Lacking Lemov

1.   Less is more: government initiatives should be limited to one side of A4

2.   Targets are for archers, not teachers: adorn your classroom with who you are

3.   League tables struggle to measure the sensitive inside leg

4.   You can lead a horse to a test but that won’t make it think for itself

5.   Teaching is like riding a bike: when you fall off it hurts

6.   Ofsted is awful: sound and symmetry and sense

7.   If they’re laughing they’re learning

8.   Don’t wear a tie just to look like a teacher

9.   A full house beats a flush and metaphor beats the literal, hands down

10. Praise everything said that is serious and genuine

11. The best objective is that which discovers itself by accident

12. Only one of the Gospels reports seeing a four-part lesson plan

13. The ‘wrong’ answer often reveals how learning works wonderfully

14. If a sonnet has 14 lines, is this a poem? Discuss, but there is no answer

Roughly 20 months into my retirement from teaching I am still incensed by the complete bollocks I hear about targets and testing and other crap. I continue to get emails from teachit, for whom I still occasionally contribute [ideas for creative writing with no measurement involved!], and today's advert for ActiveLearning online just dredged up all my anger against the compulsion for dryly drilling students to 'get that grade C or above' bullshit - the anger clearly not buried very deep...

...which has prompted me to post this, another in my sonnet sequence, written not that long ago in response to the stated 49 techniques devised by American educationalist Doug Lemov to help teachers 'teach like a champion' - yet another set of strictures and structures to convince the philistines there is no art nor humanity needed to do this job.