As if to confirm every stereotype everyone ever held about Indians, my Dad (the Indian half of my parentage) used to have a small paper shop. Not for long, it wasn’t particularly successful, but it was his own, and my dad had always wanted to own his own business.
Round about this time of year he would get a cardboard display container out with little bags of cheap stationary in them, rulers, pencils, you know the sort of thing. And he would put an advert in the local rag “Back to School”, with the name of his shop. Sounds reasonable, until you opened the paper, and there were adverts in there from the really big shops, Woolworths (well, they were really big then) etc, with their “Back to School” deals on clothes and even cheaper (in every sense of the word) sets of stationary.
The size of the adverts seemed to be in direct proportion to the size of the business, so these big chain stores would have adverts that were either the whole page, or at least dominated it, and my dads advert was a tiny little advert next to it. You had to know it was there and look for it, or you’d never see it. I’ve no idea if it worked, I get the impression that any money spent on this advert was wasted, and we certainly never had money to burn, but I may be wrong, maybe there were people out there who did want to shop in little shops owned and run by one person.
And I find myself wandering if I’m doing exactly the same thing as my dad, which is the fate that I guess every man in the world is either trying to emulate or avoid, depending on, well, if you’re a bloke you’ll know what. In my case, it’s very much the latter, but that’s not really important.
You see, I have this thing about the use of ICT in teaching in primary school, especially the teaching of English (if we are allowed to call it that) to boys. From my, albeit very limited experience, I’ve found a couple of things. Firstly, a lot children, and in particular boys, are totally turned off from English, and this screws them royally in every subject. Second, ICT just isn’t used very much at all in teaching of different subjects, and I mean really used in teaching it, where the children get to use it on mass, not just the teacher using the interactive whiteboard, or for one or two children using it to play an English game.
Now I’m going to be seriously controversial. When I think about it, I guess the reason that ICT isn’t used that widely or well, is that most primary school teachers are female and at least in their thirties, and ICT just wasn’t their bag when they were younger, and still isn’t. As we all know, most primary school teachers are chicks, and women dominate everything to do with teaching in primary schools, apart, apparently, from conferences etc to do with ICT.
And this is a shame, ‘cos boys love playing with computers, and if you can tap into this then you can really start to get them involved in learning English. And the best way to use ICT in the teaching of English? Well, for me, and given how you are reading this I guess its no surprise, every child of the age of 6 and above gets their own blog! Now, this is not exactly new or controversial, search for blog in this (its just over 3MB), or check out “The big pICTure”(and this is only instance, there is more research on this than you can shake a pointing device at).
So this is my mission, to introduce ICT in general, and blogs in particular, into any primary school that will listen, and I guess the one I work in (hopefully, pretty, pretty please let me work in one) would be a good start. But this comes back to the whole “Back to School” thing. As per my about bit, I am a student teacher, I am the most insignificant little thing on the side of the school. I imagine Douglas Adams would have a good way of describing just how insignificant I am, though I think “mostly harmless” simultaneously overstates my importance and is fundamentally misleading. And, as an NQT, this wont change. And, lets face it, I’m going to have a sackload of bigger things to worry about, like not losing my job in the first 5 minutes, should I be fortunate enough to actually get one.
But, like my dad, this insignificant thing is still going to try, and I’m going to start here. If you have children of primary school age, I encourage you to get them to blog, writing about anything. What they have read is a really good, but my daughter writes her own fairy stories, with pictures. She says she likes it because “it looks like you haven’t made any mistakes” – imagine taking away that fear of failure from writing! And get them to play around with the font, the different styles and sizes, my daughter loves it, and boys in school go ape. And get relatives and friends from across the country, and indeed the world, to read it and leave encouraging comments on it. My daughter’s blog has become an extended family activity. And if you do this, please let me know, I’d love to hear.
One day I may share what happened to my dad’s shop, but not today, it may put you off.
