Learning is delightful and delicious …

A chunk of yesterday’s staff meeting was taken up by the PSHE co-ordinator telling us about SEAL. That’s Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning to the likes of me.

According to the blurb, “At the heart of SEAL like thes five aspects of learning and their associated universal learning outcomes.”
These aspects are -
Self-awareness
Managing my Feelings
Motivation
Empathy
Social Skills.

Now, for some schools, I can see the value in the programme. It makes sense to me to try to encourage pupils to think about how they learn as well as what they learn, to have them learn to understand and value other points of view or to develop the ability to become more adventurous in their approach to learning etc. etc.

But, as I mumbled to a colleague, the problem with things like this in the sort of school we work in, is actually getting the kids to give a s**t about any of it in the first place. For many of them, the only way to resolve a dispute with another child is to thump them. When faced with something that looks a bit different, their instinct is to say immediately, “Miss, I don’ geddit”. And as for the idea of being interested in others’ beliefs, values, views and attitudes – forget it. I can’t remember a time I encountered such bigotry as I’ve come across in a large number of these 11-14 year olds.

Of course, all these things need to be changed; the kids need to learn not to hit people, they need to learn tolerance and respect, and to try to solve problems independently. I’m all for that.

But first of all, the majority of the kids I work with have to be made to see the point of doing ANY of that. They don’t see the point of learning French (”I ain’t never gonna live in France, miss, so wosser point?”) or Music (”I ain’t gonna do anyfink wi’ dat”), and they certainly don’t give a rat’s arse about empathy or motivation.

So we’ve got double the work to do – because we’ve somehow got to convince these kids that it IS worth trying new things, that it IS important to take responsibility for your behaviour and learn to manage your emotions and reactions, and that it IS a good idea to reflect on what they’re doing and to be able to think of ways to improve.

But until we can convince them it’s worth their while learning all this “stuff”, we’ll be banging our heads against brick walls.

I had to cover a year 9 maths lesson today. It was the bottom set, and they’d been set a past GCSE paper to do.

If there are any maths teachers reading this, please forgive me – I know you don’t set the curriculum and I’m not having a go at you. But seriously. A GCSE paper that includes questions like “what is one-fifth?” and gave a choice of four of five different decimal answers? One that includes the problem
(4×10)-(9×2)=

And one which showed a drawing of a weighing scale (in kg) and said that it showed the weight of Millie’s cat.
Q1. How much does Millie’s cat weigh?
Q2. Patrick’s cat weighs seven pounds. Which cat is heavier?

Half the kids didn’t “get” that one. Again, I know it was a bottom set, but these are 13/14 year olds, and they don’t know that one fifth = 0.2 or that a kilo = 2.2 pounds?

I read all the articles that appear after the exam results come out saying how everything is dumbed down and how the exams are so much easier now than they used to be. I agree with that comment 100% regarding my own subject, but didn’t really know how things stood with others. But it that’s GCSE maths, then god knows what A level must be like.
No wonder some unis are having to run special courses to get post-A level students up to speed before they can start their undergraduate studies.

Meh. Don’t mind me. I’ve had a bad day

Every year, someone suggests that the date of Easter should be fixed – and every year, people say “oh what a good idea” and then promptly do nothing about it.

Being an atheist, it doesn’t really matter to me when Easter falls in terms of the religious aspect – but it is a bit of a pain in the arse when Easter is very early and means that the first term of the year is very short. And it’s even more of a pain in the posterior when you work in two different counties, one of which has their spring break centred around Easter and the other which doesn’t, as happened to me last year.

Essex, very sensibly in my opinion, opted a few years back to fix the date of their spring break so that it’s always the first two weeks of April, regardless of when Easter falls. That has its advantages, as it means that every few years, my kids are on holiday when the surrounding counties are all back at school, so places we might want to visit aren’t so crowded.

But Suffolk’s spring break is still a moveable feast. Which means that next time this happens, I’m going to be on holiday at a different time to my kids, unless things are changed before then.

The idea of changing the school terms and moving away from having the long break in July and August is often mooted, but again, nothing is ever done. According to an article I read last year, the weather in the UK is better in May and June than in July and August (it was last year!) so it would make more sense to have the holidays then, straight after exams. And why not? Those holiday dates were set years ago when we were a largely agrarian society, so it makes no sense whatsoever now.

Keeping to the system we have just because “it’s always been this way” isn’t a good enough reason to keep piddling about with calendars each year.

First of all, let me say that I’m not a fan of school league tables.

BUT – I had to post this link to the list of the top twenty schools in England according to the tables which have just been published.

My point?

Four of the top schools in England are in Essex! Two in Chelmsford and two in Colchester to be precise. I’m not saying that this compensates for Wayne and Waynetta from Romford but it’s nice to be reminded that not everone in my neck-of-the-woods is an ill-educated chav!

So the girls who were temporarily suspended for slagging off a teacher on Facebook think they’ve been harshly treated.

Forgive me if I don’t immediately reach for the Kleenex.

One pupil told the local paper that she felt completely ashamed. Well, good. And so she should be.

Except that when you read the rest of the quote, she’s not ashamed of her actions, she’s “ashamed and disgusted” with the SCHOOL for making what she and her cronies did public.

Um. What??

She and her mates can hurl insults and accusations at someone in public – but the school shouldn’t have told anyone about it?

Well yes, of course they can, because “we feel as students it is our right to express our own opinions.”

Now, I’m all for free speech. But in a civilised society, one has to exercise a certain amount of self-censorship if you don’t want to end up with the thought-police on your doorstep at some future time.

Some of the other girls have described what they did as “harmless fun” and “a stupid game that nobody took any notice of.” Well, clearly it wasn’t harmless, because the teacher is apparently receiving counselling and the girls have been suspended, and clearly, notice WAS taken.

Now, I don’t know the teacher in question. For all I know, she may have been inefficient and unpleasant as the girls have claimed. But that doesn’t give them the right to create a group on a PUBLIC forum and make disparaging comments about her by name.

The “internet” generation has to learn that posting something on a website is NOT the same as chatting with your mates in your own front room. I’ve had discussions with friends on numerous occasions about this and we’re all surprised at the number of people who forget just how public the internet is. Also, they could do with a lesson on “be careful about whatever you write down.” I’m careful about what I write, and I read things thoroughly before I hit “post” – because after all, the person, or people who are reading what you’ve written can’t hear the inflexion in your voice or see the expression on your face; what may have been intended to have been funny might not come across that way in writing.

This is bullying, whoever the perpetrators, and whoever the victim, and I applaud the school for its actions. I was threatened and insulted TO MY FACE and I wish that SMT at my school had had the guts to take similar steps.

The latest initiative by which the government is going to try to coax parents back to work is by offering them a training grant of £500. These “mummy bonds” will be available to anyone who has taken more than five years off work to bring up children and will be used to help parents retrain for work.

But why, especially now, when jobs are disappearing left, right and centre, is the government going to implement this scheme? For one thing – how much training can £500 buy? Not very much. And unless there’s something there that also says that companies must be prepared to employ people who have been out of the workplace for more than five years, chances are it’ll be wasted anyway.

It’s not that I don’t think it’s a laudible aim – especially considering that the article says the grant should help women who are often penalised in the salary stakes for having time off to raise a family. But I can’t see it working without certain guarantees that these retrained people will be able to find employment at the end of their training.

I’m a case in point. Okay so I didn’t get a £500 retraining grant; I retrained as a teacher on the graduate trainee programme, which I’d imagine cost considerably more than five-hundred quid. I’m fairly well educated, I have excellent interpersonal, communication and organisational skills; I can type, am computer literate and can read, write and add up. Highly employable, do I hear you say?

Well, yes. you’d think, wouldn’t you?

Although it would seem not, as I have been unable to find a permanent, full-time job since I qualified.
(I am, however, in my early forties, which may also have something to do with it.)

Back on track – it’s all very well re-training people, but unless there are jobs for them to go to OR they are trained for specific vacancies, it’s money down the drain.

I said a few days ago that I was planning to watch this week’s Dispatches on Channel 4 about “Britain’s Challenging Children.”

The children featured in the programme were all at Primary school – but looking at a large number of the pupils I now have in year 7, many of whom are rude and have absolutely NO idea how to behave in a classroom – nothing I saw came as any surprise.

The schools featured had all set up specialist units and classes to help to deal with these pupils and their behaviour – and in most cases, the parents were also involved in the scheme, and over time, they (the schemes) seemed to be paying dividends. But despite their successes, these classes/units exist from hand to mouth as it were, never knowing whether their funding is secure from year to year. And according to Dispatches, a unit like this can be run for from as little as £40,000 per year, which is nothing in the grand scheme of things, and nothing when you take into account the benefits which can accrue from early intervention.

And then – that got me thinking about the fact that nobody these days – well, nobody who’s in a position to actually make policy and decisions – seems to think beyond the ends of their noses. If you have children as young as five who are disrupting lessons, surely it makes sense to deal with the problem early on, while it’s still possible to deal with it. Because unless something is done, chances are, that child will be pretty much unteachable by the time they get to secondary school. And regardless of age, disruptive pupils take up a disproportionate amount of the teacher’s time, and the rest of the pupils suffer as a result.

And after that, I got to thinking about how we really MUST find a way to deal with those secondary pupils who are unable, for whatever reason, to follow the curriculum as it is now. For example – I have a class which consists almost entirely of boys in year 9, the majority of whom are unteachable. These boys have literacy and numeracy problems, and I imagine have learned very little during the whole of their time at school. So surely, the answer is to find something they can do, which will actually be of use to them when it comes to getting a job. It would (I’d hope) give them a sense of achievement and self-esteem, which, depite all the bluster, most of them are lacking. A lot of these kids are disruptive because they can’t cope with the environment or with the work (or both) and although I get annoyed with the little so-and-sos, it can’t be too great – for them -to be thinking for most of the day that you’re not good at anything.

And that made me start thinking about the old system of higher education where we had Polys and Unis – and they both did different things. The Unis were for the more academic pupils, while the Polys were more practically based; and it made me start to wonder whether we should re-introduce this “divide”, but earlier. Wouldn’t the boys in my year 9 class be better off learning how to fix a car or a computer than having me try to teach them how to play a keyboard? Don’t get me wrong, I’m completely committed to the belief that education should be about more than just teaching children to pass exams, but for pupils who really are at the bottom of the academic pile, for whatever reason – shouldn’t we be educating them in a differerent way? Giving them extra literacy and numeracy help and then some training which may actually be of use to them in later life, rather than trying to force them to learn something they’re hardly likely to ever use?

I’m not saying that we should be “giving in” or pandering to these pupils – but we have to recognise that the effort we, as teachers, expend in trying to fit these square pegs into round holes is incredibly counter-productive. It’s stressful for us, and is of absolutely no benefit to the pupils concerned.

Of course, setting up schemes for early intervention to ease behaviour problems and then others to put 14-year-olds on “apprenticeships” (of sorts) would mean a radical upheaval of the education system in this country – which isn’t going to happen; well, certainly not in the near future.

Oddly enough, this came up at a staff meeting yesterday –
Boring teachers to be targeted by Ofsted.
Of course there are excellent teachers, good teachers and not-so-good teachers. And quite-frankly-appalling-teachers. Same as any other job, and I have no problem with that. I like to think that my kids have good teachers as I’m sure do most parents.

But to publicise something like this is just giving some pupils yet another weapon in their arsenal – it’s the sort of thing they seem to find out about by a process of osmosis, just like they know their “rights” and that we can do nothing whatsoever to counter their sometimes appalling behaviour.

It’s bad enough now – just today, when I asked a pupil why he wasn’t doing his work, he shrugged at me and said “I’m bored.” My standard response to that is “well, maybe if you actually did something in the lesson instead of nothing then you wouldn’t be bored.”

I never usually get a reply to that, other than another shrug. But now the kids realise that labelling a teacher “boring” is a pretty good insult that might actually lead to the teacher being checked up on (like we’re not checked up on all the time anyway!), well, I’m sure that “boring” could replace “gay” as the insult of choice.

I think we should all eschew rugs – I’m fed up with landing on my arse each time one of them is pulled from under my feet.

Quick bit of background to this one -

I work part-time at two different schools, one is a permanent contract for two days a week where I teach Music and French; and the other I’m at for three days, on long-term supply, teaching Music, which is my “actual” subject.

Both of them are pretty tough, in areas where there’s a lot of unemployment and not a lot of aspiration.

I’ve been at the first one for three years. And this year, I’m teaching far more French than Music.

 
The way things have panned out, I’m sharing ALL the French classes I have with other members of staff. Year 7s get three lessons per week, so as I’m only in for two, I’d be sharing to some extent anyway. The trouble is, that I’m sharing all but one of them with a member of staff who is known for taking a lot of time off sick – and who has now been off for almost two months.

As she has the classes twice and I have them once, a fair division of labour would be for me to undertake one third of the marking and testing etc. (Not that I keep score). Except that she’s not there, so I’m doing the lot.  I brought home three classes’ books over the holiday because it was the only way I was going to get them marked – some of them have NEVER been marked. And because we assess pupils half-termly (or are supposed to) it’s meant that these classes are really behind because that can only be done when I’m there; the rest of the time they have either cover supervisors or supply staff.

I’m also setting the lessons for the days I’m not there. It’s extra work, but it’s far less stressful than my getting in in the morning and having to faff about trying to find out what the kids have done so I can very quickly plan my lesson. At least this way, I know what the kids have done and what they haven’t.

I also had to do my share of marking of a set of books for a class that I share with two other teachers, so that wasn’t quite so much work. But looking at those, I had to ask myself this question -

Are these kids actually learning anything??

Because honestly, in so many of the books, I’m seeing the same mistakes made over and over and over again. They’re corrected – but it seems that no notice is taken by the pupil. There’s one girl who can’t GET that J’ ai is spelled J, apostrophe, a, i and NOT J, apostrophe (sometimes, when she remembers) i, a! We’ve all corrected it time after time, we’ve written it in her targets, and STILL – she gets it wrong.

If I could afford it, I’d get rubber stamps made for the following comments -

Don’t leave blank pages

Make sure you finish your work in class

etc.

 
because seriously, my back, neck, arm and hand all HURT after writing those several times over..!

But having to repeat myself almost ad infinitum with some pupils really does make me doubt the quality of my teaching. The emphasis today is all on LEARNING, not teaching (although of course you can’t have one without the other) and teachers are judged on the learning that takes place in their lesson. But we can only (as the saying goes) lead the horses to water – the pupils have to do some of the work!

Or am I being ridiculously naïve?

So tell me – what are your favourite repeated comments?

Oh, good God.

So now we can’t call a school a school becasue the word might carry negative connotations. Instead this new primary school is a place of learning. Well, that’s fair enough, schools should be places of learning. But to suggest that “school” is a dirty word? Well, it may be that for some pupils, but that’s not a reason to stop using the word, is it?

Because if that’s the case, we will also need to ban the word “work.”