Back when I was at school we were taught to Stop, Look, Listen before we crossed the road. Says it all, I would’ve thought. But now I notice the classic road safety theme has been expanded to SLLT — an acronym for Stop, Look, Listen, Think. For feck’s sake, why don’t we just make it SLLTBB? If we have to remind kids to think we might as well remind them to breathe and blink too.

So today I’m in a professional development session at school which was just like being back in long, boring university lectures but with the advantage of having a wireless internet laptop on which one can read blogs while looking like one’s typing notes. We got to the inevitable bit where the teacher teacher who can’t teach asks the teachers to do a Think, Pair, Share (or TPS in the biz), but the PowerPoint slide asking us to do just that had the acronym TIPS expanded out to Think, Ink, Pair, Share. You see, if you don’t explicitly remind people to write things down that they think of they won’t do it.

On a slightly related note, here’s a webcam photo I took of myself during the PD session and emailed to McBec:

Just shut up and serve the morning tea.