Weeknote 12/2024
*cough*
This is the week we all got the lurgy. It started on Saturday with my partner and gradually worked its way around to my son - who ended up with a nasty chest infection - and then, at the end of the week, I finally succumbed. I’m not sure when this strategy began - I feel it was pre-Covid - but at the first signs of illness, we all begin to sleep in different rooms in an effort to minimise transmission or disruption to others’ sleep.
This approach always reminds me of my short time living in London and I find my habits immediately revert to my 2017-18 routine when I sleep alone: the radio has to be on to fill the silence and, without it, I often find it difficult to get to sleep - lurgy or not! This week my bedtime companions have been courtesy of BBC Sounds and included the first few episodes of the final season (number 64!) of The Now Show and a Curious Collection on the theme of neurodiversity (the shows update every Sunday so clicking this link might take you to something entirely different!). I particularly enjoyed listening to A Job Before Fifty (from April 2022). This programme followed Will, who has autism, as he attempts to succeed at job applications and, later, interviews. I highly recommend you listen too as it clearly shows why more equity needs to be built into job selection processes. Will has numerous degrees and is of course incredibly intelligent, but struggles to overcome the barriers to employment.
It’s just over six years since my friend James and I went to the recording of one of the episodes of The Now Show: series 52 episode 3 to be exact (I had to look it up). It doesn’t seem that far in the past but there you go. I have no photos of the occasion except for the one I snapped as the queue wound its way through Broadcasting House.
Yes, it’s the Strictly trophy. No, I don’t know why I chose to photograph this over anything else that evening. However, I do remember having a great time and laughing a heck of a lot and - yes - there were a lot of jokes that never made it to the final recording. I’m going to miss the semi-regular topical binge but selfishly hope that Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis continue to work on other comedy shows, radio or TV. There is a scarcity of comedic escapism at the moment, at a time when it is needed most of all, and there are only so many times I can watch Mock the Week on repeat.
In my isolation chamber, I’ve had a lot more time to read this week, so I managed to finish Halfhead. I think I enjoyed it. I mean, it had a few decent twists but it’s not a book I’d choose to revisit. Thinking about it, many of the characters in the book were quite shallow and two-dimensional. There was a lot of borrowing of ideas from other films too, and I had the feeling it was written to be optioned to become a TV series. Ugh. I’ve just gone back back to Goodreads to adjust my rating!
The next book on my list is non-fiction: The Cyber Effect by Mary Aiken. This was a book suggested to me by an HND student at NESCol late last year and I managed to get a second-hand copy a few months ago. It’s all about how behaviour has changed through the influence of technology, so definitely not a light read, but I’m hoping that I resonate more with this author than I did with Nicholas Carr.
In other reading this week, I stumbled on a fantastic Substack by Thomas Kuegler (and his Dad Bill) called Letters With My Father. It’s a lovely back-and-forth, discussing marriage, trauma, old friends and family. It’s brutally honest and beautifully written and makes me reflect on the fact that I rarely took the opportunity to have a good long chat with my own Dad. I can now only wonder what his opinion was on many of the moments in our shared experience that I have decided the narrative on. I guarantee I’ve missed something, misinterpreted something, or taken it too lightly (or seriously) and I worry that, because of my apathy towards our conversations when he was alive, I’ve disregarded and disrespected his history. This is a jarring thought nearly 20 years on from his unexpected passing, I don’t mind telling you. Yes, we talked, but like the minor characters in Halfhead, we rarely ventured beyond the shallows in the final two years of our intermittent conversations.
In contrast to the slightly muted direction this week has taken (I think when you feel sorry for yourself because you are under the weather, you tend to wallow don’t you?) work has had to be much more practical. Yes, dear reader, we are talking about the importance of preparing students for exams.
My colleague Dave and I are using Edpuzzle to help provide different options to students, grouping four or five past paper / prelim questions on similar topics so that students can recognise the similarity in wording from year to year. I also revisited Blooket for the first time in a while and found that while you can import flashcards from Quizlet to make multiple-choice quizzes, you need to sense-check what it generates as possible answers very carefully indeed! We have created a great bundle of revision material which will need slight tweaks for next year’s cohort but because we have limited our platforms and tried to keep overlap to a minimum I’m hopeful I can identify the most impactful methods of supporting students as they get ready for their Computing Science exam in May.
I also celebrated the first student completing their iDEA bronze award this week, which is a fantastic achievement given they’ve only had just over 3 weeks of lessons in which to complete it. The new additions to the S1 course are invigorating the students, giving them more autonomy in building their digital skills but also providing real value for the future. Lastly, I began another new project this week: Esports. This extracurricular is going to be a lot of work, but hopefully a lot of fun for all too.
I wish you all good health and a fine week! See you next time!