INOTE conference

Greetings to anyone who's come here as a result of the weekend conference 'The Art of Teaching English', at the Lough Rea Hotel in Co Galway, which marked the foundation of the Irish National Organisation for Teachers of English. It was organised by Kevin McDermott of the English Support Service, and was opened on Friday night by Senior Inspector Mary Gilbride. Then there was a delightful address from John Quinn, who looked at images of teaching from his own life and his reading. On Saturday there was a series of interesting and invigorating workshops by practising teachers.

The note-sheet (with links) from the SCC English presentation is here.

Further notes:-

• Bernard MacLaverty's short story is called 'More than just the Disease' and comes from his collection The Great Profundo.
• There wasn't time to show the amazing Issuu, which can display your school magazine online - see here for our own Library magazine The Submarine.
  
• Atul Gawande's books are Complications: a surgeon's notes on an imperfect science, and Better: a surgeon's notes on performance. These are superbly written collections of essays which are intense meditations on the nature of learning. In the former, he writes ... Only now, as I get glimpses of the end of my training, have I begun to think hard about my father's success. For most of residency, I thought of surgery as a more or less fixed body of knowledge and skill which is acquired in training and perfected in practice. There was, as I envisioned it, a smooth, upward-sloping arc in proficiency at some rarefied set of tasks ... The arc would peak at, say, ten or fifteen years, plateau for a long time, and perhaps tail off a little in the final five years before retirement. The reality, however, turns out to be far messier.