Learning is delightful and delicious …

Apparently, the government is considering banning teachers from being members of the BNP.

Now, I hate the BNP and what it stands for, but I don’t think that telling members of society that they can’t belong to it because they happen to do a certain job is the way to go either.

Who would be next? Nurses? Firemen? And if teachers can’t belong to a far right organisation, then they shouldn’t be allowed to belong to a far left organisation either.

It can’t be about disagreeing with one particular set of extremist views – if it happens, it has to be about disagreeing with extremist views period, not just the ones the people in power happen to dislike the most.

So the Conservatives want to scrap SATS tests at the end of Primary School.

Hurrah!

But instead, they want them to happen during year 7.

Boo!

These days, I’m not especially enamoured of any political party, so I’m not going to get on a soap-box and rant about how Labour/the Tories have really screwed up our education system. But this is as half-baked idea as any I’ve heard.

I totally agree that having the SATS at the end of year 6 means, in many schools, that pupils are put in a hothouse for the year and that their studies are narrowed to whatever will help them to pass tests and get the best results. I do, however, think it’s a good idea to have some sort of testing at the end of Primary school. The point though, surely is WHAT AND WHO ARE THE TESTS FOR? Getting ready for work this morning, I was yelling at the Today programme’s report about the subject. I had to leave part way through it, but I remember hearing something along the lines of “if there are no tests at the end of year 6, how will parents know which schools to send their children to?”

Er – what? Finally, the truth – the tests aren’t for the benefit of the pupils and not for the benefit of any school they may go to in the future – no, we’re putting an intense amount of pressure on eleven-year-old CHILDREN (and incidentally my eldest daughter will only be ten when/if she takes them next year) just so some people can fight, cheat and/or buy their way into the “best” schools.

As a parent, of course I want the best for my kids. But that isn’t what the SATS tests should be used for, is it? I certainly think that pupils should be tested at the end of primary school. It can provide useful data for their intended secondary school, and will give children themselves an idea of how they’re doing. But using the data to compile league tables isn’t – to my mind – how things should be done. Ofsted is there to inspect schools and tell them what they’re good at and bad at – and that information is freely available.

We don’t need to be putting pupils and teachers under this sort of pressure just so the 4×4 brigade from Chelsea know where they’ve got to buy a house so that little Ibsen can get into a good school.

Scrap the NATIONAL tests at 11. Let schools do their own tests in order to check pupils’ progress and supply relevant information to secondary schools, but leave it there.

Wow – it’s over a month since I’ve posted anything here.

It’s not because there’s nothing going on, or I haven’t got anything to say – there’s quite a bit going on, but a lot of it is specifically related to my job and the school I work in, and I don’t think it’s appropriate to post about that on a public blog. Rest assured, I’ll never be one of those teachers who’s had up for posting about their pupils on Facebook!

Talking about jobs though, I am about to apply for a new one – and once again my head is reeling with the sort of information teachers are asked to supply on a mere application! I can honestly say that in any of the other jobs I’ve had, I’ve never been asked to supply such detail; although I’d always worked in the private sector until I became a teacher, and perhaps other public sector jobs are similar. I’ve filled in the usual application form, but now I have to write the dreaded personal statement and accompanying letter. I’ve been asked to write about my philosophy on education (well, everyone should have one!) and my views on the role of Subject Leaders (the job is a Subject Leader – if I answered that honestly, I’d be saying that it’s just a cheaper way of saying a Head of Department!) – the person spec is in seven sections, the first of which covers one side of closely typed A4. Is it me, or is it actually getting harder to apply for teaching jobs? Honestly, faced with this, I’m surprised anybody actually bothers to change jobs.

I’ve also been landed in the s**t by a colleague; before half-term we discussed what schemes of work to follow with each year group and she suggested one that I’ve not taught before, but said that she had plenty of resources. I didn’t see any reason why not to go along with the suggestion; I’ve been going it alone since September so letting someone else provide resources meant a bit less work for me. Thing is? She’s been off sick since Tuesday and will be off for at least another two weeks, so having started the topic (because I didn’t find out she was sick until Tuesday morning and didn’t have time to prepare anything else) I’ve now got to prepare everything myself. Okay, so that’s what I’ve been doing up until now anyway, but I’d have had at least two weeks’ worth of stuff ready before half-term. Now, it’s going to be a frantic rush tomorrow morning to get stuff into the repro office in time to get it back for lessons tomorrow.

Anyway – I just wanted to let anyone who reads this know I’m not dead – just tired and busy and buried under a bigger pile of crap than usual.

Why is it that so many young people, after attending school for more than 10 years, are found to be so poorly equipped for employment? the Sunday Times asks today.

This is another of those articles that initially makes me throw up my hands and cry “hallellujah!” – simply because I’m glad that somebody else out there has cottoned onto something about which I’ve been moaning for ages.

Although of course, my joy is short-lived when I come bak to the real world and admit that despite the publicity, it won’t change anything; and fades faster when I reflect on the sorry state we’re in when so many of the children I and others are teaching are unlikely to be able to find jobs (and in many cases, don’t aspire to them anyway).

I can’t put it any better than this –

Yet employers find that, despite their formal qualifications, many young people are unable to communicate simply and well; they cannot work in teams; they lack initiative, enterprise and the capacity to foresee and resolve problems; they cannot plan a schedule or manage themselves; and they lack a thirst for continued learning and personal growth. They are deficient in the soft skills that form an essential component of each individual’s human capital, some of them to the extent that they are in fact unemployable.

It’s what I’ve been saying for ages. We’re not teaching kids how to think for themselves.

You’ve only got to give out a simple worksdheet to see that – hands are in the air and there are chants of “I don’ geddit” before the paper has even hit the desk.

Despite an insistance in every training session I’ve attended about pedagogial issues, all of which insist that lessons should be a maximum of 40% teacher-led, that the focus is on learning rather than teaching and whatever else is flavour of the month, there is no advice on how to combat the sheer apathy and disinterest of a large number of kids. There is often little or no willingness to engage with any activity that requires the slightest amount of effort, and believe me, you can plan and give the root’nest, toot’nest, all-singing, all-dancing-with-bells-on lesson and still get absolutely nowhere. Other than completely exhausted.

Employability skills are the product of a well rounded education.

Yes, quite. The number of times I’ve been tempted to have the “rounded education” argument with every eleven year old who asks “wot do I ‘af ter do French for? I in’t goin ter France”, or “why do we ‘af ter do moosic?”. But of course, even if I did get into the discussion (not a good idea), seventeen is a very long way off to an eleven year old.

Over-prescription is stifling creativity and imagination in our schools. We’re teaching kids to pass exams, but they’re not really learning anything – certainly not a number of the skills that will serve them in later life.

The answer? I don’t think it really lies just with schools any more, because it’s clear that schools can’t “solve” this alone. Slimming down the national curriculum, but NOT to the extent that it throws out arts subjects as has been suggested – may help, but we also need to get rid of national testing and league tables, which are putting such a huge amount of pressure on pupils and teachers alike. But it needs to go beyond that, because no matter how good the lessons or the teachers, if you’re standing in front of a bunch of kids who see no point whatsoever in getting an education, it’ll still be a waste of time.

We need to abandon this stupid “one size fits all” approach to education – we’re all different and have different levels of intelligence and ability, so we need to teach pupils that they can’t be good at everything and that sometimes they will fail, and teach them how to deal with that failure so that they don’t just give up and turn their energies in a more negative direction, like disruption. Schools need to have the confidence that measures they take to deal with disruptive pupils will be supported, and we need to come up with a way of providing an education for those pupils who are too disruptive to attend a “regular” school. The odd anger-management or self-esteem class won’t do it – we need to be giving the “silent majority” of pupils who will learn, given half a chance the, well – half a chance to do so!

Things like that cost money – although I doubt there’d be a willingness to go down that route even if the economy hadn’t gone tits-up; because if Alan Steer is to be believed, there are no real behaviour problems in schools.

And I’m the bloody Queen of Sheba.

And that, right there, is another of the things that will hold back and/or totally prevent any progress towards a solution to the problems highlighted in the article I linked to at the beginning of this post – the head-in-the-sand approach to the issue of behaviour. Until we find a way to improve standards of behaviour in many schools, there will be little or no progress academically OR socially, and the proportion of “employable” young people available to take their place in the workforce will continue to diminish.

Why is it, that almost every educational news-story I read makes me immediately think of Basil Fawlty’s line about Sybill’s specialist subject on Mastermind being “stating the bleedin’ obvious.”?

Today, we’re told that boys don’t do well in mixed-sex English classes.

I don’t teach English, but even I can see that boys’ literary skills are, in general, lower than girls’. And – also in general – the reasons for that are bleedin’ obvious.

Although I don’t think it’s just down to the fact, as the article states, that boys realise that girls are “better” at it than they are and just don’t bother. I think it goes deeper than that. I teach music – and in the majority of cases, when the set project is a composition task, the girls are almost invariably more wiling to use their imaginations and experiment. Again, that’s a generalisation, because of course, there are some boys who are willing to have a go, but I’d say that it’s true 90% of the time in my experience. Which is why I say that the idea that boys do worse in English when there are girls in the class isn’t just down to their thinking that the girls will outperform them.

To me, it indicates something more serious than that – the fact that it’s not “cool” for boys to be seen to be creative. Or rather, not to be seen to be creative in certain subjects. It’s okay to be able to “Bend it like Beckham” or to come up with a device to set off all the fire alarms across the school in science – but to be “arty”, for most boys is a definite “no-no” and will, in most cases, lead to their being labelled a “gayboy”. And the article also states that there is no corresponding dip in the achievement of girls in maths or science – they do okay whether the boys are there or not.

And while I’m on the subject (sort of) of “boys versus girls” – I’ve been gnashing my teeth for weeks over the way that other recent stories about whether boys need to be taught separately and differently from girls, and about it not being “cool” for boys to do well at school – are being presented. I’m fed up with reading about lessons being “geared” towards girls.

What?

Just because they may involve having to sit still, write things down and actually think about things sometimes? How is that “girl-centric”? I fully accept that boys tend, in many cases, to need to be more active than girls – but there are limits as to what you can do about that in a classroom. And let’s face it – some of those boys will grow up to be… lorry drivers… office workers… will do other jobs where they have to sit still, so they have to learn to do that sometime!

I’ve read many comments on various blogs from men who clearly feel increasingly hard-done-by and who have made some incredibly bitter and sometimes downright nasty comments about the fact that they feel that things in general are now biased towards women. They’re entitled to their opinion. But all I can say is that IF that’s true, then it’s about bloody time. For centuries, women were the underdogs – treated worse than dogs in many cases. It wasn’t worth educating them because all they needed to do was keep house and have babies; they couldn’t own property, couldn’t vote – and even as recently as a hundred years ago, were regarded as “property”, belonging either to their husband or their father.

So yes. Maybe it’s our ‘turn’ now.

BUT – having said that, I certainly don’t think that one sex should do well at the expense of the other.
We need to find ways to help boys not feel ashamed about being good at “girly” subjects and vice-versa.

And this is starting to become a completely different post from the one I started, so I think I’ll end it there for now.

Catching up on the news, it seems that last week’s “educational topic of the week” (and in my head, I hear a Harry-Hill-like jingle while typing those words!) was mostly about the worsening behaviour in schools.

Really? /sarcasm. These come around with alarming regularity and (surprise!) nothing changes. Many Principals are shit-scared to throw out the worst offenders because it shows up on the figures, and until that is changed and each one can do what they think is best for their school without having to worry how it looks when compared with the school up the road or across town, things are only going to get worse. Unless you’re lucky enough to work in a school where the head has the balls to say “sod the figures” and take the action that’s needed.

And soon – we’re told – schools are going to have a US-style report-card grade, which will take into account the “happiness” of pupils. I’d like to think that some schools will be in for a shock when they realise how pissed off the majority of kids are at the continual disruption caused to their lessons by the “usual suspects”.

Will these report cards also take into account the happiness of the staff?

Hm. Thought not.

Anyway, it’s articles like these which starts off by saying that -

Parents let their children rule the roost at home and then expect schools to discipline them,

- that make me think I should create a “no shit, Sherlock” tag for this blog.

There were several articles published last week in the wake of the survey by the ATL which states that around 40% of teachers have been subject to abuse by parents and that around one third of teachers in primary schools have been subject to physical violence by pupils. This account, from the BBC News site is chilling –

A six-year-old completely trashed the staff room, put a knife through a computer screen, attacked staff and we had to call the police.
“Another six-year-old attacked staff and pupils with the teacher’s scissors.

- and there are many more where that came from.

Then there was this, from the Guardian –

Some 40% of teachers surveyed said student behaviour had got worse over the past two years, while 58% said it had worsened over the past five.

I’m amazed at such low numbers. I can only assume that the teachers surveyed who did not think that behaviour had worsened in the last two or five years are either working at top end state schools or in the independent sector.

But for me, the quote of the week came from Dr Susan Greenfield in We don’t need a Twittericulum in the Telegraph.

…we are rearing a generation of kids that are in danger of becoming emotionally stunted, inarticulate, hedonists with the attention span of a gnat.

I’d argue with the “in danger of” part, because there are a large number of kids who are already there, in my experience.

Still on the topic of behaviour, yet on a slightly different tack, I read this article in the Times, about the fact that teachers are being targeted by unruly pupils both at school and at home. I have to say, I often walk to the car park at the end of the day wondering whether that’s the day my car will have been keyed, or been broken into. Not that I keep anything in there worth nicking, mind you. But again, kids know that at worst, all they’re going to get is a finger wagged at them and probably a stiff talking to – and they don’t give a toss about that.

I don’t advocate corporal punishment, but we really need to find things that we can do to try to curb the worst excesses of behaviour. In the majority of cases, I’d imagine that parents either don’t or aren’t able to exercise any discipline at home, so taking away the X-Box or PS2 isn’t an option. Detentions at 7am was something one school I was at was thinking about trying – although whether they were actually going to go to pupils houses and haul them out of bed was never made clear. Detentions on Saturday mornings during which pupils would be expected to do the work they hadn’t done in class – but again, who is going to make sure the little dears turn up? Perhaps that’s where the suggestion I’ve often seen, that in the case of parents on benefits, those benefits are reduced in some way if the kids don’t turn up – could be applied, although again, I have no idea how such a system would be operated.

The point is though, that something needs to be done, and it needs to be done fast. Someone – and clearly, despite his name the current education secretary does not have them – with serious cojones needs to say “stuff the league tables and sort out these kids”.

Oh look. There are those pink flying things again. Oink!

I went to Tescos this morning with my youngest daughter. My husband takes our eldest to her swimming club on a Saturday morning, so I usually go out and do stuff. Anyway, we decided we’d get some breakfast in the cafe – we got our food and sat down.

At the table behind us were two boys. If the eldest of them was more than eleven, I’d be surprised, and I imagine the other boy was his younger brother. There was no adult with them, and I assumed that their mum must have dumped them there while she did the shopping. That’s bad enough, but for these boys, breakfast was a six-pack of McCoy’s crisps, coke and a box of chocolate doughnuts. They were loud and rather obnoxious, talking, laughing and telling each other to “piss off” at the tops of their voices. At one point, the elder boy decided to “accidentally” fall onto the floor – and at that point, I went over to a member of staff to point out that these two boys were unaccompanied, behaving very badly and using foul language. I went back to my seat, and my daughter told me that the man opposite – who had arrived with his wife and baby – had told the boy to get up. The boy was back in his seat, but made some comment which I didn’t hear, because the man who’d told him off said “if you want to play, go to the park.” The boy answered back “well, you can go to the park” or something and he and his brother carried on talking and giggling very loudly.

Finally, the member of staff I’d spoken to came back with either the store manager or someone from security who asked the boys if they had an adult with them. They said no. He then told them that they weren’t allowed to be in there without an adult and that also, they were only allowed to eat food that had been purchased in the cafe. The elder boy then piped up that their dad was waiting in the car outside, and then they left. You could hear the collective sigh of relief from those of us sitting in the vicinity.

But you know what? I actually felt quite intiminated by the older boy. Perhaps it was because I had my daughter with me (she’s six), but really, that kid is going to grow up into the worst kind of knuckledragger.

But what kind of parent sits out in the car, lets their kids go around Tescos on their own picking up crisps, coke and doughnuts (such a nutritious breakfast!)? And yes, that’s a rhetorical question, because I know the answer only too well.

I have to deal with rude, obnoxious and threatening kids for forty weeks of the year. I don’t particularly want to encounter them when I’m off duty!

Another case of the meeja finally catching up with something we’ve known for years – Clever boys dumb down for fear of being bullied – or worse.

Sadly, it’s all too true. The insult of choice in most secondary classrooms these days seems to be “gay” – but “nerd” or “boff” seems to be running it a close second at times. I regularly come across boys who don’t want to answer questions or appear to be good at something (other than football) because then they’ll get labelled as “clever”. And it’s not just boys, although as the article points out, it doesn’t seem to be quite as bad for girls.

Now, I know this is nothing new. I’m sure this will come as a shock to those people who know me, but… I was the school swot, and back in the dim and distant past (aka the seventies) when I was at school, my nicknames were, variously, “prof” and “boff”. But guess what? I liked that other kids thought I was clever – and most – if not all – of the time, those nicknames were used good-naturedly.

But I just don’t understand this need to ridicule someone for being good at something. Oh, I get where it comes from, sometimes – but we’re all good at different things, so why should a child be ridiculed because they’re good at maths or french or music? They might – like me – be utterly crap at PE, so it evens out!

But there’s another thing. It’s okay to be good at sport. Why is that “allowed”, while being good at an ‘academic’ subject “isn’t”?

And yes, that’s a rhetorical question. Although you should feel the freedom to tackle it if you wish.

This article from the BBC – Pupil TV habits concern teachers – dares to suggest that parents should take more responsibility for what their children watch on the telly.

Of course they bloody-well should! I sometimes let my eldest (she’s nine) watch documentaries that not made for children if it relates to something she’s studying at school – but I either watch with her, or watch it myself while I record it for her so that I can check it’s okay for her to watch.

Although of course, the article talks more about Big Brother and soaps, neither of which we touch with a bargepole in this house, although I will confess to enjoying Little Britain. It’s absolutely true that all the staff at school used to be relieved when the show went off air, because we’d had enough of hearing “compu’er says no” or “eh, eh, eeehhh”, every ten seconds. I deal with Vicky Pollard-types every day and much as I loved Lauren (Catherine Tate’s horrid, yet so accurate mouth-on-a-stick schoolgirl), I could have throttled Tate for creating her!

Is there a way to get kids quoting Aaron Sorkin instead? That, I could live with.

I’m just sayin’.

I’m not a History teacher, and I’m not a “trained” Historian – but the idea of kids learning even less history than now isn’t something I regard as a good idea. I’m not an expert, but I’m very interested in the subject and know a fair bit about certain periods. My eldest daughter, who is nine, is a complete history geek and has been ever since she was introduced to it via the Great Fire of London in year 1.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that, if you’re going to have a true sense of who you are and where you’re going, it’s important to know the “backstory” – where you came from (and I don’t just mean personal or family history) and how you got ‘here’. I remember talking to a class of year 7s who were moaning (again) about having to learn French – about the Norman Conquest. They had no recognition of the date of 1066 and no idea who fought in the battle or who won. One of the most oft-quoted dates in British history and they hadn’t got a clue. Okay, so that’s going back a fair bit, but it has a relevance to the evolution of our language, our legal system and many other things besides – and … nada. Zip.

So I think we should be teaching more history and not less.

And on top of this, comes the great idea that kids should be taught How to Blog.

Now, I’m all for promoting a greater facility in the use of the written word. I’ve often said that it’s… rather ironic, at a time when the written word is being used more than ever, what with emails and texts and blogs and Facebook and the like – that the general ability of people to use words correctly is shrinking greatly. And I’ve also said frequently that people need to be very careful about what they write and send or post, as it’s very easy to misconstrue something that you read when you can’t see or hear the person with whom you’re communicating. But that’s not something you learn how to do in IT, is it?

I think we have a shorter school day now than when I was at school, and yet the-powers-that-be are trying to pack in more and more. The article I linked to above talks about an “overloaded” timetable – so for Pete’s sake, stop trying to shoehorn in silly, faddy things like a GCSE in Twitter and leave room for the “proper” subjects, like History.