Teach Secondary 13.7

WHY SEPARATE SCIENCE FROM THE ARTS? When choosingmy GCSEs in the 1980s, I didn’t have a clue. I was a quiet child, spendingmy time alone writing stories and computer programmes onmy BBC Micro, not knowing how to translate those personal interests intomy school subjects. Coming fromquite a religious family, I initially considered taking religious studies before my head of year intervened and proposed a compromise. He’d teachme RS outside of school, on the condition that I take physics. I didn’t understand why he was so adamant. Tome, physics was just another subject to half understand, another noisy classroom in which to try and disappear – but his nudging changed something. I fell in love with science and never looked back. Mr Thomas of Exhall School, Bedworth set me on a path that eventually ledme to work on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, teach physics in Sudan, join several (fun, but unsuccessful) tech startups and ultimately end up as anAI researcher at Google DeepMind. I owe hima great debt, but he still only got to see one side of me. It took 35 years of gentle disappointment and quiet failure before finally reconnecting withmy other great love of writing stories. I now get to combine the two, writing novels during part of the week and coding software during the rest. The two activities are intertwined inmy brain, each supporting the other, and I know now I couldn’t live without either one of them. Both are ways of trying tomake sense of a chaotic world; twomeans of re-ordering the ideas inmy head into forms that others can experience. Yet I can’t help feeling that I was forced intomaking an early binary choice between a ‘scientific’ or ‘humanities’ path, which kept me from seeing the fundamental links between both for a very long time. I think about this when I’mon school visits, and will ask Y7 to Y9 students if they consider themselves ‘science-y’ or ‘arts-y’ people. Most have a strong preference for one or the other. Very few tell me they like both. Even if unintentionally, we lead students to think they have to choose a specific path, which I feel is amistake. Rather than treating them separately, let’s elevate and teach the connections between the two, and encourage students to see their classes more as a continuumof specialisations, rather than a series of discrete subjects. Years of physics training taught me two important lessons. First, that science is a way of thinking, rather than a subject. The hopeful scepticismof the scientific method could be taught across, and in parallel with other subjects, and would enrich students’ ways of thinking about all of them. Second, that science is a creative act. Scientific ideas begin with careful observation and measurement of the physical world; drawing those measurements together into a coherent narrative that we can imagine and reason about is an act of storytelling. I enjoy an uncommon combination of art and science inmy working life, and the books I write reflect this. My stories start with the kinds of dilemmas that young people often face, in settings laced with the technical detail that I love and whichmake the world feel real tome. More importantly, my characters confront the challenges I present themwith like scientists – seeking to understand and explain using the tools at hand, by way of trying to reclaima little control from the chaos. It’s a way of thinking that might be useful to any student, regardless of what they’re studying at GCSE, A-Level or beyond, and could help them face down whatever the next 30 years has in store for them. DO THIS REVISIT YOUR RULES ADAMCONNORS IS AUK-BASED ENGINEERINGMANAGER FOR GOOGLE ANDAYA FICTION AUTHOR; HIS LATEST BOOK, FINDME AFTER, IS AVAILABLE NOW (£8.99, SCHOLASTIC) Exercise better class control with these tips fromRobin Launder... It doesn’t matter if student behaviour is currently good – you must still revisit your rules frequently. In fact, this might even be the best time to do so. Why? Because your students will be receptive rather than defensive; the experience will be positive rather than negative, and because being proactive is better than being reactive. How you revisit your rules is up to you – just make sure you do, often, and in different ways (repetition and variation being key to embedding material into long termmemory). One simple, yet powerful way of revisiting your rules is to draw attention to them when they’re being followed. For example: “Three, two, one, pens down. Thank you. And thank you for following rule two, ‘We follow instructions right away’.” See also: “ I liked the way that you said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. Politeness fits squarely with rule four, ‘We respect each other’. Good. ” Robin Launder is a behaviour management consultant and speaker; find more tips in his weekly Better Behaviour online course – for more details, visit behaviourbuddy.co.uk 76 teachwire.net/secondary