Meet the teacher...

Educating our kids – it’s a big business, but its so much more than that.

And so it was that the intrepid Amnesty team found themselves at the Scottish Learning Festival  – an annual conference to enhance the learning and teaching experience for all – alongside the purveyors of all manner of equipment, textbooks, computers and other clever things I could only guess at the purpose of.

Offered the chance to meet several thousand teachers, we were there to market our new Scottish-curriculum-linked education materials  – designed to help teachers bring human rights into Scotland’s new Curriculum for Excellence. So armed with our smart new posters and leaflets we took up post just outside the smallest stand in the building – outside the stand because once we put all our stuff in it there was no more room – and waited for Scotland’s teaching finest to come to us.

And come they did. We gave out about 300 of our packs over the two days – it would have been more except on the first day we just couldn’t talk to all the interested folk queuing up at the stand. We also signed up a whole bunch of new contacts for Teachrights – Amnesty’s electronic education newsletter.

Looking around the marvels available to the modern day classroom did make me feel rather old, thinking back to my own schooldays, when chalk was the thing and you gasped in awe if an overhead projector was brought out. In my final years a few computers were acquired and we drew lots as to who would get computer lessons and who (like me) would get extra PE instead. Now they have fancy walls where the children can write and the image appears on a computer screen (or was it the other way around?).

Good stuff, so before we left we signed up for a bigger stand for next year. I’m intending to pass myself off as a primary teacher so that I can get shots on all clever toys.