Diary of an NQT Stop crying your heart out!


I HAVE been given a prudent piece of advice this week. Hot weather + adolescent girls = hysteria. This week, en masse, I have slowly realised that


this may well be true. Like a chain of dominoes they fell, one by one, breaking down into floods and then systematically leaving via, what I wish was a revolving, classroom door. Friendship issues and the dreaded


Facebook seem to be the instigators here and my saintly patience is wearing thin. Proud of keeping my calm, and the lesson moving, I managed, but I hope that’s it for now. This strange, seasonal


disturbance to equilibrium doesn’t seem to be consigned singularly to my English classes either. In form, too, fallouts are becoming regular. Apparently these friendship


issues are irreparable and the friendships are “over”. What could they possibly be


arguing about, aged 12, which would terminate a five-year friendship immediately? Perhaps, being male, I could


never possibly understand the trials and tribulations of the teenage girl. Boys are much easier. All it took


was a good talking to and a handshake to get some of the boys’ friendship back on track this week. All they seem to want to do is make


each other laugh. This behaviour was typified beautifully in a year 7 boys’ lesson this week. In an attempt to understandA Midsummer Night’s


Dream, we acted out a scene in small groups. I was not prepared for the level of enthusiasm and dedication the boys showed. Patrick Stewart should


Teach it like Torno! Reflections before summer


“Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.” Peter F Drucker. As the long summer term begins to come to a


close the time is ripe again for reflecting on the year you’ve had. It’s a time to tally up the successes you have enjoyed alongside the things that did not go so well. It is also a time to look forward to September and ask yourself what you would do differently. Perhaps it is also worth considering whether all


failures are indeed bad. After all Winston Churchill himself noted that the definition of success was “going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm”. Teaching is never easy at any


given time though it is hugely rewarding. I have learnt through making many, many mistakes, but the most important way in which I have learnt is in the reflecting afterwards. I have also learnt that while the


pressure will always be on to secure the grades that students are predicted, one must always find new ways to avoid becoming too stressed. When I first started teaching I would worry about whether the students were making the expected progress and if I was good enough in the classroom. I would worry about the behaviour of some classes and to what extent my planning was detailed enough. I can honestly say that I


sympathise with the NQTs who are just beginning to find their feet and are looking for reassurance. However, as I have indicated, the real learning came in the reflections. Recently I had a most profound


learning experience. Over the past year one of my classes has been tracked by Teachers TV. Though not the most difficult class I have taught, they are certainly not without their challenges. At the end of year 8 they were considered to be one of those classes for whom the word “joy” is not associated. Constantly chatting over one another and showing little respect for each other’s opinions. Teachers TV wanted to film a first lesson with a “challenging” class. The lesson went well and the class were made aware of the expectations. However, I have to admit it has not been easy.


However, Teachers TV recently returned to film a


follow up to the September lesson. Though the lesson was okay it was not the “outstanding” performance that was expected. As we watched the lesson back I was confronted with some quite challenging realities about the amount of learning and progress that was actually going on in the lesson. The feedback was conducted with utmost professionalism and in a coaching style and, though at times, I found it somewhat uncomfortable, I am extremely grateful. It is not until you really consider how


valuable certain tasks are for moving students on that you can start to assess the individual progress made. Added to this the value of watching yourself teach cannot be underestimated. You start to see the habits you have built up alongside any idiosyncrasies you may have developed. It put me in a position


in which I had to reflect very deeply indeed. As a result of the filming I have started to reassess my impact on the learning of the students and the extent to which I can continue to improve. I suppose to an extent I was in danger of taking lessons for granted which is not a good


position to be in. No matter how long you have taught there still needs to be opportunities built in to reflect on what has worked and what needs developing. Moreover, it is a difficult balance to strike because you also need to be robust enough to see it for what it is. All types of feedback can be valuable if presented


in the right way. It is true that nobody likes to be confronted with a situation in which they feel they are not


living up to expectations. On the other hand, it is refreshing to feel that I have been given another opportunity to be the best I can be. At the heart of


this is the students and their future is the bottom line. As long as you don’t give yourself too much of a hard time, reflecting can be an extremely worthwhile tool.


•David Torn is professional tutor and advanced skills teacher at St Edward’s Comprehensive School in Essex. He is the London Secondary School Teacher of the Year 2007 and is passionate that the purpose of education is to change lives. He returns in September.


give it all up, the new generation is here! Daintily and with mischievous wit, our young Pucks danced around my classroom, dropping their potent potions into the eyes of Lysander, but also myself and the teaching assistant, who stood amazed, often crying with laughter. Funny voices; one of which made


me almost sure that Billy Connolly was in the room, booming narration and Shakespearean exaggeration all made this particular lesson a truly memorable experience; they even asked me if I would video it next time. Tomorrow will be a first for me,


my first sports day that is. I’ve been assured that the day is exciting and fun, well as fun as structured chaos


can be. Organising my form, themselves extremely sporty, was fun and I’m sure, it being their first sports day as well, that they will enthusiastically throw


themselves into the competition, as they always do. I’ve been assigned “timekeeper” and


can only imagine that this means that I get to sit inside the track perimeter, with a stopwatch, desperately trying to track a child who continuously wanders


out of lane. Even so, I’ve managed to dodge the humiliation of a teacher’s race and am looking forward to a relaxing, sun-kissed


afternoon on the field this Friday. What a shame it is timetabled during my


free periods though! You win some, you lose some.


• Matt Connett is a newly qualified teacher of English at Shenfield High, a training school in Brentwood in Essex.


A lesson i


Scientist Professor Jim Al-Khalili argues that


discussing the science behind the concept of time travel can engage your students


I 8


T IS not difficult to pick holes in the physics behind Dr Who, mainly because it is not meant to be scientifically accurate – good fun, but essentially nonsense. You may therefore be surprised to


hear me say that Dr Who’s TARDIS is an excellent way of engaging with students


on some of the most fascinating ideas in modern physics: the possibility of time travel. I remember making a short documentary for the


BBC some years ago on how the TARDIS might actually work. I confess I needed to be reminded what the acronym stood for, but then I got going I had great fun discussing the possibility that it


was nothing more than the entrance to a Lorentzian wormhole passing through the throat of another Lorentzian wormhole in four-dimensional space- time. Well okay, I’ll stop showing off. A serious point, however, is that amid all the constraints of having to teach the science curriculum at school, enthusing pupils with some of the more exotic ideas in physics is, I believe, vital in keeping alive their interest in science in general. And getting them thinking about the principles, practicalities and paradoxes of time travel is a neat way of overlapping science fiction with science fact. One can begin by asking the simple question: do


the laws of physics allow for the possibility of time travel? You may be surprised to hear that not only do we know time travel to be possible, but that it has been demonstrated routinely by experiments. Of course one must qualify this by pointing out


that it is only time travel into the future that has actually been achieved. Time travel into the past is much more difficult, and is probably impossible. What makes it so fascinating though is that it cannot yet be ruled out. Until Isaac Newton completed his work on the


laws of motion, time was considered to be the domain of philosophy rather than science. Then Newton described how objects move under the influence of forces, and since all movement and


change requires the notion of time for it to make sense, time had to be included as an integral part of his mathematical description of nature. However, Newtonian time is absolute and


relentless. It is said to flow at a constant rate as though there were an imaginary cosmic clock that marks off the seconds, hours and years regardless of our, often subjective, experience about its passage. We have no influence over its rate of flow. This all sounds perfectly reasonable; but modern


physics has shown beyond question that this view of time is wrong. In 1905, Einstein discovered that time and space


are related. He published his theory of relativity and brought about a revolution in physics. He showed that time is no longer absolute and independent of the observer. Rather, it can be stretched and squeezed depending


on how fast you are moving. In fact, by travelling around close to the speed of light is a way of slowing your time down so that when you stop, less time has gone by for you than in the outside world and you will find yourself literally in the future. It is true that such time travel does not require the future to already exist “out there” waiting for you to visit it. Instead, by travelling at near light speed you are simply “fast- forwarding” into the future and getting there before everyone else. So time travel, at least into the future, is allowed.


Indeed, it has been verified experimentally a number of times. In the most famous experiment, in 1971,


physicists synchronised two atomic clocks and observed the tiny but accurately predicted time difference between them after one had been flown on a jet for a while. Of course, while jets do not fly at speeds


anything near that of light, the fact that time slowed down – very slightly – for the travelling clock was confirmed beyond doubt. There is another way of slowing time down


that does not require high-speed travel. Instead, Einstein’s theory of gravity (known as General Relativity, and which he completed in 1915) shows that a gravitational field will do the same job. The effect can even be seen due to the Earth’s


gravity; clocks run faster out in space than they do on the surface of the Earth where gravity literally slows time down. So to travel into the future, all you need to do


is find a suitable massive object, such as a black hole, which has a strong enough gravitational field to significantly warp spacetime in its vicinity, and orbit around it a few times (oh, careful you do not get sucked in). While doing this, your time will flow more


slowly than it does in the relatively weaker gravitational field on the surface of the Earth. When you return, everyone will comment on how young you look considering the many earth years you have been away.


SecEd • July 1 2010


SCIENCE


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