Management speak....

I must say I really don't like the way management speak has infiltrated Education so much. This article in the Age Newspaper regarding the Australia 2020 Summit interviews "Nicholas Gruen, chief executive of Lateral Economics and chairman of Peach Discount Mortgage Broking" who says, "We need to empower the consumers of those services to know something about their quality so that … the value-add that schools are making is monitored and made public," - 'consumers' means I supposed parents and their children, the school students or 'learners' as they might be called elsewhere....and 'value-add' is a nice way of saying extra stuff that they have at their school - computers, pools, overseas exchange programmes etc....I suspect, but am not sure. See the full article here:
Education Hot Topic of Summit

Other news is that I only have two more days of practicum left. I have really enjoyed my time at South Sydney High School and will miss all of them there when I go. They have a really great department and that helps a great deal when you are teaching - support of others. I think it will really affect the way that I deal with students from now on, taking a much more individualised approach - attending to students outside of class so that there is a personal relationship on which to build a student-teacher relationship as well. You get so much more out of teaching when you invest this time with the children - I have seen it work. I just hope I can follow in my prac supervisor's footsteps.
Final news is that I finished my 1st essay for Literacies for Learning. I have found it hard to concentrate on this whilst doing prac which is so much better because you plan and then actually teach...rather than just write about it....but I feel pleased with my efforts in this assignment which were focussed on re-evaluating a lesson with reference to literacy support. I used one of the old lessons from my first curriculum method subject 2 years ago and it was good to revisit it.

Right, onto my photos - went to Woronora General Cemetery in Sutherland today with my partner and took some great shots there. Am sort of obsessed with the little objects that people put on cemeteries and have taken lots of pictures of all sorts of oddments. You can see this and other information about cemeteries I have visited on my new blog site: Cemetery Curiosities