Mark Goodrich

@markgoodrich.bsky.social

1314 Followers 668 Following

Was a lawyer, now a primary teacher. Interested in politics, chess, citizenship and education. Has lived in 🇯🇵🇰🇷and 🇱🇦. https://open.substack.com/pub/markgoodrich

Cover of Varjak Paw by SF Said showing a black cat with orange eyes.
A building with a stone cross on top in the foreground with a wonderful blue lake and forest in the background.
One of the famous lakes of Mljet island.
Cover of Crookhaven: The Forgotten Maze showing three black-clad figures, one of which is just under the surface of some water with the other two standing.
Cover of Where The World Ends by Geraldine McCaughrean showing a boy hanging from a rope over the mouth of a cave with gulls all around.
Cover of Murakami’s What I Talk About When I talk About Running.featuring an image which both has a man running and looks like a fountain pen nib.
The cover of Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf by Catherine Storr showing a young blond girl making daisy chains with a large wolf.
South Korean hotel looking exactly like a cruise ship but perched on a cliff high above the beach.
An extract from The Grammar Book confirming that a comma is optional before the “and” in: “I walked up to the door, and I stepped inside.”
Results of the Teacher Tapp survey of teachers using social media for work-related purposes. Figures: Facebook - 19% Instagram - 13% LinkedIn- 10% Pinterest- 4% TikTok- 5% X - 11% YouTube - 34% Threads - 1% Reddit - 1% Bluesky - 3% Substack - 4% None of the Above - 39%
Cover of Monstrous Devices by Damien Love with a black background showing a silhouetted cityscape and a stylised outline of a robot in the foreground amongst lots of favourable quotations.
Teacher Tapp chart showing that 57% found their previous career “much less demanding” than teaching.
The Economist obituary of Nuno Loureiro.
Badminton racket cover with its brand Kumpoo written in big letters.
The cover of Phoenix by S F Said showing a white outline of a boy with a fiery trail behind him with a black night with stars and behind him and a swirly red design around the edges.
A middle-aged man (me) wearing a bright chemistry-themed shirt inside at at Corebeer.
A middle-fed man (me) holding a #pint26 placard outside Pint of Science Laos.
BBC local council results from 131 of 136 councils.
Results of a Teacher Tapp poll which asked. Do you think the following statement is true or false? Buying a share in a single company usually provides a safer return than an equity fund. Only 32% answered correctly False, with 2% True, 3% Refuse to Answer and a whopping 63% for Don’t Know.
Cover of Ballet Shoes by Noel Streafeild showing a red-haired girl performing ballet in the centre with a design of stems and flowers around the outside and locket-style portraits of 2 other girls in the top left and top right hand corners.
You thought. Are you so grotesquely lacking in self-control that you cannot let a single idle thought pass through your mind without acting on it?
The cover of All The Things That Could Wrong by Stewart Foster. It has an orange background with with the title in a series of bubbles. "THINGS" and "WRONG" are in white capitals against a scribbly black bubble whilst the other words are in black against a white bubble. There are two small white silhouettes sitting on the WRONG black bubble.
Cover of The Explorer by Katherine Rundell, showing jungle foliage, a small plane and a large river running through the middle of it.
A huge pile of Young Samurai books and with some Laura Marlin mysteries at the bottom.
Cover of the The Final Year by Matt Goodfellow showing a boy standing on a school playground with angel wings coming out of his back.
A Greggs poster advertising three different types of matcha for £3.
My hand festooned with white threads tied around the wrist.
Cover of Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve showing a steampunk style hot air balloon with two figures in it above a scuttling traction city set against a red and orange sky.
A copy of SF Said’s Tyger with a business card for 67 Pall Mall on the top.
Lemov has worked with two recent NBA championship franchises and an English Premier League manager. But May remains an outlier, obsessed with the tiniest details of teaching.
A view of the back of a girl holding a beautifully dressed toy rabbit.
The front cover of The Matchbox Diary showing an elderly man with a small girl above various matchboxes including one which sticks out saying "The Matchbox Diary".
Photo of Gwangmahung Square being dominated by the free BTS concert
Cover of Beetle Boy featuring a boy with sticky-out ears and a rhinoceros beetle on his head.
A live timetable showing the BRT bus route from National University of Laos to Morning Market (Talat Sao).
The cover of the The Star of Kazan featuring a bird in the foreground of an Alpine church
Data on fossilised horses over time in table. The task is to put the data into a bar chart.
Chart converting English numbers from 1 to 1 quadrillion to the Japanese versions of "man", "oku" and "cho".
Cover of Heart of a Samurai by Margi Preus showing a storm-tossed rowboat on the seas above a whale underwater.
Book cover of The Unforgotten Coat by Frank Cottrell Boyce showing a Mongolian boy in a coat with the book title and author written on the coat.
Matt Goodwin now described as “GB News presenter”
Matt Goodwin with BBC Headline: FB News presenter unveiled as Reform by-election candidate
Cover of The Murderer’s Ape by Jakob Wegelius
Bluesky User Counter passing 42 million.
Foreground of Lao national flag and hammer and sickle flag with colourful Buddhist wat behind.
Cover for The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo showing a small mouse with big ears running with a needle attached to his side by red thread in the manner of a sword.
Cover of The Gun, the Ship and the Pen by Linda Colley
One thing that does frustrate me is a lot of the big education accounts who opened up on Bluesky, did a few posts but carried on posting actively on X. That isn’t going to get anyone to move over with you. Announcing that you no longer actively posting on X and will now be posting on a new platform would be a different case. I haven’t seen a single large education account (say over 30K followers on X) that has taken this approach but there are plenty of huge accounts that have stopped posting on X
A beautiful Lao cocktail with chilli on one side and salt on the other
A black and pink drink called Black Pink.
Photo of the sun setting over the Mekong taken from a boat.
A labelled picture of Secret Squirrel (a squirrel wearing a white trench coat and purple hat with eyeholes) and Morocco Mole (a mole with a fez, glasses and cravat).
Me with a medal!
An advert inviting me to "Check out Charles Dickens's brand new title: A Christmas Carol"
Cover of Murder Most Unladylike showing schoolgirl detectives in stylised black and white.
Bubble chart visualization showing accounts you interacted with, sized by total interactions across all engagement types in 2025. Top interacted accounts: @samfr.bsky.social, @stephenkb.bsky.social, @bennewmark.bsky.social, @adamboxereducation.bsky.social, @t0nyyates.bsky.social (from Anisota's Annual Bluesky Harvest)
Emoji bubble chart for 2025 showing 41 different emojis used 139 times total, visualized as bubbles sized by frequency. Top 10: 💯 (15×), ⚪ (14×), 👏 (14×), 🟡 (7×), 😂 (7×), 🤔 (6×), 📌 (6×), 🟢 (5×), 🙏 (5×), 🤣 (5×) (from Anisota's Annual Bluesky Harvest)
Word cloud visualization for 2025 showing your 50 most-used words, sized by frequency. Top 10: "reading" (141×), "school" (78×), "book" (70×), "blog" (64×), "primary" (64×), "education" (60×), "schools" (57×), "teachers" (54×), "find" (54×), "seems" (54×) (from Anisota's Annual Bluesky Harvest)