It's a Boy Thing Christopher Waugh and Gena Bagley

9 Years ago, Bagley's daughter Scarlett died, age 7. We take some time in this episode to examine how this deep loss strengthens her work in the classroom.

Rarely does anyone gain an insight like this into the privacy of another person's grief. As a listener to this podcast perhaps you'll get a sense of the honesty and inner strength that makes Bags such a successful classroom teacher of English.

Shakespeare features too. Of course.

23 years ago Chris wrote an entry in his online journal that described his time at Otago Boys' High School. This was subsequently published in a history of Otago Boys' High School that was published for its 150th.

We'd been searching around for a text to analyse on the podcast and Bags suggested that Chris read it. So here it is.

Bags and Chris come out of their respective closets for Pride week and we discuss how setting up patterns in the classroom accelerates boys' learning.

This week we start looking inside (and as it happens, outside) the doors of our classrooms with an exploration of the routines we operate in our classes to support safe healthy relationships and to keep the focus on the learning.

Today's routines are the macro ones, the procedures we use as students enter and leave the class which can be crucial to setting the tone.

What are the routines like in your classrooms, or the classrooms you remember - and importantly: what purpose do they serve?

This week we get to hear what advice Bags gave the delegates during her conference presentation and we reflect on how to get the culture right in the teaching of boys. There are some new boys' voices too.

So we succeeded at putting on a conference that focussed our attention on Teaching Boys English, and by all accounts it was a real success. Gena and Chris chat about the messages of the event - including a few reasonably contentious points of view - until we were interrupted by boys arriving for English!