tangled days of ambitious excitement and furious motion. Some Sundays were quiet enough for me to witness the world like Janus, looking...

I write tonight because that once familiar restlessness has returned, that urge to create beyond the routines of my thinking job. I have many creative hobbies (I love the painting and music) but writing stimulates in a way the others do not.  Part of this restlessness...

When I first started this blog I wanted to reflect on what I was doing. It was an early internet age where we could stumble across the sites of others. I 'met' others and got better at teaching, reading and living. For many years our internet diets have become curated...

Teachers are busy. Pressures to prove progress constrain us (although not all equally). Exams exist and define much of what we do (unless led by those with courage). Schools are people places. The tides of influence and ambition form dangerous eddies, where individual...

For a fair while I have not typed a message on blog. I barely read blogs myself, consuming mostly reddit posts and mainstream media outlets. I refuse to engage with social media where perhaps much of my audience has long since migrated.   The limitations of my desire...