Diving Bell
Teachers Need Honest and Thorough Conversations about Materials
According to both state and federal governments, the solution to professional exhaustion is to outsource the creation of teaching...
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Diving Bell
Apr 17, 20221 min read
Visit The Craft of Writing Blog
HSC English Module C 'The Craft of Writing' continues to perplex students about the nature and possibilities of such weird animals as...
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Diving Bell
Jan 26, 20213 min read
ICT, Wisdom and the Satisfaction of Research
One of the big tasks of Term 1 is checking on the progress of senior research projects. Have students thought about them over the...
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Diving Bell
May 26, 20203 min read
Ask for power words, not techniques
Whenever you put your foot on the accelerator, there's a bang from the engine as the car goes forward. You take it to the mechanic, and...
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Diving Bell
May 17, 20203 min read
Craft of Writing: mixed mode responses
A mullet: the ultimate mixed mode response It's ok to mix modes in your writing. Most speech isn't purely one thing or another: in the...
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Diving Bell
May 13, 20203 min read
Theorizing Advanced Module A
Often we move straight into the study of the texts themselves in Module A without thinking about influence and intertextuality...
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Diving Bell
May 5, 20203 min read
But is it beautiful?
In the language of pandemic, the HSC Advanced Module B rubric says that students will develop 'detailed analytical and critical...
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Diving Bell
Mar 24, 20202 min read
New times, new text types
Like most pessimists, I perk up in times of despair. There's endless opportunities to say I told you so, and as standards become...
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Diving Bell
Mar 16, 20203 min read
Where's the argument?
Writing about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the historian Geoffrey Roberts says that On the Soviet side the pact emerged from a process of...
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Diving Bell
Mar 11, 20202 min read
What even is...a value?
This week I discovered the value of a school blazer: it clearly tells kids what the school values. 'Truth, Justice, and Diddling the Tax...
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Diving Bell
Mar 4, 20202 min read
What even is 'representation'?
Students often seem to stumble on essay questions which ask them to consider 'the representation' of something. In the previous...
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Diving Bell
Feb 26, 20205 min read
Opening êthos: how historians claim your trust
In the last History post, I suggested that students can find traces of historians' very early schooling in the way they construct their...
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Diving Bell
Feb 20, 20202 min read
Pitching the conversation concept
In this term's opening lesson on Module A: Textual Conversations, one student said 'Don't conversations involve both people taking turns?...
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Diving Bell
Feb 12, 20202 min read
History Extension and Ancient Schooling
The first topic of History Extension is easily my favourite thing to teach, because there's never a time I don't feel as if I'm teetering...
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Diving Bell
Feb 5, 20202 min read
What even is textual integrity?
When I came back to Australia from doing a DPhil in late medieval politics at Oxford and saw that English students were required to talk...
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Diving Bell
Jan 29, 20203 min read
What even IS analysis?
Last week I asked what we did when we 'did' English. It had something to do with texts, reading, and meaning, I thought. Practically...
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Diving Bell
Jan 22, 20202 min read
What do we do when we do English?
Last year I started by asking each year group that I teach 'What do we do here in English?' (for Year 7s, I asked 'What do you think...
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Diving Bell
Jan 15, 20203 min read
New year, stronger skills?
My professional weakness is graphic novels. I just hate them. I can’t see the point, and I don’t know what to do with them. I’m worried...
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Diving Bell
Nov 9, 20192 min read
A New Oodgeroo
As an immigrant to Australia (I'm white, so I gather I can call myself an immigrant, not the more PC 'migrant) I had no preconceived...
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Diving Bell
Aug 29, 20192 min read
Student blog: Essays are not a flash mob
What makes an argument? Connection, my little vegetables. Only Tinder users are hungrier for connection than an essay. And an essay requires
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