The first sign is for the Beauty Therapy Electro-cosmetic Therapy course.  In outcome 1 the students learn about UV radiations and Skin cancer. The sign is to remind people to use sunscreen. The arm is too faint but that can be fixed later.

The second sign is a warning sign. I am surrounded by students – and staff – wearing shoes that should come with a health warning. While not for a specific course warning sign might make students thing before they go teetering about in ridiculous heels.

Once the signs were prepared in powerpoint they were saved as jpegs for easy upload into the blog.

I have put the ‘about me’ in the about me. I am feeling old because I have been reading lots of stuff about retirement. Clydebank College is merging with Reid Kerr and James Watt and staff at Clydebank have voluntary severance to consider.

I must say looking at the list of participants I am already feeling like a duck out of water. I guess I will be the one with the most to learn.

Thus endeth the first post in the refreshed blog.

Why do the SQA still insist on graphs being drawn by hand? Why can students not use Wolframalpha for calculus? I could go on. I have a dream that by the time I retire students in FE will be doing a unit called ‘Digital Mathematics’. In general, I am not teaching mathematicians of the future. They are ‘turned off’ and ‘failed’ mathematicians. We could rekindle some enthusiasm for maths but instead we teach them ‘indices’ and how to differentiate totally unrealistic expressions. Come on SQA develop a unit and let students have some fun with maths.

The Early Years class has learners who would struggle at level 3 and one who should be doing level 6. I am teaching Levels 4 and 5 – feeling guilty about the sinking level 3 students and the student who should be doing Level 6. I signed the class up for the Scottish Learning Festival which they found worthwhile. One managed to collect 36 pens.

The NC Computing has 8 Polish students in the class who are very good. Contextualised learning has included number systems. The Polish students have enjoyed learning about UK Income Tax and National Insurance.

The Health and Social Care group have been following 2 courses. The future nurses need different numeracy from the future social workers. We did the topic ‘alcohol’ as it was relevant to both groups. Working out units of alcohol proved challenging to some. I wonder if requisitioned alcopops, gin, wine etc. I would get away with it. Empty bottles were not the same as the real thing.

There is a lad in one of the classes with cerebal palsy. He struggles with writing and using a calculator. He makes errors because he can’t read his figures. For the last couple of weeks I have been teaching him how to use Excel so that he can use it for assessments. He has to know how to do the question so that he can set up the spreadsheet. The skills he is using are more useful for his future than accessing software that he won’t have when he leaves college.

I wonder if all students should be taught how to set up a spreadsheet to do numeracy assessments. Would the SQA approve?

Spot the error!