What playing NRL Fantasy has taught me about teaching...

I got reminded last week that this blog is linked in my email signature. I actually wondered if that was a bit vain of me? (My work email, not my personal email that definitely would be vain!) I wondered if anyone actually ever clicks on this blog when I email them. How does it read? What kind of impression does it leave if they don’t know me very well. I realised I don’t normally think about my blog in this way, and when I write a blog post (which is very irregular) I write it somewhat in isolation from the rest of the other posts on the blog.

So today attempting to scroll my blog from the lens of someone who doesn't know me, or who is trying to learn about me from this blog. I scrolled. I scrolled down my blog post and clicked through it quickly, and actually I was pleasantly surprised that it didn’t seem as disjointed as I feared. However, worse in many ways, it was boring! It wasn’t until I landed on my post about Lockdown learning that I saw a glimpse of my personality. Not that my theoretical alter-ego “Marcus” is anything like me in real life either, but at least it wasn’t as dull as the rest of my blog posts…

So I decided to write something a bit closer to home, a bit closer to my personality and to my interests, and I thought I would keep it on this theme of looking at something with a different lens, and the way it can make you think differently or understand something so differently, even something you know or understand well.

I'm a massive NRL fan, and I've been playing NRL Fantasy for years. For those who don't know, NRL Fantasy is a game where you create a virtual team of real-life NRL* players, and your team earns points based on their real-life performances. But surprisingly, my NRL Fantasy obsession has actually taught me some valuable lessons about life and about schools and education as well (bear with me here).

*National Rugby League. An Australian based rugby league competition.

Before playing NRL Fantasy, I watched the game like any other fan. I watched the ball, the tackles, the tries, and the moments of brilliance. But now, I watch players in isolation. I pay attention to their minutes on the field, their missed tackles, their metres gained, their errors, and their offloads. I look at the statistics, and I see the game from a different lens.

In the last couple of years since changing roles from a classroom teacher to "PLD facilitating", out of a number of different schools I’ve had a similar change in the way I see things. Instead of just seeing what's happening in the classroom, I've started to be party to the bigger picture at times. I've started to understand why schools and school leaders make certain decisions, even if they seem counterintuitive at first (especially from the classroom teacher perspective). I've started to see the impact of little things, like how time is spent, and how they can add up to something much greater. I’ve started to think back at my time in the classroom, and can understand particular moments in my career differently.

Either that or perhaps I’ve hit that point where I’ve been out of the classroom too long and have lost touch..? Which is what I used to think about other PLD facilitators and providers at times when I was still in the classroom. Full circle?

Anyway, this is how I’ve decided to fit NRL Fantasy into my professional learning blog. Which is a little bit of me, and my personality, something else in my life that I’m really passionate about aside from teaching. Though,  i’ll probably refrain from writing another blog post about NRL fantasy or anything as silly as this again, but if you have read to this point and are so inclined to enjoy a bit of NRL Fantasy yourself, drop a comment and maybe we can get a league going!