The Collection / Correspondence
Correspondence
The cabinets this one is named after were never really about the objects. You showed the collection to someone who had traveled to see it, and what came back was a letter.
That is still the arrangement I am hoping for. Teaching is a strange profession in that most of us do the same difficult work in parallel, alone, a few hundred metres or a few thousand miles apart, and almost never compare notes on the parts that went wrong. I would like to compare notes.
Four things I would particularly like to hear about. Any of them is a good reason to write; so is none of them.
Work on something together
Co-building a unit, running the same lesson in two schools and comparing what happened, moderating each other's marking, or something I haven't thought of. I am especially interested in working with people who teach subjects I don't.
Useful to include: what you teach, what you're trying to build, and what you'd want from me
Tell me what you changed
If you took something from here and adapted it, that is the most valuable message I can receive. Nothing on these shelves is finished, and the revisions I trust most are the ones that came from someone else's classroom rather than my own.
Useful to include: which resource, what you changed, and whether it worked
Tell me what's wrong with it
A quotation I've misattributed, a rubric band that doesn't discriminate, a claim that doesn't survive contact with a real cohort, a lesson that collapsed twenty minutes in. Criticism is welcome and corrections are genuinely welcome — several things here exist because an earlier version failed.
Useful to include: the resource, and the slide or page if you have it
Ask for something that isn't here
If there's a gap — a text you have to teach and can't find anything decent for, an assessment you keep rebuilding from scratch every year — tell me. I can't promise to make it, but I would rather know what's missing than guess.
Useful to include: what you need, and what you've already tried
Write to the cabinet
I read everything and answer most things, though not always quickly — this is a side table to a full teaching load, and there are stretches of the year when it goes quiet. If something you send changes a resource, I'll tell you, and you'll find it credited on the page.