Why subscribe?
The blog will mostly relate to my Modern Studies and Politics website.
If you’re a Modern Studies or Politics teacher, learner or parent, you might find it of interest. You might not!
I’ve been a teacher of Modern Studies most of my life.
I’ve insights into education gained from practical experience as well as working for a lot of other organisations such as SQA, BBC Scotland, Scottish Government, even a spell in the States. Mississippi. Yeah, quite a place!
I’ve been running modernity.org.uk for twenty years now.
When it first started out, digital education in Scottish schools was in its infancy.
A strength, and sometimes a bugbear, of Modern Studies is that the subject content changes very regularly. Political leaders, political parties even, come and go. Most teachers of Modern Studies will have to update resources on Scottish local, Scottish parliament, UK parliament and US elections. A constant cycle. Throw in Brexit, Covid and the inevitable SQA syllabus tweaks and you can see the need for digital rather than print based resources which go out of date very quickly. I’ve written loads of books that are now way out of date!
The modernity website is very much my take on Modern Studies and Politics. The subjects allow teachers a certain degree of autonomy over the topics they teach. The vast majority of content though is the mainstream stuff most teachers teach. The SQA runs the roost though. Each SQA course has a Course Specification and I don’t depart from these. I look forward to seeing what Qualifications Scotland offers in terms of Modern Studies and Politics. I suspect though that unless the culture of our education system, which is relentlessly geared towards exams and exam success, changes, students and teachers will want engaging educational content but also want stuff that will get results.
I try to provide this.
Right now, October 2024, I’m having a great time re-writing and updating a lot of the content. In 2017 my wife and I bought a hotel in Aberdour, the Woodside Hotel. I had planned on moving away from teaching and writing, to indulge in one of my other passions, music. We hosted some great concerts, with fabulous artists such as Hannah Aldridge, The Bathers, Steve Forbert, JJ Gilmour, James Grant, Kevin McDermott, Glenn Tilbrook, Mari Wilson (apologies to others I missed out!) Then Covid and post Covid hit and we couldn’t sustain the business. We’re in the process of converting the hotel into flats, which is sad in a way, but times change and Modern Studies teachers are used to embracing change!
So, in between property development, I now have the time, and enthusiasm it has to be said to devote to Modernity. I’m enjoying exploring all the many ways digital communication has moved on in the last few years. I realised a long time ago that people do business with people. It’s relationships and trust that keeps you going back to a particular business.
I’ll try to use the Substack blog to build up and maintain that trust so that you know the content on Modernity as what you as a teacher, parent or student require the take you where you want to go. The new site won’t be ready till 2025. I’m not rushing anything. It’ll be like a Blue Nile or a Bathers album. It’ll be here when it’s here but it’ll be good!
