Week 3, the doodles start...

We started our third week with an all day workshop on sustainability, a subject I know a bit about and a subject I am fairly skeptical about, when the day was over I came out knowing a lot more and was even more skeptical! Amongst the new things I found out was how bad the production of cotton is for the environment and how 100% organic cotton isn't really any better as all it means is that no pesticides are used on the crop. 'Green-washing' was a new term I came across; when big corporations put all these 'eco labels' on products so you think by buying them you're helping the environment when really it makes little or no difference. A lot of the logos used on products eg. the triangle of arrows recycled sign don't mean a lot either. On a positive note I found out that the horrible carpet tiles which are used in schools and offices are actually pretty sustainable as companies lease them out and when that school or office no longer needs them they send them back to the company to get cleaned and fixed up and leased out to someone else.

We finally got into lesson planning this week and paired up to plan a lesson and present it to the rest of the group. After much confusion I think I managed to get the gist of it and really liked the lesson my partner and I came up with. The rest of the group had some pretty good ideas too, the session really made me feel more confident in planning my own lessons when in my school placement. I am now collating ideas and am looking forward to putting them into practice.

We had quite a few GPS lectures this week and was quite disappointed by them. Until now I have found pretty much all of them interesting and have learned a lot from them, this week however we had some fairly boring lecturers who I struggled to listen to which then lead to doodles not only from me but from a lot of students, I ended up spending most of the lectures admiring other students illustrations. One of the only quotes that really sticks in my mind from one of the weeks lectures was when someone said; 'education is like a big quacking duck...' what they meant by this I have no idea??

We ended our week again in the workshop with our first real practical lesson. I really felt like I was back at school in a D & T class sawing, chiseling, sanding. A few of us did end up with minor minor cuts to our fingers, not really an issue but definitely got me worried about if we are injuring ourselves what are they year 7s likely to do to themselves??? Must really focus on health and safety!