WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
I like quotations. Usually because the author manages to say in fewer or more descriptive words what I’ve been thinking. One of the quotations I’m going to mention stems from immediate practice whereas the other is from considered reflection. The first, then:
I’m not waving, I’m drowning!
A fellow teacher said this to me during the last week or so and I think it’s true for a great many of us. We float along swan-like sometimes, whilst our legs are paddling away furiously beneath the water! I know how many hours I put into my job and the things relating to it and I really don’t think - in fact I know from past experience - that doing any more would make me ill.
The trouble is that the people who make important decisions don’t see this. They see Ofsted inspection-planned lessons, schemes of work that have seen many burned candles and smiles from teachers who want to make it quickly up the career ladder. I think we need to reflect on whether more means better. It’s the same for students: so what if they’ve got 15 GCSEs instead of 9? Does it necessarily make them any more employable or develop their personality? The problem, of course, is league tables - but let’s not get into that… 
The second quotation I’ve come across this week that has put into coherent sentences what I’ve been thinking I read on Cin Barnsley’s blog, Thinking 2.0. It’s a quotation from Michael Wesch about the false digital natives/immigrants dichotomy I’ve discussed before (here and here):
The great myth is that these “digital natives� know more about this new information environment than we do. But here’s the reality: they may be experts in entertaining themselves online, but they know almost nothing about educating themselves online. They may be learning about this digital information environment despite us, but they are not reaching the levels of understanding that are necessary as this digital information environment becomes increasingly pervasive in all of our lives. All of the classic skills we learned in relation to a print-based information universe are important, and must now be augmented by a critical understanding of the workings of digital information.
On the one hand, the ‘traditional’ notion of school needs to go. But we also need to be wary of going too far in the other direction; our pupils are not born knowing how to educate themselves through the resources they have at their fingertips. It’s a bit like the teachers as lifeguards analogy that I’ve used before - our role is to explain and inform, let them loose in the waters of knowledge, and rescue them when they get into difficulties… 
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I like quotations, too.
Here’s a “conversation starter” from David Warlick’s latest posting:
“But does it really matter that half of the people around us do not know the shape of the Solar System, the function of DNA, and when the last dinosaur died. Most of these folks are productive citizens. They have jobs, pay taxes, and care for their children. They do what they’re told. They believe what they’re told. They don’t think very much about it, but they’re busy with the day-to-day.
Should we be concerned? If so, why?”
The responses to you and David and to the other blogs addressing this issue should make for some interesting reading…and quotes.
Don’t know if this is the egg or just another chicken, but here’s a Stevie Smith poem a colleague shared with me several years ago:
Not Waving But Drowning
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.