Tag: education
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The Clickbait Breakdown: How The Media Converts Scottish Education into Rage-Bait
Scottish education reporting hit another low this week with The Scotsman’s latest piece of statistical rage-baiting: a page-padded countdown of Scotland’s “worst-performing” council areas for Higher passes. We are no strangers to local news reducing complex public institutions to raw, decontextualised metrics. But pieces like this step beyond lazy reporting; they actively mislead the public…
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Routine
The text alerts come first,then the aerial footage of the parking lot,red and blue lights washing over the stucco wallswhile parents wait behind the yellow tape. On the television, the spokesmen take their placesto recite the standard liturgy.They call it an unspeakable tragedy,an isolated act of evil,a storm that no one could have predicted. They…
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The Gradebook of Small Griefs
We came for chalk and the sound of a question landing,for the slow bloom of a student’s face when a hard thing suddenly makes sense.We came with lesson plans like little ships and optimism folded into our pockets,and somewhere between the photocopier and the meeting room the compass got nicked. The salary letter arrives as…
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3 Good Things Vol. 6 (14/06/26)
On Sundays, I like to share three things I have enjoyed in the past week. They could be anything; just stuff that has, as Marie Kondo might say, sparked joy. They also don’t have to be new or recent, so long as I’ve enjoyed them this week. Thing 1: Enjoying Dungeons & Dragons Again I…
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Howl For the Quiet Classroom
(With inspiration from, and apologies to, Allen Ginsberg…) I saw the best minds of my generationtrying to get thirty teenagersto care about a metaphorat nine‑thirty on a Tuesday,holy fools of fluorescent corridorsdragging whiteboard pens like relics,summoning meaning from photocopiesthat still smell of warm toner. I walked the tiled floors of the learning cathedral,the budget‑cut basilica,the…
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Poetry is Taught Wrong
They teach us metrics like a checklist,syllables counted like coins, rhythm weighed and filed away.We learn to admire the beast from a glass box: dissected, annotated, politely dead.They hand us diagrams of feeling and expect tidy answers. We are asked to tame metaphors into essays, to translate thunder into bullet points.We paste sticky notes over…
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Salt, Stone, Signal
We wear the weather like a cardigan here;salt on the collar, wind in the seams, Caithness sky stretched like an exam paper you can’t quite fold right.The bus leaves before the light finishes waking; I tuck my keys into the same pocket that remembers first-day nerves.My classroom is a cottage of cushions and careful rules,…