How to avoid marking - for teachers and others of that ilk.

Louise S was complaining that she hates marking. Don't do it - simple as that:
How to avoid marking:
1. Don’t use written work – use cards such as true/false, agree/disagree
2. Use Powerpoint and make a quiz
3. Learners create artefacts – posters, models, drawings, time lines, songs, poems
4. Get the learners to write the questions, and the answers
5. Peer assessment – give it back to them to mark amongst themselves
6. Fill in the gaps – cloze exercises, swap to mark
7. Photocopy their answers, project on to screen, and mark as a group
8. Give out the criteria, with tick boxes, and get them to tick when they can do it
9. Don’t set homework
10. Do set homework, and put model answers on the VLE. If they can be bothered to do the homework, they can be bothered to mark it
11. Make multiple choice quizzes, and mark there and then, or later, themselves
12. Use the internet – thousands of tests and things that the learner does, with a score awarded – BBC is full of it.

I like number three best.

The Guardian

I don't think the Guardian are going to print my letter - they didn't ring today - so I'm sharing it the other way:
I love it when the middle classes catch on to what the rest of us have
been doing for years (The gift that keeps on giving: village group
exports recycled present idea worldwide, 12/12/09). We collected
empty coffee jars to fill with sweets during the miners' strike, made
hampers for the protesters at Molesworth, and have been making new
gifts from old things my entire life. My favourite suggestion was
'Send a delivery of logs sourced from a local supplier' - where the
f**k else does one get logs from, Waitrose online? Must go now, off
to clean mummy's car for xmas.Colin Billett
ps - soz, I think I woke up in the wrong newspaper.

Late Autumn (not winter for a week or so)

I had a glorious ride over Wenlock Edge this morning, and back again this afternoon, and a lovely walk in the late afternoon light, just after the sun had gone down. It just reminded me that however hard we try we can never capture it on film. No camera has peripheral vision like a human, and I think mine is almost 180 degrees, nor can it have the depth of focus. To watch the sun go down, to the sound of a young buzzard, the bell of the church striking 4.00pm, the whistle of the steam train and the clatter of the main line train far in the distance, to feel the damp mist on ones face - an artist can only hope to give an impression of this, in music, paint, photograph, prose or poetry. I can only hope to soak it up, and occasionally get a really good shot.

Dawn in Pink

Dawn revealed herself this morning clothed in a luxurious pink. The moon was hovering in the south, a brilliantly white hemisphere and looking like a button in the clear blue sky. We know it to be an illusion; the moon looks so big to the eye, but to a camera it is just a small white dot. Then the sun began to emerge over Hartlebury Common, like a tiny segment of an irradiated orange, growing larger by the second. Within a few minutes the whole of the bright globe had appeared, the sky had become lighter by a significant degree, and the moon began to pale in the new light of day, but still hanging in the sky to watch the show. The clouds formed a wall along the western horizon, and nothing else in the sky but a few wisps that might have been vapour trails, but then again maybe a few sketch lines drawn by some unknown hand. When the rest of the dog-walkers joined me at ten past eight the show was over. By nine o’clock the sky had clouded over, the moon retired for the day, and the sun on it’s lazy journey to that low zenith it maintains so near the winter solstice.