A PR person recently sent me an email asking if I would like an article about something called Bare Minimum Monday. Apparently, this is an “initiative” that involves doing the bare minimum when you return to work after the weekend, so as to ease yourself back into work.
BMM, by Terry Freedman
I’ve worked with people who do the bare minimum, aka the least amount of work they can get away with, and not only on Mondays. The result tends to be either that their colleagues pick up the slack, or the end-user, such as the customer, is not given the quality of service they’re entitled to.
Apparently this is a thing embraced by, in particular, Gen Y and Gen Z — those people born between 1981 and 1996, and 1997 and 2012 respectively. Perhaps they think this is a great way of maintaining good mental health.
I should have thought that in these fragile and uncertain times, with AI taking jobs left, right and centre, doing as little as possible is perhaps not the wisest strategy.
I wrote this a year ago, which was even before freely-available programs like Claude (especially Claude) could whip up a useful program in five minutes or less. Needless to say, I still believe the views I expressed here are correct. Perhaps even more so.
Lord Puttnam once said something every interesting at a conference I attended. Having been a film producer, he said it used to be the case that to be a successful cinematographer you had to be able to take a camera apart and put it together. Now, none of those sort of skills are required: you need a whole different set of skills in order to find employment in that occupation.
Cameraman, by Terry Freedman
I believe a similar thing is true in the realm of “digital education”. Almost nobody needs a gasp of computer programming, and even fewer need to know how computers actually work.
Now, if you’re talking about computational thinking as a reason to study Computer Science, that’s different:
“Computational thinking” offers insightful ways to view how information operates in many natural and engineered systems.” From a Royal Society report.
I’m not entirely convinced that Computer Science is the only, or even the best, way of teaching computational thinking, but at least it’s a sound reason – and an honest reason – for suggesting it. How many pupils will need to use coding in their future employment? How many people in the games industry itself (one of the loudest voices in this debate) need to have coding skills? Almost none of them.
Also, given that in order to succeed as a programmer you need high level mathematical skills too, telling kids that lots of doors will open for them if they take Computer Science or something similar is, I would suggest, somewhat naive at best. In fact, I’m almost certain that universities would be better off insisting that students come to them tabula rasa as far as “proper” computer programming is concerned.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m all in favour of encouraging young people to explore computer science options in education and employment, but not by misleading them, even if unintentionally.
Every so often there is a sort of collective nostalgia for the time when you had to do real programming. Just about every conference I go to includes a presentation that contains a photo of the BBC Micro. Using the BBC Micro, and programming with it, was fun in a way – but only because there weren’t that many alternatives in school at the time. In fact, at around that time someone drew my attention to the Atari ST. With its graphical interface, and WYSIWYG applications, it was the obvious choice for doing productive and creative work. The BBC wordprocessor of the day required you to type a code in the margin in order to make words bold or underlined, and you couldn’t see what the document looked like until you had printed it out. In what sense of the word could that be described as “fun”? It was a monumental waste of time. What’s more, the Atari had its own version of BASIC so you didn’t really need the BBC Micro at all.
My recollection of coding at the time is one of spending ages copying lines of code from a magazine article into the computer, only to have it tell you, when you typed “RUN”, that there was an error on Line 1210. Or of writing a program yourself only to realise, with horror, that you’d forgotten to put a line number in somewhere near the beginning, meaning that you had to delete everything back to that point. Not fun at all.
As for understanding how computers work, in the sense of being able to take them apart and put them together again, it’s a completely unnecessary skill, at least for 95% of the population. It may be fun, but only if you’re that way inclined. I have known people who like taking car engines apart, making their own candles and refitting their own kitchens. I don’t think I have suffered in any way at all by having no interest in developing any of those skills.
One thing I did like doing was making and editing films as a hobby. The editing was a skilled and labour-intensive job, and completely different from digital editing. I used to have a lot of fun doing it, and would spend hours at it – but I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that kids should be able to edit “real” film as part of a modern video-making course.
Admittedly, the early days of computing in schools were satisfying and fun in the way that pioneering and undergrowth-clearing activities can be, but I’d never want to inflict any of it onto people these days. I regard the nostalgic views expressed about computers and computing in the the same way as I regard the way people speak about the last world war: nothing they say will ever convince me that it was an experience anyone should have foist upon them.
Remember the so-called humble brag? You know the sort of thing: “I felt really embarrassed when the headteacher offered me the job before he’d even seen the other candidates.” It seems almost quaint these days.
I’ve seen similar announecments to that example, but devoid of even trying to come across as humble: “I did so well in the interview that the Headteacher offered me the job before he’d interviewed the other candidates.” (So much for equal opportunities, eh?)
Or the brag not-so-thinly described as sharing: “I am happy to share that I have been appointed the Chief Cheese at…”. I suppose, being generous, that some of these announcements are genuine, by which I mean they are intended to convey information, not intended as a boast.
This is interesting to me for two reasons. Firstly, many years ago, before the world-wide web, in the days of bulletin boards, I was persuaded by a fellow educator to put in my signature that I was now head of Computing at such and such a school. It wasn’t even an announcement, more like what we know today as the email signature. It read\;
Terry Freedman
Head of Computing, Gasworks Lane High School.
You will admit that that is much lower key than my current email signature, which is:
Boy, did I get a diatribe from some disgruntled person ranting that the forum was for providing information. Funnily enough, that’s what I thought I was doing.
The second reason I find it interesting is that I am not sure how necessary it is. I will never forget, when I resigned from what I call my last proper job, I handed my notice in in the morning, having told my line manager of my intentioon to do so. I then held a team meeting in order to tell my colleagues I had done that. And then I beetled off to a conference in the afternoon. As soon as I walked into the hall, someone rushed up to me and said, “I hear you’ve resigned from your job in order to go independent. I can offer you work.”
My point is that news travels fast.
Getting back to bragging, on severalk occasioons I’ve seen page-length advertisments praising someone’s work — by the person concerned! And without troubling to put the word “Advertisement” as the title. Astonishing behaviour. Mind you, something not too dissimilar was tried many years ago by a company putting on a conference. Someone from the organisation left a comment on one of my articles about conferences. That “comment” was, in fact, a 500-word advert for the conference. As I had moderation enabled I just deleted it and marked it as spam, which is what it was.
But even that pales into insignificance compared to the announcement I came across that read something like: “It was great to meet up with a few people recently and discuss how brilliant I am”
Wow. I thought that was a parody. In fact, I’m still not entirely convinced that it wasn’t.
Do such exercises in self-aggrandisement work? When I need a builder, a plumber or electrician I seek word-of-mouth referrals from friends, family and neighbours. I don’t look for the advertisement with the largest quantity of self-praise. (I was always told as a child that self-praise is no recommendation.)
I do think that even in these days of social media and all the noise generated therein, if you’re really good at what you do then work will come to you through word-of-mouth recommendations — at least to some extent.
But even it doesn’t, if you’re an introvert like me then probably self-glorification doesn’t come easily to you. That’s why my email signature is a bit of a self-jibe — “shameless self-promotion”. And yes, it is pretty transparent, and yes, I am a bit of a hypocrite. But unlike some people, I’ve never claimed to be perfect!
Although this is a few years old now (2018), it has stood the test of time.It covers a huge amount of ground including, I was delighted to discover, the learning theories of Piaget and Vygotsky.
No mention of Bruner though, as far as I can tell, and Ausubel is mentioned — in the references, not in the body of the text.
Strong points, though, are the book’s even-handedness, questions to consider, and the research focus sections.
In my experience, most people run most meetings really badly. What are the most common pitfalls, and how can you avoid them?
Meetings should always result in something happening. Even if the meeting was a discussion, an exchange of views, there should be an action arising from it -- a good example here would be for someone to produce a summary of the views expressed.
Colleagues should know in advance what the meeting is going to be about. All too often, the Agenda appears at the last minute. You must give people time to prepare, especially if you want to have a genuine discussion about something.
Papers for the meeting should be made available well in advance. I have attended meetings where a 108-page document relating to the meeting was emailed to everyone 25 minutes before the meeting was due to start. That is unacceptable, and simply lays you open to suspicion of not intending to have a genuine discussion.
Do bear in mind, though, the well-known Parkinson’s Law of meetings, namely: a discussion about whether to install a nuclear reactor in your classroom will go through on the nod in about five minutes, but a discussion on whether to increase the contribution to the departmental tea fund will take three hours.
Someone should take notes in the meeting. As you are unlikely to have a secretary to do that, the fairest thing to do is take it in turns. But note that it is very difficult to take notes and chair a meeting. When it's your turn to take notes, you might consider asking someone else to chair it. That would also have the benefit of giving others a chance to step into your shoes and gain some valuable experience in their own career advancement.
Minutes are meant to be a record, not a transcription. Keep them brief and to the point. And make sure they are distributed within a day or two. The person taking the minutes should always give them to you for your approval before disseminating them to the rest of the team.
Minutes must always include action points, with a named person responsible. Note that the person responsible must be selected in the meeting, not afterwards, and only if they are present and agree -- it could be considered unprofessional to assign a task to someone in their absence, especially if it's a task that nobody else wishes to do.
Meetings should have set start and finish times. Even better, there should be some guidance in the Agenda as to how long each item will take. If these timings turn out to be optimistic, curtail the discussion and put the item(s) high on the next meeting's Agenda.
The meetings should start on time, and finish on time. No waiting for people who haven't arrived: the most important people are the ones who are actually there, and it's unfair to keep them waiting. It's also self-defeating, because they will learn that meetings start later than the time specified, so next time they will arrive late as well, because there is always something that "I just need to do quickly before the meeting."
Meetings should not be so frequent that they end up being held for their own sake -- everybody is too busy for that. Neither should they be so infrequent that there is no opportunity for a team spirit to build up. You'll have to judge this for yourself, but I would suggest that a meeting every two or three weeks is about right. If that is very difficult to fit in, consider a different pattern and structure: say, a full meeting every month, with a ten minute get-together at the end of each two week period in-between -- or an audio or online meeting just to "touch base".
Sometimes it may be impossible for someone to get to the meeting, but that need not be a problem. It's now both possible and easy to hold meetings which include people who are not physically present.
I'd also add that you could invite guest speakers to your meeting via Zoom or Google Meet, or a similar webcam-based solution. If you really wanted to push the boat out you could ask a member of your team who is attending a conference or an exhibition to report in live through their laptop.
Finally, even though they may not have a choice in the matter, the members of your team are giving up valuable time to attend the meeting. Very few people like meetings. Sugar the pill by making sure refreshments are available. If possible, invite a guest speaker in, or ask one of your team to prepare a presentation. In other words, make it a bit different: you might like the sound of your own voice, but others might not!
This is an expanded version of an article originally published on 5th April 2007.
