I quit my job once when two schools amalgamated and the timetabling proposal meant I’d have ended up travelling for half the day. It didn’t retain me at all. I guess it depends how you do it.

Yes - I think he was joking about that bit. 😂

A now retired colleague of mine used to say he’d like to meet whoever it was that decided the optimum class size was 30 … and punch him! 😂

A classroom is a bit of a ‘pressure-cooker’ environment. A lot of children find it intolerable. And it takes its toll on the adults as well.

Absolutely!

That’s because, mostly, no-one wants to admit the real stresses in teaching. If you teach secondary, you could interact with several hundred people per day. That, alone, is stressful. Class sizes are stressful. Just being in a room with 30 other people in close proximity is stressful.

Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #6,129,338!

Absolutely. The key to effective teaching, imo, is teachers understanding the function of what they are asking the children to do at any one time. Understanding ‘how’ whatever it is engenders learning. One phrase I’d like to eliminate from the profession is ‘deliver a lesson’. No: you teach children

True - because you’ve barely used any of it since. Yet - I can still recite stuff I revised for ‘O’ Level (oh! My age!) History because I’ve used it a lot in the last 40 years.

Yes. On Friday morning, I had a Y9 lesson which was noisy at times - the children were genuinely having fun. But … we started the lesson in complete silence as they searched their memory for the information we needed and ended the lesson in complete silence as they wrote about what they’d learned.