Time

I’m feeling tired today. Last night my youngest (she’ll be 2 in October) had a tough time trying to get to sleep, so my wife and I spent most of the early evening taking turns in soothing her. Each time we heard her cry there’d be a groan from us both, then one of us would go up. On the fourth or fifth time of rocking her and singing her a song to try and calm her, I had a stark appreciation of the situation. My eldest is 4 and she never needs us to go up to sing to her any more. I’ve got maybe a year left of cuddling and singing before that’s it – no more soothing the baby. While it’s difficult, it is something I will miss and I won’t get that time back.

Time’s one of those things we never seem to have enough of as a teacher and I know many of us struggle with this both professionally and personally. Each year when we receive our new timetables we scour them for the free periods as they dictate the time we have to catch up on work. Then the summer holidays arrive and we suddenly have a seemingly endless stretch of hours and days in front of us.

I did an assembly earlier this year on Time (I mean the topic was ‘Time’… I haven’t just written a blog post about how I was punctual). The premise was pretty simple, that we shouldn’t take life for granted, but that we should make the most of these moments – even if they seem difficult or arduous at the time (like me rocking my daughter who won’t go to sleep). I borrowed heavily from a fantastic blog at Wait But Why. At this time in the year for teachers – on the first days of the summer holidays – I think it’s important to think about what we do with our time to make the best possible use of it – even if it’s just to recharge before September.

I love an abstraction, and it seemed to work well for the assembly, so I put some graphics together which helped me think about time. They assume (probably optimistically) that I’ll live to the ripe old age of 90. I’m currently 36, so a simple one to start with would be my life in years:

(where the blue circles are years I’ve had, and the yellow are ones yet to come)

Boris became the new Prime Minister today. At the age of 36 I’ve seen 7 Prime Ministers, including BoJo. With a new one every 4 years or so, I can expect to probably only see another 15.

By today, all UK teachers should now have started their summer holidays. I have had 14 summer holidays as a teacher. The red dashed line marks the estimated end of my teaching career – assuming I retire at 65.

This all starts to look a bit morbid though. Some good news is that those extra holidays mean we get more time for leisure. The recent TeacherTapp on how many books are read was positive – on average, people in the UK read 4 books a year (YouGov, 2014) but it looks like most teachers are planning on reading 3+ books in just the summer holiday!

If I push myself into that group (4+3 = 7 a year?) then this looks better for my reading… a perk of being a teacher, definitely.

(378 for me as a teacher, and 216 for me as a non-teacher)

In my assembly I finished with the graphic below. It simply showed the number of months (Sept – July) that students had in school. I used Year 10 as they were in the middle (Years 7/8/9 on one side, Years 11/12/13 on the other) and it was a whole-school assembly. This image resulted in a quiet hum in the audience, and it’s the one that students mentioned later – the realisation that their education does have an end, and that their time in school does move quickly. Those older students already knew that they were at the tail-end, but this graphic apparently prompted some of them to question how much of that time had been spent productively. Sometimes a reminder that they won’t be sitting in classrooms forever is useful, especially for those who assume that it will all miraculously be OK once they reach their final exam year.

We as teachers go through the curriculum each year, tweaking and refining: they’re the ones who experience this though. As teachers, we need to make sure that time is spent as usefully as possible. That graphic could be easily broken down into weeks, days or lessons. In my department we certainly have some refining to do, giving more time to some topics and rethinking some that are less useful to the students. But that can wait until after I’ve finished my 3 books.

How board games improved my teaching

There has been a resurgence in board games in the last decade. What used to be a dusty box brought out to play reluctantly with your family at Christmas has blossomed into a huge industry. Like the late-to-the-party hipster I am, I joined the trend a couple of years ago. It started as an excuse to meet up with friends every couple of months but soon turned into attending a weekly club and a pretty expensive hobby.

This post isn’t about getting into an excellent pastime (although if you are interested, my solid recommendations to start with are Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne). It’s about how playing board games has helped me with my teaching.

An issue with board game enthusiasts is that there are a lot of games out there, all of which are potentially excellent. This means that at a board games club there will usually be a large number on offer and not everyone will have played all of them. There will usually be a number of players who need to be taught how to play. Mostly being on the student end for this has given me a lot of experience in how, and how not, to teach a game. It is a skill and can make or break the overall enjoyment for everyone taking part (which is important, as most of these games can take 1-2 hours). I like to think I’m reasonably good at delivering a rules explanation but thinking about how I teach a game has made me think more about how I teach my lessons as well.

Quintin Smith of Shut Up and Sit Down has a great video on how to teach a board game. It’s a good starting place for how to deliver knowledge as efficiently as possible while ensuring engagement… which is essentially what teaching a lesson is!

So here are my top tips on how to teach a board game (partially borrowed from Quins) and how they have improved my own teaching practice:

Make sure you know the game inside-out / Revise your subject knowledge

Quins describes this as “if you’re not reading the manual on the toilet for a week, you’re doing it wrong”. It is seemingly obvious but I’ve sat through rules explanations where someone literally opened the plastic-wrapped box, got the manual out and started reading it to us. After 30 minutes I’d given up listening and couldn’t care less. How does this translate to teaching? Know your subject knowledge inside-out, be prepared to field those tricky questions, and know what you’re going to be talking about! If it’s a challenging topic at an advanced level, then do your homework. Maybe not on the toilet.

Play a dummy game on your own / Check your resources

I wanted to play Arkham Horror LCG with my wife, and a friend recommended I play through the first scenario on my own first. It was the best advice I could have had – the little nuances for the game had me checking the manual every 5 minutes and that would have stilted the flow when we came to play it together. How have I taken this to my teaching? We bought in a number of resources this year and it can be easy to just rely on them instead of properly planning a lesson. I’ve been guilty of this and not only does it make the lessons flat, but there can be errors in external resources which break the lesson flow and are harmful to learning. If you’ve bought some resources then make sure it all makes sense and you understand them.

Start with How, Why and What / Provide context for the lesson

Most games will have a theme, from Azul’s laying tiles in a Portuguese palace to Tokaido’s quest to have a lovely enriching travel experience. Include this – it helps with the explanation of the game and it makes it fun to discuss as you play. And tell players how to win! This is often an afterthought because the teacher of the game is so worried about not missing out any details of how to play. Start with how to get victory points, then players can mentally refer to this as they are told how to take their turns. It’s the same in teaching – where does this topic fit in your curriculum? Why are you teaching this? How does it relate to previous lessons and how will it relate to future lessons? (Adam Boxer has some great blog posts on thoughts about sequencing a curriculum – I recommend starting here).

Know what to include and what to leave until next lesson / game

Don’t include all the funky addons or complicated rules for the first time you play. Leave out the farmers in Carcassonne, use the default map for Catan. Make sure that the players have mastered – and hopefully enjoyed – the game and then add in more intricate fancy rules as you return to it. With teaching, plan your lesson carefully – don’t overload students with concepts which can be returned to in a future lesson. If they can’t convert a binary number, they certainly can’t convert a floating point number. If this means returning to that lesson/game again, so be it. They need to master it before moving on.

 

And that’s where my analogies end. Quins talks about giving people bits of plastic to hold so they have “an emotional connection with the game” and I’m not entirely sure how I can shoehorn that into teaching.