Bulgaria with Noodles

We are now in Veliko Tarnovo and that gives me an excuse for including a few old photos of VT, most of which were taken by my friend Peter Adams.  Recently I received an email from Thomas Hughes, a new recruit for the teaching staff at St. George's School. Hi Simon, I hope you are well. I managed to get back to the UK after much trouble getting out of Mexico, and Elena managed to get back to Russia a couple of weeks back. Phew. I asked the school a couple of weeks back what age range they thought I would be teaching, and they said that I would most likely be teaching year 5 & 6.  I think you mentioned that you were willing to pass over your work from last year which would most likely help myself transition and teach next academic year. That would be a great help if you are still willing to do this. Also, I have 28 days in quarantine to look forward too in the UK and Sofia it seems, so this would help me to stay sane. Let me know if this offer is st...

Here is another reply to a message on the TES . It gives me an excuse for including a few of the excellent photos that were taken by my friend Peter when he came to stay with us in Shenzhen.  In a nutshell, DON'T take the kitchen sink with you. Try to find out as much as you can about what will (and what will not) be provided by the school. Think very carefully about what you really need to take with you and what you could actually do without.  Are you going to get an apartment provided by the school? Or will the school's HR people put you in contact with some letting agencies, so that you might get some choice about your accommodation? Or will there be some other arrangement? It really would be silly to bring with you all kinds of bits and pieces, only to find that those things have already been provided!  Of course you could ask the school's HR people, but an even better strategy is to ask for the e-mail addresses of a couple of the present staff. Most pr...

My post about The World's Fastest City seems to have attracted a lot of views. Recently I had yet another e-mail from a teacher, via TES, asking me about what it is like to teach (and live) in the UAE, so here is one of my replies. This time I have included a few photos from our time in RAK. Lunch at the excellent "Green Valley" Indian restaurant Dear Danielle, Quite a lot of teachers have written to me recently, to ask me about teaching in the UAE. I have put several posts about this on my blog, bulgariawithnoodles.blogspot.com In a nutshell, I would say that salaries for teachers in the UAE have more or less stagnated in the last six or seven years. During this time, the cost of living in the Emirates has definitely gone up quite a bit. Yes, some schools do still pay quite well, but not that many. This means, of course, that there are relatively few teaching posts available at the better schools and there will be a lot of competition for the po...

Another very annoying article in the TES provoked me into writing this reply. Homework Dr. Wendy Edwards criticizes teachers who set "finishing off" homework, especially for English, but it is often the case that a class of 30 (or more) students do not all complete a piece of work at exactly the same time. Perhaps she did not know that this does in fact happen. If a student gets most of the work done in the lesson, then asking that student to spend some time at home completing a comprehension exercise, writing a story, doing a piece of proof reading or whatever, is not an unreasonable thing to do. The student has already made a significant start on the work and knows what to do, but he or she just needs some more time to get it completed. Yes, I am sure Dr. Wendy is right in claiming that many schools do not have "finishing off" as a reason for setting homework. On the other hand, many schools do boast about their high academic standards and that might...

This piece by Lucy Moss recently appeared in the TES. Do we really need to teach  (or use) cursive handwriting? The issue of whether students need to produce joined-up writing is a divisive one  – Lucy Moss takes a look at the debate                                               Everyone has an opinion on handwriting.  It’s a divisive issue that can take up whole staff meetings and Inset sessions, and often commands its own official policy in school.  Speaking to a colleague recently, we got on to the subject of teachers’ handwriting. While we agreed that it is essential for teachers to lead by example and write neatly and legibly in learners’ books, we disagreed on whether that should be in a certain style.  Cursive handwriting She felt that all staff should use the school handwriting policy. Sh...

Yet another teacher has contacted me through the TES, asking me about teaching in Qatar. Well, it gives me an excuse to include lots of my old photos of Doha. Dear Casper, To be brutally honest, the Gulf English School does not have a good reputation. Yes, I might consider teaching there, if the alternative were to be unemployment and starvation, but not otherwise.  Yes, it is true that the ISR reviews I sent to you are quite old. If you want to read more recent ones, then you will have to pay your twenty dollars or however much it costs these days. Then you will be able to read the lousy new reviews for the Gulf English School, as well as the lousy old ones. Yes, in theory it might perhaps be possible for the Gulf English School to improve, but in reality that is most unlikely. If the school has the same Qatari owner or owners, then my guess is that nothing is going to change. In addition, most of the students will be Qatari and that is seriously bad news. T...

A blogger at the opening ceremony for a new school year The most important thing we’ve learned As far as children are concerned Is never, ever, ever let Them near your television set. In fact, just don’t install The idiotic thing at all. Well, that was one of my greatest heroes, Roald Dahl, in that modern classic, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But Dahl’s words of warning about the pernicious effect of the TV on young children’s minds seems quaintly dated, irrelevant and out of all proportion to the dangers for children that can be found on the Internet. And some of those dangers are not passive, like a television. They will coming looking for your son or daughter, 24/7. Yes, you can switch off your family’s TV, but how do you turn the Internet off? Recently my school, St. George’s in Sofia, has had a blitz on Safeguarding. All of the staff have been doing online training with a company called Educare. Some of the courses have been pretty explicit and not exac...

I seem to be spending a lot of time reading and commenting articles in the TES, The Times Educational Supplement. As usual, my comments are in italics. ‘Your pupils are never too young to make a difference’ ​​​​​​​ Sleeping out overnight to raise awareness of homelessness had a profound impact on one school’s staff and pupils By Emma Sturm Last September, three weeks after I had begun working at James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh, I attended an assembly for S1-3 pupils. We had a guest speaker, Alice Thompson, co-founder of the Social Bite social enterprise (which has created such a stir by attracting Hollywood stars such as George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio to Edinburgh to support it). She was an inspiring young woman who talked about homelessness. She introduced the idea of "The Wee Sleep Out": thousands of pupils sign up to sleep out – a variation of Social Bite’s "Sleep in the Park", for under-16s who want to do their part to help figh...