Wilson Waffling

As I start to write this waffle, I really have no idea where it is going or what I really want to say. I've been thinking about writing this for a while but could not seem to get the focus correct. In a last ditch attempt to get it sorted, I just thought I would start to waffle and see where I end up - so please, don't expect much from the start! You might be intrigued about what this waffle is going to attempt to be about now and I am happy to share with you the broad topic - its.. wait for it... tight jeans!

Education is, by nature, cyclic. When talking to my students as they prepare to leave university to start their first jobs, I like to give them various pieces of advice. Apart from to make friends with the caretaker/cleaners and admin staff - the number of times this has ended up being beneficial to me is immeasurable - I tell them to have a career plan and work towards it. It is very easy, when working within education, to get permanently 'stuck' in the cycle of events and as Christmases, SATs and Sports Days roll pass you suddenly find yourself like me, old and grey and looking at the NQTs thinking how young they all look! When I moved to higher education I had great hopes for my career, one of which was to attain the accolade of my doctorate. However, as the years have gone by, I have realised that I have fallen into the cyclic chasm I frequently warn the departing students about and that my doctorate itself is becoming transparent, intangible and practical non-existent.

Ideas for this blog are like buses, I have none and than I find that two or even three come together! From the title you might have already guessed that this is an RPG waffle rather than one of those in which I reveal my most inner secrets - do you like reading those? or would you prefer me not to wash my dirty clothes in public! - answers in the comments section below! Anyway back to the topic. I really enjoy watching other people's RPG streams on Twitch, it gives me so many ideas of how people play and DM and how I should be altering my own technique. However, one thing which I have noticed is the platform that people use to stream the game content from, and whether they roll the dice on the screen or on the table, away from the cameras - and hence the topic of this waffle - "To dice or not to dice... that is the question."

I always find that whenever I start to research a topic for this website I suddenly feel like I am untangling a ball of wool. I see a tiny little bit sticking out of the ball and think 'that will be long enough for a waffle' and start to pull it away from the actually ball just to find that it gets longer and longer. Then I find that I encounter a knot which has to be unravelled and then have to spend several hours following the piece of wool under, over and round numerous other threads, trying desperately not to deviate from the other strand which was my initial topic to discuss. Staying with the Innovating Pedagogy Report 2017 I wanted to waffle about another topic - but I found that this one took me deep within the ball of wool and, in fact, as I write this, I am still trying to unravel it - what am I talking about? well this week it's all about Student-Led Analytics.

Within education we always have to be careful. Although essentially stoic in its approach to learning, education, at all levels, is frequently bombarded with a range of innovated approaches which practitioners are encouraged to engage with and adopt. While teaching in the primary sector, there were often new ideas which landed in my pigeon hole requiring attention and implementation, all promising significant improvements to both my own practice and the progression and depth of the children’s learning. However, I learnt very quickly that ‘not all that glitters is gold’

This week, at the end of the mathematics session at university, we got talking about the Sun, the celestial body rather than the rather dubious newspaper. According to Google, so I am sure it is correct, our sun will actually turn into red giant and engulf our planet in about 5 billion years. You might be thinking, what a morbid topic to be discussing in a mathematics lesson, but it was at the end and originally we started to think about the amount of time it takes for light to travel. I was informing the students that probability had been removed from the key stage 2 curriculum and so that awkward question will the Sun definitely rise the next day no longer needed to be engaged with. As the students claimed it was certain, I reminded them that it takes eight minutes for the light of the Sun to actually reach us, so the sun could have actually exploded now, and we wouldn't know for another eight minutes. (Google actually says 8 minutes and 20 seconds...although it might just be trying to make us feel better by giving us 20 more seconds!). There was then quite a discussion about what to do in the their final eight minutes. My response? - well finish the session of course...

Within my Twitch career there are a few occasions which I remember very well. These include, having more than me and the bots talking in chat, receiving confirmation of my Twitch Affiliation and my first ever donation! I do believe that you can actually see my reaction to the latter [on Youtube](https://youtu.be/fKRhGV1DR8E). A viewer once asked me, what do I do with all the donations and subscribers contributions? Well in order to assure you that I am not using it to build an army of androids to fulfill world domination (hideous laugh!) I thought I would write a waffle to describe where the money goes...

Well, I bet you haven't seen a link to this site for a while! I was sat thinking about targets and I flicked back to the targets that I set for this site at the start of 2017\. Even the title sounds depressing! Sometimes people say that you need breaks from activities and even people in order to reassess where you are and where you are going. I never actually thought this was true until I stopped blogging on this site on a weekly basis and suddenly found that I was no longer blogging here at all. I have been blogging on my other site but while browsing through my Youtube channel and this blog I suddenly felt reignited to do things. So, like a phoenix, I feel I might be arising from the ashes of Wilson Waffling to blog again, with the new and improved me!

Now, you might be mistaken into thinking that I am about to introduce you to an old game show - "Welcome to Every Second Counts!" . But no, I've actually been inspired to write this waffle for some time now, but even more so since I have had yet another birthday and time appears to be ticking by. As part of my new year's resolution, I have decided to be more positive about almost everything and this got me thinking about time and how much we have of it to enjoy life. And hence the title of this waffle - "Every second counts...."

Tomorrow I head back to my day job and I am expecting the similar salutation from many people - "Happy New Year and did you have a good Christmas?" After the usual adjectives have been employed, for example - 'nice', 'quiet', family', I wonder how long before the discussion will get onto New Year Resolutions. I think that research shows that these generally last a maximum of about three weeks, if you are lucky, before they disappear into non-existence and we flop back to the way we were. For me, I tend not to set resolutions, but more targets to achieve and so this waffle is going to detail whether I have succeeded with last year's targets before setting new ones for 2018!