Sunday round-up 20 March 2022

What have I published here in the past week?

Mar 20, 2022

∙ Paid

Production at Freedman Towers has been proceeding at full pace in the last week. Here’s a list of the articles I’ve published here:

Eclecticism, from Terry Freedman

The Society of Breakers

Each month, in a secret basement, the location of which is known only to a few invitees, and then only an hour or so before the start time, the local branch of the Society of Breakers meets. The Chair calls the gathering to order, the air is pregnant with anticipation. “Who would like to propose the first target?”, he or she asks…

3 years ago · Terry Freedman

Eclecticism, from Terry Freedman

Toxic Leadership

Dysfunctional leadership takes several forms, including well-intentioned actions. It's not just only about being nasty or bullying. In this article, I list a few of the counterproductive approaches or actions that some leaders take. Problem-solving You might think it helpful, and good leadership, to solve challenges yourself rather than discussing them wi…

3 years ago · Terry Freedman

Eclecticism, from Terry Freedman

The Bartleby Response

In Melville’s ‘Bartleby, The Scrivener’, the eponymous protagonist has a standard response to all requests from his boss : "I would prefer not to." As uncooperative responses go, this is hard to beat. It's not exactly an out and out refusal, but an expression of preference. Had Bartleby been subjected to a disciplin…

3 years ago · 3 likes · 4 comments · Terry Freedman

Eclecticism, from Terry Freedman

An example of why pedantry is never a great idea

Me: [Reading a set of instructions that have emerged from the printer, and having spotted a missing space and an ‘s’ instead of an ‘a’.] Whoever wrote this quite obviously skipped their English lessons at school. Mrs F: I wrote it. Me: It is, however, incredibly erudite…

3 years ago · Terry Freedman

Eclecticism, from Terry Freedman

The joys of non-standard English

Every so often some so-called educator, or a politician who thinks they know something about education, has a psychological meltdown about people using non-standard English. Whether it’s youngsters using slang, or (shudder) text-speak in their writing or a different branch of the language altogether, they rail against the corruption of our glorious lang…

3 years ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Terry Freedman

Eclecticism, from Terry Freedman

Inspection

Preamble Inspection article Although I have had a fair bit of experience of inspection, as an additional inspector for Ofsted, being inspected on several occasions, my experience has been in England. I've had some very useful feed back from Kenneth H. Westgate Jr., who is a Technology Coach/Technology Coordinator in Pennsylvania, USA. I'll need to spend s…

3 years ago · Terry Freedman

Eclecticism, from Terry Freedman

More on the generic Head of Department job description

The job description for the typical Head of Department’s post misses something important, I think. I created it from an amalgam of various Head of Department job descriptions provided by secondary schools, across a variety of departments. I took the most common elements, and collated them into one document…

3 years ago · Terry Freedman

Eclecticism, from Terry Freedman

London life

As I write this I am half watching an episode of The Saint, one of those crime serials in the 1960s in which the whole of Scotland Yard or the FBI cannot solve a crime, but one person with a smart car and a sharp suit solves it in under an hour. What I like about these pr…

3 years ago · Terry Freedman

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