Mike Tyler Sport

The Christian church in the West has abandoned the supremacy, primacy and infallibility of Scripture. Notice what I did not say. I did not say that we have abandoned the doctrine of the supremacy, primacy and infallibility of Scripture (though some have). I said we have abandoned the supremacy, primacy and infallibility of Scripture. Let me explain how this has come about, and what difference it makes. Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There is a favourite book of mine. In it he argues that Western man has, over a period of several centuries, become isolated from himself, from truth and from God because he has given up the search for coherence and unity in his view of his existence. Having done so, modern Western man has replaced the search for coherence with an acceptance of a dichotomy. The dichotomy is the dichotomy between the rational and the irrational, between the natural and the spiritual. Schaeffer argues that this dichotomy can be understood to have produced a line...

I am a big fan of the work and thought of Michael Polanyi. His realism is refreshing as it is brilliant. But in this post I want to pick up on one interesting feature of Polanyi's epistemology, and show how it might be helpful in the ongoing discussion around pedagogy. Michael Polanyi asserts that coming to know is akin to an act of discovery. In learning, some new meaning is achieved through the integration of new and old knowing into a new, perhaps-only-half-anticipated coherence. Sometimes this feels like a 'eureka' moment, sometimes more mundane, but the process and the structure of the integration are the same. Polanyi also suggested that once a coherence is discovered (not 'constructed'), you know you have done so because you have a sense of 'indeterminate future manifestations' of that new thing. It explodes with meanings and possibilities. You might find yourself saying 'oh, that suddenly makes sense', or 'I can't believe I didn...

Michel Foucault is the most cited scholar in the social sciences, and his book Discipline and Punish is one of the most cited works. Foucault's influence is hard to underestimate within academia. It is my contention however that his ideas have been a substantial force for ill. Allow me to explain. Michel the Mystic In my view, one of the central problems of postmodern-leftist academic thought is the obsession with unmasking what lurks beneath, to dig beneath what is self evident in pursuit of something substantial and profound below the surface. Reality doesn't simply present itself to us, and common sense is not so common, they say. It is almost mystical in its framing. Academics of this persuasion are like miners digging ever deeper, excavating through the layers, uncovering ever more imperceptible 'truths' (a word which must be deployed in ever-so-knowing scare quotes). Deeper, and deeper they go until the nugget is found; the thing itself, the source, the slime, or...

Q. I've got an observation coming up and I've been told I need to show that my students have made progress in my lesson. How do I do that? A. Well that depends on what you mean by 'progress'. Q. Go on. A. Well, I think progress means that a student knows more about the subject than they did when we started. It's basically synonymous with learning. Q. So, what's a good way of checking for progress? A. If you want to know what someone knows, you ask them questions about it. If you want to see what someone can do, you ask them to do it. But progress is something different. Progress is change over time, not simply a snapshot. So if you want to see if someone has made progress you need a starting point and a destination. You can then compare knowledge at the start of a term, say, and again at the end. As long as your assessment methods are appropriate then you've got yourself evidence of progress. Q. This all seems pretty straightforward. But I need to ...

There is always much talk of what great teaching should look like, and I have my own thoughts, of course. I've been struck recently by the work of Michael Polanyi, whose work on 'meaning' and 'knowing' has affected me profoundly. It can hardly be helped but to apply some of his ideas to see where they might assist me in my teaching practice. Polanyi's most helpful concept is the idea that all knowing is, in his terms, 'subsidiary-focal integration'. I've  written about this before  in the context of sport. This idea is a remarkably simple one and yet its utility is vast and ranging. In this post I'd like to suggest that an awareness of subsidiary-focal integration (SFI), as the structure of all knowing, helps a great deal with lesson and scheme of work construction. To do this, I will be applying SFI at the level of the individual lesson in order to highlight its applicability. By all means, extend the application of SFI across a series of lesson...

I've done a spot of travelling in my time, but the most enjoyable trips I've made, the ones which have enriched me the most, have been those trips where I've had a knowledgeable guide. I've had a tour of the Vatican. I've been shown round Florence. I was even guided around Israel for a couple of weeks by a pastor and theologian from Nazareth. What a lot I learned! He took us to the crusader Church of Saint Anne at Bethesda where we sang a hymn, because, he told us, the acoustics are superb. (They are. We drew a decent crowd. Of nuns.) We learnt the comic-tragic tale of the Immovable Ladder. We heard the account of the siege at Masada and saw the astonishing earthen ramp built by the Roman army there. We walked the Via Dolorosa, gazed up at Golgotha, visited the garden tomb, drank Arabic coffee by the roadside in Nazareth, ate fish at the Sea of Galilee, peered over the Mount Precipice. Yep, still there. As we went I had questions. A lot of questions. (I'm that s...

"There is no real substitute for a ball struck squarely and firmly". So says Billy Bragg in the song A Lover Sings, and anyone who has played football (soccer, if you must) knows what he means. You know what it's like to make the perfect connection with the ball. You just know. But what is it that enables us to 'just know'? That's what this blog post is about. Think about the last time you hit the perfect strike and sent the ball screaming into the back of the net. (Okay, point taken. Just imagine it.) What did it look like? How did it feel? Did it sound like a thud, or was it some other kind of sound? Were you aware of your surroundings? The opposition? Teammates? It's kind of hard to say, isn't it? We need some way of thinking this through, so let's start with an example, to which we can refer. Here is a short video clip of the best goal ever. (You heard me.) More than we can tell I wonder what the goalscorer Zinedine Zidane would...

The Road Not Taken? http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/01/07/70/1077046_d3f400d2.jpg It dawned on me this week that I am approaching the ten year anniversary of quitting teaching after the first half-term of my NQT year. This post is a reflection on what went wrong then, why I'm still in teaching, and, perhaps most importantly, what I've learned from a decade of QTS. Before September 2006 My PGCE year went well. Perhaps too well. I had the opportunity to work with some genuinely talented trainees and learn from top quality lecturers at Leicester Uni. (Secondary Geography, since you asked). We embroiled ourselves in the pedagogical topics du jour . I remember, in one seminar, making a speech about the moral dangers of the 'fake it till you make it' approach to teaching, and getting a resounding round of applause from my peers. What a schmuck. But I had a pretty successful first placement at a school in the town where I was living. I put the hours in, that's for sure...

It's been all over the news. The Tories want to lift the ban on Grammar Schools. There is near unanimity amongst teachers and education types that this is a backward step by a deluded and out-of-touch political class hankering for the glory days of imagined British greatness. And although I may agree on this assessment of the Tory party, I've yet to be convinced that grammars are a bad idea. I've heard scarcely a voice in the wilderness of the public sphere in favour of the status quo. Except, that is, for two well-known conservative figures, who have both written in support of Grammars. Their names would give the game away, of course. (But what the heck: see  here and here ) In this post I want to confront two arguments in favour of retaining the ban on new grammar schools that are the most repeated. Argument 1. Grammar schools don't work. Well I'm pretty sure they do. Grammar schools consistently out-perform comprehensive schools in terms of academic results; it...

Von Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo Quarto Stato https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24902065 Some radical leftist theorists have suggested that to fully understand the plight of the proletariat (if we grant that there is such a thing, but this is the first sentence: let's not get too tangled just yet!) it is necessary to be among their number. Some have plainly stated that it is impossible for any other person (i.e. the bourgeoisie) to attain true knowledge of the state of proletarians. Here are two examples of such an assertion; one in the realm of grand theory, the other applied to the sport of boxing. The first is from Georg Lukács and the second is more recently from sports sociologists Ingham & Hardy. "The knowledge yielded by the standpoint of the proletariat stands on a higher plane objectively: it does after all apply a method that makes possible the solution of problems which the greatest thinkers of the bourgeois era have vainly struggled to...

This is an anecdote. I was born in 1982 and raised in a housing association house on the east of Birmingham. My mum worked as a teaching assistant in my primary school, and my dad on the shop floor of a vehicle parts factory. He biked it to work because we didn't have a car. My mum's parents weren't called grandparents. They were Nan and Granddad, and they too lived in council housing. My Nan used to bath all three of us kids at the same time, and wash our faces with our own underpants. True story. We were working class. Birmingham has always had a strong grammar school presence, and I was one of the select few to whom those schools afforded an opportunity that I had no right to claim. No one coached me for the 11-plus entry exam, I just turned up and did it. They offered me a place. That was a critical moment.  I loved the environment at my school, and felt immediately at home. It was an environment in which I was able to indulge my love of learning and my teachers pushed ...

I was reading an article recently by Philip Mellor and Chris Shilling entitled 'Body pedagogics and the religious habitus' in which the following statement is made: "The global resurgence of religion in the contemporary era, however, has presented a challenge to what can be seen as the methodological ‘default’ position of many sociologists, namely, that religion is always the ‘dependent variable’, relative to secular phenomena deemed to be more important." (p. 27) I want to assist with this challenge. It seems to me that every social scientist must stand downstream from Marx for some period of time, if not to take the plunge then at least to test the water. Why is this? It is plain that the great majority of renowned sociological thinkers draw from that stream. When Mellor and Shilling speak of the 'methodological default', it seems to me what underlies this is a prior commitment of those 'many sociologists' to a leftist theoretical perspective. ...

The changing design of Barcelona's club badge teaches us about how sport is an integral part of wider society, not simply a meaningless addendum.  In 1899 at the club's founding it was decided to use the city coat of arms as the club's badge. FC Barcelona's regional ties have long been a fundamental part of its identity, and when the club produced its own unique badge in 1910, key symbolism from the city's crest was retained. The Cross of St. George 1910 crest St George, is not only the patron saint of England, but also a significant icon in numerous regions of Spain. In Catalonia, as in England, he is the noble slayer of dragons, the moral crusader, the rescuer of damsels; in short, God's man on the earth. In a culture saturated with Catholicism the symbolic act of wearing George's cross is of great relevance. The selection of the Cross to form the Barça crest is a means to tie the club to a heritage which - albeit mostly invented - enables the...