Dr J's Emporium of Musical Education

Last weekend I attempted to make ice cream for a book club meet I was hosting. The recipe I was following was from Nigella Lawson and was one that I have successfully made countless times before. For some reason this time it didn’t work with the cream splitting, leaving me with home-made butter and whey that had a distinctly minty orange flavour. Staring failure in the face I made a decision just see what would happen if I froze the whey and use the butter in some other recipes.  This led me to make some orange and mint flavoured scones , orange and mint frozen whey and cartons full of orange and mint caramel popcorn for a friend’s barbecue…. Joshua Morris in a recent tes.com article comments on how we have perhaps become too concerned with success and do not allow our students the option of failing. With the now obsessive culture of school, teacher and student success we are at the stage where everybody is scared to get things wrong. I have recently seen this myself at...

I have signed up to take part in a staff peer mentoring scheme at school.  This was all well and good (a bit of peer mentoring can be a great thing in helping validate how great we are as educators), but when I was asked what I would like the focus to be, while I admit that there is always areas of improvement, I was stuck for an exact area to develop.  As a solution to this the mentoring coordinator suggested that he might come in and video a lesson and then we could see what develops from there.   Of course the lesson we had arranged for the videoing to take place in was on a day where the HoD was bedridden with man flu (actually it might have been proper flu as nothing usually slows him down)!  This meant I was having to get cover work sorted for his classes, briefing the cover teacher and starting the lesson.  Even with these beginnings and rushing about, on reviewing the video I realised the area that I really needed to work on with my own class was...

While I would like to say that I am tech savvy and keep up with all that is new, in reality I am always a bit of a scaredy cat when it comes to embracing new stuff, and generally hold off purchasing 'the latest thing' for quite a while (usually until about 3 months before the next latest thing is launched!).  Thus it has been with Facebook, iPhone, Macs, the smart watch, and most recently, Twitter. I finally joined the Twittersphere last year as a colleague recommended it as a great source of CPD and advice for teachers.  After an initial false start (some scumbag had got my email address blocked after using it as a spam address), I set up my account and waited for all the followers to hang on my every word.  While I waited (and still am) on this multitude to materialise, I decided to research others who I could follow, and while doing this came across @TeacherToolkit .  Not only does this feed direct you to resources that you can download, but it also has the 1 m...

It is Thursday evening (start of the weekend in the Middle East) and I find myself sat here at a loss.  Tomorrow should be the 3rd Dukhan Triathlon with the longest event, in which I intended to participate, being an olympic distance race (1500m sea swim, 40km bike and a 10km run).  Over the past six months myself and a few colleagues have been training up to 5 times a week, with blood, lots of sweat, and a few tears along the way, and working up through the previous super-sprint and sprint distance races in the aim of taking part in this 'biggie'.  But then the weather had other ideas..... Screenshot of Windguru.com - 6.6mm is a LOT of water! Now, although not a preference, I do not mind swimming in choppy water or running and cycling in wet/windy weather, but the race has had to be postponed due to the accompanying thundery weather.  The event will now take place in May but, due to the heat at that time of year will only be a sprint distance race (750m ...