Filling The Pail Newsletter

Unfortunately, it has taken a while to shift the flu or whatever it was I contracted a couple of weeks ago. I am still speaking croakily and have something of a cough. As you read this, I will be enjoying a quiet weekend—something I need after the last few weeks. At researchED Canberra—more below—I managed to deliver my keynote address despite suffering from a touch of the Barry Whites and I think people were able to bear with me.

For the reasonable price of just $5 AUD per month or $50 per year, you can be a full subscriber to Filling the Pail with complete access to my extensive archive on a range of topics, as well as access to the unabridged version of my weekly Curios posts. Back at the start of July, TES published a piece by Christian Bokhove in which he rehearses his usual schtick about cognitive load theory.

After returning from Sydney last week, I have had a nasty dose of something. I want to say it’s the flu. It has certainly knocked me down harder than anything I have experienced in recent times, but I had my flu and covid vaccines earlier in the winter. So, maybe it was a strain absent from the vaccine or just a nasty cold.

For the reasonable price of just $5 AUD per month or $50 per year, you can be a full subscriber to Filling the Pail with complete access to my extensive archive on a range of topics, as well as access to the unabridged version of my weekly Curios posts. At time of writing, it has been four days since I emailed the address given on the About page of the Australian Centre for the Public Understanding of Science (ACPUE), asking who they were. So far, I’ve had no response.

For the reasonable price of just $5 AUD per month or $50 per year, you can be a full subscriber to Filling the Pail with complete access to my extensive archive on a range of topics, as well as access to the unabridged version of my weekly Curios posts. It may surprise you that I am usually a live-and-let-live kind of guy. People make mistakes. If those mistakes are unimportant, then who cares?

Sunday saw me visit the University of Melbourne with my two daughters and their friends. I drove down to Melbourne because the local train line was out of service and replaced with a bus. As someone who uses the train to Melbourne infrequently, it is surprising how often it is replaced with a bus when I do want to use it. On Wednesday and Thursday, I attended the Learning First conference in Sydney about curriculum and how we might improve it in Australia.

Last Saturday, I attended researchED Melbourne as a regular punter. Held at Haileybury independent school’s City Campus, it was somewhat unique. If you missed my rundown of the day, you can catch it here. It has been cold and wet in Ballarat. This is good for the farmers and contrasts with the dry weather I am hearing about in Europe. Sadly, one of the lettuces I planted has died, but the rest are doing well. Why not take out a free trial of a full subscription so that you can read all of this post?

For the reasonable price of just $5 AUD per month or $50 per year, you can be a full subscriber to Filling the Pail with complete access to my extensive archive on a range of topics, as well as access to the unabridged version of my weekly Curios posts. The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) recently released an extremely brief document, At a Glance: Explicit Instruction.

The inimitable Cait Wade at researchED Melbourne 2026 For the reasonable price of just $5 AUD per month or $50 per year, you can be a full subscriber to Filling the Pail with complete access to my extensive archive on a range of topics, as well as access to the unabridged version of my weekly Curios posts. The first researchED Melbourne took place in 2016 at Brighton Grammar and so it was fitting that it returned to the city on Saturday.

This week was a short one. We closed on Thursday for a boarders’ weekend, enabling our boarding students to go home and visit their families. As a result, I had five days of meetings and packed into four and was glad when Thursday afternoon came. I taught my Year 7 science class about the Earth’s magnetic field. This is highly confusing because the Magnetic North Pole is a magnetic south pole and so on. We also discussed auroras, which are a cool topic.