Learning is delightful and delicious …

I imagine most teachers are familiar with this one – planning a lesson takes a reasonably short time relative to the time taken in preparing appropriate resources.

Although I’ve been qualified for a few years now, I’ve spent each year so far working in different schools on temporary contracts because I just haven’t been able to find a full time job in my area. And while that means I’ve had the opportunity to get my hands on lots of different resources, I still end up either adapting them or making my own which takes a lot of time. And given that I work in schools where I have a lot a pupils at the lower end of the ability scale, I find I’m ending up making lots of flashcards, matching games, etc. etc. Okay, so once I’ve made them, I’ve made them – but as I’m using school facilities for copying and laminating etc. those resources belong to the school and once I leave, I can’t take them with me. (Or I shouldn’t anyway).

I’ve spent about three hours this afternoon on ONE lesson. I’m adapting a scheme of work on songwriting that I’ve given a number of times to various year 9 classes, none of them with any great deal of success, so I’m tweaking and re-writing and fiddling to see if I can make it better. Because that’s what we do, right?
But to be honest, it’s turned out to be more than a rewrite – there’s very little that I already have that I can use, so I’ve got back to the drawing board. I’m sure teachers in other subjects have headaches like this, perhaps in different areas, but what I got stuck on today was – “what song can I use that’s a)short, b)simple and c) has a very limited number of chords with an easily identifiable chord progression d)that’s not any more than a couple of years old, because if I use the Beatles (although Beatles songs are very useful for analysis!) the kids will moan??”

I eventually setlled on “Shine”, by Take That, and plan to use the first half of it for this lesson, which is about identifying chords. I’m now “Shined out”, having listened to it numerous times in order to notate the chord progressions and identify the chords so that I can play a bit of it if I need to. Time taken – amazingly, about an hour. Then I’ve made a powerpoint, written the lesson plan, made a puzzle at puzzlemaker.com and made a template for a set of cards which need to be copied and laminated when I get back to school.

That’s one lesson of 6 or 7 done. I might try to do a second while I’m in the mood, but somehow I don’t’ think I’m going to get any further today.

says this report in the Indpendent.

I couldn’t agree more.

My own children are primary age, and while they have fantastic teachers, when it comes to some subjects, they really could do with being taught by someone with more specialist knowledge. I’m a music teacher who also teaches french, both of them subjects which require a certain amount of detailed knowledge and skills. (The school has started teaching French this year, and my eldest regularly comes home mis-pronouncing words. “Miss says it like that,” she point out. “Well, I’m sorry, but Miss is wrong,”. I have to say).

Last year, I taught for three days a week at a primary school, where I provided cover for staff PPA time. I think I was pretty successful there – the kids were all very upset when they heard I was leaving (I was only contracted for a year) and have apparently been asking when I’m coming back! But the reason my contract wasn’t renewed was (I was told) financial. And this is surely the reason that prevents a lot of primaries from employing specialist teachers. Well, that, and the headache that would surely ensue in timetabling.

Language teaching is going to be compulsory at primary schools very soon, which means that every class teacher is going to have to be able to deliver those lessons. And if they’re going to be done properly – and let’s face it, most of the early learning of a language is going to be done aurally and verbally, that makes it even more important that the teacher knows how to pronounce the words correctly! So that’s a lot of extra work for the non-specialist teacher, and, if they get it wrong, kids going up to secondary school not knowing the basics of pronunciation in that language.

And as far as music is concerned, things are even worse. Many teachers are quite frightened of undertaking even the simplest musical activity. Primary music-making tends to be centred around singing, and there are teachers who just won’t sing because they think they can’t. But for God’s sake, what matters more to kids of that age is that they see an adult doing it and having a bit of fun, not whether you sound like Maria Callas!

I’m currently in the situation of having to prepare lessons for staff teaching music who are non-specialists. It’s a long story – bascially, I’m at one of my schools three days a week, and I’m preparing lessons for the staff who are covering the days I’m not there (because I have a contract somewhere else). The HoD is keen for me to provide lessons that a specialist would give – which is all very well, but if the person delivering these lessons has no idea how to clap – crotchet-two quavers-crotchet – and how it should sound, then that’s not going to work.

But back on topic – the lack of consistency in music teaching in primaries really does make my life as a secondary music teacher very difficult. The ability of pupils coming into year 7 varies amazingly, depending on which primary they went to, and it makes it very hard when we’re expected to get them to a certain level by the end of the term/year or whatever. Of course, this is true for all subjects, but with the core subjects, there is at least an expectation that a certain point will have been reached and certain subjects covered. That just isn’t the case for me – well, not at the sorts of schools I currently work at.

Although, let’s face it, somebody probably has.

From today’s Independent Pay schools extra for teaching poorer pupils.

Under this scheme, schools would get £3000 per year for each child they take in from the poorest postcode in the area.

The article suggests that perhaps this extra funding would also encourage “better” schools to take such children. Call me cynical, but I’m not sure a 3 grand carrot a-piece would be incentive enough to cancel out a drop in the school league-tables once the exam results were affected because the school had taken in a crop of less able kids.

And before you call me rude names, of course I’m not implying that all pupils at … less successful… schools are dim, but I’d imagine that there’s a greater chance they went to a less successful primary school and come from a less supportive home environment. Again, I know that’s a generalisation, but I teach in a couple of tough secondaries, and there’s a definite difference in the levels of ability in the kids I now have in year 7 to the year 7s I had when I trained (at a much “better” school).

In one class I had last year, I had two pupils with ASD who were statemented, and another three on School Action + for various reasons, including a form of epilepsy which had kept the child from going to school a lot of the time. Plus about another three kids on SA for “mild learning difficulties.” This was a small class, of about 22 kids… but I was on my own in there. I don’t teach a core subject, and I’m sure that the school’s LSA’s were off working in maths and english classes – but that didn’t help. The two ASD pupils couldn’t read or write, and really needed one-to-one help 100% of the time. But that wasn’t available. I’m not going to get into whether these pupils should have been in mainstream education in the first place, but in lieu of that, extra funding would be a definite step in the right direction.

And no, of course it doesn’t mean that all kids from the less desirable postcodes are going to have SEN. But I’ve only got to look at the huge list of pupils with SEN in the schools I’m at now and compare it to the school where I trained to know that there’s a definite correlation between the catchment area and the number of pupils who need extra help.

At last – someone in the meeja has got it right about the Sex Ed in Primary schools.

I generally rant about this sort of stuff over at my LJ blog, but I thought it was about time I had somewhere separate to talk about teaching and education and stuff like that… and this is it.

The big education news story this week is that sex education is going to be made compulsory for kids from age 5 upwards. Naturally, it’s caused a furore in some quarters as there always is when anything to do with sex education is mentioned. I don’t know what to say really. I’m certainly not against it – it’s just that I don’t think that the burden should fall on teachers. Having said that though, I wouldn’t advocate what happened when I was at school, which is that all we were really taught was the mechanics in biology lessons. But by that time, my mum had already sat me down and give me “the talk” which did encompass more than just the mechanics. And of course, I intend to do the same for my kids. My eldest daughter will be getting a talk at school towards the end of this academic year, and I’ll make sure that I’ve told her all of it in advance.

Of course the plan isn’t to tell five year olds what bit goes where – anyone with half a brain should realise that the emphasis with younger children is going to be on the relationships side of things. BUT – it’s NOT the sole province of schools to do this. It’s our job to educate and inform, yes. But with something as sensitive as this, is there any question that the first port of call should be with parents?

Also this week – Behaviour in schools worsens. No shit, Sherlock. The number of kids who are repeatedly excluded from school for short periods is increasing rapidly. Why don’t we just exclude them permanently? I hear you cry. Well, it’s not that simple. The government has basically told schools that they have to cut down the numbers of kids that they expel. So instead, the kids are just suspended repeatedly for several days. They come back to school for a day, and then get suspended again and so it goes on. Details of the number of permanent exclusions are also included in league-table figures, so there’s yet another incentive to keep them down. But the thing is – the majority of these kids are never going to succeed in mainstream education, and all they’re doing is taking up time and effort that could be spent actually teaching the kids who do want to learn. That’s not to say that these kids should be consigned to the scrap heap; no there are alternatives like PRUs (Pupil Referral Units) but there aren’t enough of them and they cost money.
Also, at a recent training session I discovered that it costs around £7000 for a school to permanently exclude a pupil. That’s about £4000 in lost funding, and the rest to pay for the lawyers etc. And once you’ve succeeded in having the exclusion upheld, you’re likely to get a phone call the next day asking you to take in a pupil who has been excluded from another school – so some schools are opting to keep “the devil they know”. Hamstrung doesn’t even begin to describe it.

I mean, what on earth do we do when confronted with a 5 year old who takes a knife into school saying he planned to attack a teacher so that he would be moved to another class.”The article was confiscated, parents and the police were informed and the matter was fully investigated.”The child was made aware of how serious the matter was and we feel everything that was done was appropriate.”The boy was suspended and evaluated by psychologists.

Yes.

And?

Where the hell does a five year old get the idea that it’s okay to do something like that? It’s not something that would ever have occurred to either of my kids – you have to ask what sort of household that child is growing up in.

I’ve seen a few articles about this on the net, but haven’t come across anything on the telly or radio – teachers at Movilla High School in NI have refused to teach a pupil who assaulted one of them. NASUWT members are now on strike, because they have not been paid, even though they were teaching all their other classes – just not the ones which included this pupil. As Frank Chalk says. “Top Marks.” It’s about time teachers stood up for themselves when faced with behaviour like this – the school apparently did nothing and although the kid is now going to be charged with assault, he’s not been kicked out.

As I said here, I and my colleagues at school regularly receive risk assessments for certain pupils, telling us that we could be at risk of injury. That’s the school covering it’s arse of course. But what other professions are put in this position? Okay, there are a few where it’s to be expected that people are dealing with violent behaviour on a regular basis – you’d expect it in a prison or on a phsychiatric ward. But in a school??

More and more trainee teachers are failing the basic literacy, numeracy and ICT tests and having to re-take them several times. These are mandatory tests that you have to pass before you can qualify. They are taken online, and if I remember rightly, 30 minutes (each) is allowed for the literacy and numeracy tests and 40 or 45 minutes for the ICT one. As someone who’s never struggled with maths or English, I wasn’t worried – until I did some of the mock tests online. I was actually having trouble with the maths one, which really worried me. (I was just scraping a pass). But on the day I did the maths test, I went into the test centre, sat down – and was handed a piece of paper and a pencil. “What’s that for?” “Your working out,” was the answer, as if I was an idiot. Well, clearly I was, because the reason I’d been having trouble with the mock tests was because I’d been doing ALL the calculations IN MY HEAD. Once I’d got the paper and pencil, the thing took me ten minutes and I passed, no problem. Same for the literacy. And 15 minutes for the ICT test.
But I know people who have had to take these tests three or four times. Which amazes me. With one exception, they were all younger than I am by at least fifteen years; which could perhaps account for it, because they were probably at school at a time where teaching kids to read, write and add up had fallen out of fashion. But the thing is, these days, you need to be educated to degree level (and have got a 2,1) to become a teacher, and you need to have good GCSEs in Maths and English. So if these tests are an “insurance policy” – they’re not really working.
It’s worrying though. I’ve had documents – reports, for instance – returned to me for correction, but I’ve not made any mistakes! It’s not my fault if the person “checking” it doesn’t have the same grasp of spelling, punctuation and grammar than I do!

Rant over for now. I’m just waiting to see what enormities of stupidity the next week brings.

You know how you have those times when you feel like you have loads to do, but you just can’t remember what any of it is?

Well, I’m at the point right now. I’m sure there’s something work-wise I should be doing, but I’m buggered if I can remember what it is. It’s probably because the last week of each half term is generally “assessment week”, so the majority of my lessons don’t need much in the way of planning. But there’s still the next half-term’s to do (and I’ve made a start on those already), plus loads of resources to find and make, which is the stuff that takes up most of the time these days.

So I’m sitting here reading through various bits of paperwork and doing some filing. One of the things I’m reading is an “Individual Risk Assessment” for a year 10 student I taught last year. I don’t know what’s more worrying – the fact that the assessment says things like:

Risk to staff – Being struck by X throwing furniture or whilst breaking up a fight

- or the fact that I’m not especially fazed by it. I mean, we had a warning this week about a year 8 girl (who’s in one of my French classes) and told that under NO circumstances should a member of staff be alone with her at any time or for any reason.

You have to ask – what the hell are these kids doing in mainstream education?

I made a little progress this morning with my practically unteachable class of year 9 boys. Admittedly, two or three of the worst offenders weren’t in the lesson, but I decided I’d take them to an IT room and give them some quizzes and stuff to do online, and amazingly, they got on with most of it without complaint. So I think I’ve found at least a temporary solution to that problem – I’m going to give them various projects to work on (when I can think of some!) and they’ll be expected to spend about half the lesson doing that, and when they’ve reached a certain point, they’ll be allowed to play some games or do other stuff. Part of me is really resistant to things like this, because it’s almost as though I’m rewarding these kids for being pains in the arse, but at the end of the day, it’s going to make my life easier and who knows – they might even learn something (by accident, probably!)

Tomorrow night, although I don’t normally work at school #2 on a Wednesday, I’m going in for the year 6 parents’ open evening. It’ll be a long day, because it’s not worth driving home and back again between the end of school and the thing, but I’m getting paid extra for doing it, which will come in handy seeing as I won’t be paid over half term.

If I don’t work out what the hell it is I’m supposed to be doing, I might end up going to bed instead.