Tag: College

Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Pick Teaching As A Career

Teaching is never easy and it can seem like a thankless task when you spend the whole weekend marking, only to be mocked by friends who joke that you get too many holidays. However, there are many reasons why you should pick teaching as a career and undertake a teaching qualification such as Middlesex University PGCE courses.

1. Holidays. Let’s get that one out the way first. We know you didn’t choose to be a teacher just because of the holidays. We also know that, despite what your friends and family think, you will spend a large chunk of your holiday marking papers and writing lesson plans. But all those holidays are nice and even when you are working, it is a luxury to be able to work from home.

2. Rewarding. There’s nothing like seeing your class finish a long and complicated project or put on a play. You will watch your pupils learn and grow as people as they get older. You will feel almost as proud as the parents when the day comes for them to leave your school and take their next step in the world.

3. Changing Lives. Not many careers will give you the opportunity to have a positive influence on children and shape their future for the better. You may spot a creative talent in a pupil and give them the confidence to pursue their dream when they would have otherwise decided to opt for a safer career instead.

4. Getting To Teach A Subject You Love. Whether it’s art, English, science or maths that is your passion, nothing will give you more joy than being able to work in this field everyday. You will also be able to share your love for a subject with others and have the reward of watching them enjoy learning about it too.

5. Job Security. Not many careers provide jobs for life these days, but a good teacher will always be able to find work in their chosen area. There are also a number career progression opportunities available and you can choose to move up to be the head of department, head of year or even head teacher.

6. Job Opportunities Away From The Main Cities. This can enable you to find work away from busy cities and avoid the high house prices and traffic hell that city dwellers have to endure.

7. Work Around Your Family. Even if you don’t have a family now, you may consider starting one in the future. As a teacher, you will be off school at the same time that your children are so you could save a fortune in child care costs and spend more time with your children too. You also won’t have to worry about asking a nagging boss for time off because your holidays are set out for you each year. You can’t grumble about that!

June 10, 2012
Guest Post: 7 Reasons You Should Have Paid More Attention In Art Class

When I was last at school I treated art lessons as a time to let my hair down, muck around and generally play the class fool. I don’t know what the kids must have thought of me – no wonder I didn’t last long as a teacher.

Photo by Blue Monkey

Here are seven good reasons why it really does pay to brush up on your art skills at school.

1. Think Of The Money. There is very good money to be made from art. In 1895, Norwegian artist Edvard Munch knocked up a picture of an alien-type figure holding their head in their hands while screaming on a bridge. He called the picture The Scream and it’s just been sold for $119.9 million (£74 million) at auction.

2. Anyone Can Come Up With A Great Piece Of Art. Looking at The Scream it’s hard to resist the thought that anyone could have drawn it – the figure in the picture is just one step up from a stick man; Munch hasn’t even troubled himself with the task of giving the screaming figure tricky-to-draw details like hair, eyelashes or fingernails. The Scream shows that a very simple, well-executed idea will take you a long way. And makes you lots of dosh too.

3. Making Great Art Can Be Quick. Watching the great children’s TV artists of the 1970s and 1980s go about their work provided a crash-course lesson on how to create great art quickly. Both Rolf Harris and Tony Hart worked at a frightening pace – producing two or three top-notch pieces of work in each half-hour episode. Replicate this work rate over a 9 to 5 working day and you will have lots of interesting art to sell.

4. Art College Is The Modern-Day Fame Academy. Britain has a great tradition of people going to Art College going on to become famous stars. John Lennon of The Beatles, Pete Townshend of The Who and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones were just three of the stars who went to art college to study painting techniques and graphic design. It is worth noting that all of these stars found fame not through painting but through music and that most of the 1960s art colleges have been closed down because of spending cuts but you get the picture.

5. People Love Child Artists. Paying attention during primary school art lessons can pay dividends very quickly as the art world is particularly keen to embrace young talent. Nine-year-old Kieron Williamson is a case in point. The Norfolk lad regularly exhibits his oil, watercolour and pastel originals at exhibitions and has been dubbed ‘Mini Monet’ by chin-stroking art experts. “It’s lovely to see a nine-year-old boy keeping traditional landscape painting alive,” Kieron’s mother Michelle recently said. And there’s clearly a market for it – the youngster’s brilliant paintings fetch as much as £150,000 at auction.

6. Art Is Self-Expression. What other professions allow you to choose your own hours, attract muses and keep a messy office without the boss telling you off? Being an artist is all about expressing your inner soul and letting your creative fires burn freely.

7. Art Opens So Many Doors. And if all else fails you can always become an art teacher.

Author Bio: James Christie writes for Yellow Moon craft supplies shop.

May 10, 2012
Guest Post: 7 Reasons ‘Red Light Spells Danger’ By Billy Ocean Should Be Used As An Educational Tool

Today sees the sofa experiencing something it would rather not. A Babylon5 marathon. But that is the price we pay for guest posts and at least we know it will come back in a good condition. Last week I had to scrub it clean with my Aston Villa shammy leather cloth after it had been infected by a Birmingham City supporter. Anyway, viewing Babylon5 – until the rugby starts – is Rob Lee. Or, if you prefer, Wobbly. I, incidentally, am Jelly. I often feel our double act days could have been so much more. Right, enough reminiscing, here’s my brother who ain’t heavy.

Billy Ocean

1. ‘Red light spells danger’. This says it all really. The red light that says don’t drive when stopped at traffic lights, the red light that tells you not to cross the road at inappropriate moments, the red light that warns you not to press the large, round flashing button attached to all that sophisticated computing equipment and large missile. It teaches children to fear red lights, and this is good, because red lights spell danger.

2. ‘Red light means warning’. Teaching young children is quite often based on repetition – clearly Mr Ocean was in touch with such modern teaching methods when he wrote this in the 1970s, as not only does he teach that a red light spells danger, but also that it means warning. This is very effective teaching – the children believe that they have been taught two different pieces of information, thereby preventing them from becoming bored, whilst they have in fact had the same important message twice drilled into them. Red lights mean danger. And Warning. Which are sort of the same thing. Sometimes.

3. ‘You got me on a ball and chain, doin’ things I don’t wanta’. Despite his lack of grasp of the correct grammatical use of the English language, which is not setting a good example I’ll admit, our education-minded singer is in this instance warning of the uncomfortable experience going to prison would result in. Not only being tied to a ball and chain, but also having to do things you don’t want to; traditionally this might be breaking large rocks into smaller rocks – this is of course bad for your teeth, so the lyric contains a valuable lesson about not eating too many sweets as well.

4. ‘Hold on, heaven guide me’. This is clearly a teaching about the importance of having faith. If you believe in that sort of thing, if you don’t, well, holding onto things is usually a useful practice too. Especially eggs, not holding on to eggs means you drop them, causing a mess, and then you’ll have to clean them up. Cleaning up a mess is probably something you don’t want to do, and as the previous point, erm, pointed out, doing things you don’t want to do isn’t much fun, and can be bad for your teeth. Anyway, if you do believe in heaven, then letting it guide you is a good thing to do, and if you don’t, holding onto things will suffice.

5. ‘I always used to kiss and run’. Having given it much thought, Billy also decided to include the rules to a common playground game in his song. Although, on reflection, the objective of kiss-chase was always to run after someone and then kiss them, not kiss them and then run away. Mind you, that might depend on whom you kissed. After all, running up to Big Ron, the class bully, and giving him a quick peck on the cheek might not be a clever idea, so, in fact, Mr Ocean is providing useful instruction on what to do should you run after the wrong person and kiss them. (N.B. this also applies in adult life, not just the school playground. Besides, kissing probably isn’t allowed in the school playground any more, for health and safety reasons.)

6. ‘I can feel the heat is on’. here we move to the significant element of home economics (that’s cooking lessons to the uninitiated). Checking that the heat is on in your oven is sound advice, since otherwise that cake you’ve just made won’t cook. It will sit in the oven, but without heat it will remain a mass of uncooked cake mixture. If you check first whether the heat is on, you’ll know when to put your mixture in the oven, and, therefore, end up with a delicious treat rather than a sickly pile of goo. However, as with all electrical or gas based equipment, you must naturally check that the red light is not on. Because red light spells danger. And warning. Just in case you weren’t sure the first time.

7. ‘Can’t hold out, I’m burning’. Many people believe that they should suffer in silence and not inflict their problems on other people, especially in these trying times. This is why they don’t walk around with a red light displayed on their head. In certain areas of the city there is another reason why they don’t wear a red light but we won’t go into that. Anyway, the point is, Mr Ocean is telling pupils not to remain silent if they are, in fact, burning, but that they should tell someone. Preferably a teacher. Lesson 7 – If you find yourself on fire, always tell the teacher. If you can’t find a teacher, display a red light. Because red light spells danger, and fire is quite dangerous.

March 12, 2011
Guest Post: 7 Reasons That American Football is Better Than Soccer

It’s the first weekend of the Six Nations, so who better to hand the 7 Reasons sofa to than blogger, occasional 7 Reasons guest poster and sports nut, Richard O’Hagan. And what more appropriate subject for him to write about than…oh…the Super Bowl? Which is also happening this weekend. Apparently.

It’s Super Bowl weekend. What do you mean you hadn’t noticed? How could you not notice? It’s the biggest single sporting event in the world. No other event makes an entire country grind to a halt like the first Sunday in February does in America. You want to know how special it is? It’s one of only three days in the year when Americans actually manage to eat MORE than usual – no matter how impossible that might be to imagine.

Yes, all over America, football fans will be doing their best Mr Creosote impressions, barbecuing as if their very lives depended upon it and convincing themselves that they have room for just one more giant pretzel, before settling down in front of the television for the sporting event of the year. Meanwhile, people like me attempt to stay awake until stupid o’clock in the morning, because despite all of the above the Yanks haven’t yet worked out that there are people elsewhere in the world who like to watch the game, too, so they start the game at somewhere near midnight UK time.

And why do I put myself through this every year? Simple. American Football knocks just about every winter game into, if not a cocked hat, then a football helmet. And that particularly includes what Americans call soccer, because:

1. Fat People Can Play This Game, Too. Come on, when was the last time you saw a fat guy playing what, to avoid confusion, we shall also call ‘soccer’? A really fat person, the sort of guy who would make the 1980s Jan Molby look anorexic. I’ll tell you. Never. Even William ‘Fatty’ Foulkes, the fattest man ever to play professional football, was only average size for an American footballer. It’s an all-inclusive sport, you see, and for some positions on the field being 300lb-plus is a minimum requirement. And it is not just being over 300lbs that counts, because every one of those guys can run 40 yards in less than 6 seconds, and most of them do it in close to 5. Go and try that for yourself. Most of you won’t even come close.

2. And The Players Are Educated, Too. There’s one unbreakable rule in American Football, and that’s the one that says that you can’t play it professionally unless you have been to university for at least three years. Proper university. No going to the Mail Order University of Chipping Sodbury. And no studying nonsense degrees such as ‘The History of Popular Music Since the Spice Girls’. There are guys playing football with degrees from Harvard, from Yale and all of the other elite US universities. Compare that to a sport where Frank Lampard is regarded as educated because he has more than one GCSE.

3. Cheerleaders. Yes, I know that some soccer clubs have tried this, but frankly they are rubbish and wouldn’t even make a high school cheerleading team in the States. Football teams have proper cheerleaders, most of whom have also gone to university to train as cheerleaders. When it comes to grinning inanely, clenching your butt cheeks and waving pom-poms, you have to say that football is the best.

4. Lingerie. Sepp Blatter famously wanted female soccer players to wear skimpier kits. Americans have already embraced that idea and the women’s football is played indoors in little more than lingerie and protective pads. Google ‘Lingerie League’ and you’ll see what I mean. You might think it wrong and you might think it demeaning, but it gets a heck of a lot more television than the women’s premier league does and pays better, too.

5. Adverts. One of the biggest whinges about Football is the number of ad breaks, but in fact you hardly notice them (and see reason number six anyway). But look at the players’ kit. Notice anything? Takes you back, doesn’t it? Back to the era before every soccer team sullied their shirts with advertising. Every kit is pure and unadulterated and you can wear your team’s shirt without in some way providing your own endorsement for some evil corporate monolith and their tax-dodgy, peasant-exploiting ways.

6. Beer. You can drink alcohol at football matches. In most stadia they even bring it to your seat. You can’t do that at a soccer match. And even if you don’t have in-seat service you still need something to do during the ad breaks, and what better to do than getting another beer?

7. Hardness. Every time I see a soccer player lying sobbing on the pitch because an opponent breathed on him, I reach for the sick bag. You want to see proper hard men, watch the US game. And do it without whinging about the helmets and padding, because that just proves that you don’t know why they are worn (the explanation is too long for here). Instead, think of someone like kicker Nate Kaeding, who in 2008 played three games without realising he had a broken leg. That’s ‘leg’, not ‘fingernail’, soccer fan.

So go on, give the game a try. Take Monday off work, stock up on pretzels, doughnuts and tasteless beer, and settle down for some American action. It’s better than football.

February 5, 2011