I thought I'd make a little montage of education related stories I've read recently and my reactions to them.
Part of me thinks this is a good marketing strategy... the rest of me despairs that this is necessary. I can only think of two reasons the kids don't want to do these diplomas, one, they haven't given it any consideration and gone for the simpler option, or two, they have considered it and decided to go with the one that will give them the better chance of getting into a good uni. Hollyoaks can only help with the former, not the latter reason.
I actually don't know how I feel about this. Shorter terms with small breaks might really help with concentration, and to prevent teacher burn out. They might also mean more parents taking their kids out of school in the summer, as the summer vacation period will become even smaller and more expensive.
In my opinion stories like this one are severely damaging to the general morale of the teaching profession. Of course there are bad teachers, and of course they should be found and either helped to become good teachers or else 'moved on' as Jim Knight put it. All stories like this do is give the media and the public fodder to claim that all of society's ills (including anti-social behaviour, poor numeracy and literacy in our young people and the economic downturn) are entirely the fault of teachers in general, and bad teachers in particular.
This independent reader missed the point entirely, when she complained about her daughter receiving numerous after school detentions. By concentrating on the inconvenience of the detention's timing, this parent ignored the fact that the child is clearly disrupting the learning of the other children in her school.
And finally, if anyone can demonstrate how this new assessment for GCSE oral examinations can be fairly administered then I'd be most grateful to hear it.
3 comments:
the short summer holidays would be a disaster in reality. Can you imagine every parent of a school aged child in an office requesting the same 2 weeks annual leave?
Just read the article about bad teachers. I notice that there is no mention at all of what a bad teacher is considered to be? Is it someone who cannot control a class? Someone who just reads a lesson from the front of the class and gets children to copy things down? Someone who doesn't know their subject?
I think they'd get 4 in the summer and 2 weeks every other time, but you're right, it would be stupid.
I think their failure to describe a 'bad teacher' is very telling. They clearly don't understand teaching as a profession, and are going for sound bites. I'm a little scared about entering a profession which will be micro managed by ministers who don't understand what teachers do on a day to day basis or what difficulties they have to deal with.
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