Hello!

This is my first blog post! It’s not an interesting one, apart from the fact that it’s the first one. Which might make it interesting.

What might I write about?

I’m not sure yet, but I might write about my experiences with teacher training, funny experiences in the classroom, musings from my corporate days, and maybe some recipes (for disaster).

The design of this site

To start off with, I could talk about this website. This is the latest in a long series of websites at walkland.net — approximately one per year since I bought the domain. I’ve always enjoyed writing code, but I never felt like I had the mental energy to maintain a website or finish all of my personal projects.

After spending all day at work — talking about software, thinking about bugs, testing code — I always felt my mental energy was sapped. At least, my energy for coding was sapped. I still put energy into personal projects, but they were always non-technical — writing and playing a fantastic D&D campaign, practising on bass, growing food on my allotment.

So what now?

Well, I don’t work in software any more. I am training to teach. My energy is still sapped, but it’s a different kind of energy - social energy. I hope I will still play D&D, but I can already feel that I have more coding energy left over at the end of the day - hence this site.

Not just this site, but also www.teachmaths.net — a project inspired by my experiences in the classroom. While there are many good free resources for teaching maths, many digital tools are either locked behind a paywall or feel stuck in the ’90s. This is especially true for modelling manipulatives like counters, which often lack the flexibility I look for as a teacher. So, I figured — why not create something that works exactly how I want?