Downtime

Today started well – washing done early, blue sky, sun, good church service. I’m working on some training material for our teachers that we will be starting on Tuesday. The biggest challenge of putting it all together is avoiding my usual tendency to try and get too much done in one go. I’ve decided to focus on two strategies to help us in our quest for creating amazing mathematicians in our schools. Neither of them are rocket science really. One involves digging really deeply into test results to see where youngsters are struggling and the other focuses on a back to basics maths ‘boot camp’ approach to the pupils who have the most difficulty. All was going well until I decided to try resurrecting a laptop to use on the training day.

I have probably said before how much I enjoy putting spreadsheets together to make data management easier. A couple of years ago we were fortunate enough to receive funding for five laptops for the teachers and pupils to use. As is the case with all technology it’s alright as long as it works. This particular machine has, in the last six months or so, picked up a virus which is making it very difficult for me to hook it up to the Internet. Viruses are relatively easy to get rid of if you have got a good antivirus programme and reliable access to the Internet. Unfortunately neither of these things hold true for this laptop. Tonight it has been very difficult to get any kind of connection to the Internet, making it impossible to do anything about the problem. I’m hoping that tomorrow the situation might be better. I have a horrible feeling that the only thing to do with it in the end will be to restore it to a previous incarnation and re-install all the software. A tedious job at best and a nightmare if the restore doesn’t work and I have to rebuild it from scratch.

On a more positive note I have drawn some real inspiration from Salman Khan’s book “The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined.” If you haven’t visited the website or have children who are struggling at school go to https://www.khanacademy.org/ and have a look at one of the most powerful tools in the education toolbox at the moment.