This post kind of harks back to something I’ve been complaining about for, and it’s an issue that is really starting to concern me. I have some bright kids in my class, and some totally hopeless ones. They both need attention. But plans to take even more money from the Gifted and Talented programme and give it to bright kids from deprived backgrounds (again) seems to show that there is only one group of interest to politicians.

We have so many initiatives and schemes already in place for the kids from deprived backgrounds; special reading groups and measures with one-to-one tutoring. Extra funds and rewards for those pupils who acheive that crucial C grade at English or Maths. We talk about our ‘deprived kids’ in staff meetings, and attend lectures on social mobility. But I can’t remember the last time I heard someone say something about ensuring some our brightest kids achieve the best they can. In fact the general consensus is that they’re likely to get an A or a B, so why bother? They’ll be fine; we’ll hit our league table targets. All is good.

This attitude is failing kids in exactly the same way that we are always accused in the press of failing kids from deprived backgrounds. These bright kids have a certain potential, and we are not pushing them to fulfil it for fear of not doing enough for the less able pupils. It’s like some kind of inverted elitism. When did we stop caring about being the best and just settle with, that’ll do?

 This article from the TES, which I finally got round to reading in yesterdays staff meeting, is quite interesting – though as usual it does annoy me when the papers ‘report’ on something revolutionary with bold type and a big headline, which is merely a repetition of complaints heard in staffrooms up and down the country for years.

Frank Furedi, who often lectures on education, says our fear of kids being bored is leading to over-innovation – i.e everytime results aren’t what the government hoped for some overpaid bright spark says that pupils aren’t motivated anymore and we must therefore have ‘more innovative and dynamic lessons to really get them engaged’. We must develop several new IT programmes to help with this innovation, draw up a list of targets to aim for and put together some sort of quango to ‘drive this agenda’.

Problem is, this is now happening almost daily. My pupils are so overstimulated they now start shaking if there’s more than a ten second silence; which means my Monday morning solution of ‘quiet reading on your own while I try to deal with this epic hangover’ is tragically a thing of the past. Leaving me attempting to motivate and inspire a group of hormonal, over-hyped teenagers while juggling a sore head and alarmingly blurry vision. Perhaps we’re all just too over stimulated now?

Every day so far this week, students have been asking me to explain what a ‘hung’ parliament is, while trying to hold back fits of giggles.

This has been annoying because, even though I like puns, hearing the same one in every class (sometimes more than once) is just too much. It’s also irritating because by the time I finally worked how to actually answer the question, it was all over and we ended up with a coalition.

As we saw last week, most of the parties had fairly similar plans regarding education but the thing the Conservatives and Lib Dems seem to have reached an instant agreement on is Pupil Premiums and how to fund them.

Although it looks like the money will be coming from child trust funds, I’ll be interested to see how they actually implement the cuts and whether they are across the board or they keep the trust funds for low-income family.

It’ll be a shame to lose child trust funds but I don’t think they would have ever lived up to the expectations some journalists laid out of these funds helping to encourage and glamorise saving money. As a teacher (although certainly not a particularly financially-savvy one) I cant help but think that actually teaching personal financial management in school would me more effective.

Now that almost all university students in the country will end up in debt, preparing them for it while they are still at school and teaching them how to manage it could be a far more valuable investment than a child trust fund.

So the Blues, the Reds and the Yellows have had their say, they’ve pontificated about standards and change and laid our their Manifestos of the Mostest. But what do they really say?

Having finally spent the holidays having a look at the three main options – because, really, that’s all there is – a few things strike me:

• They are all really similar, especially Labour and the Tories, one of whom must have definitely copied off the other in the manifesto exam.
• Academies, despite what everyone says, are here to stay in some form or another - whoever you vote for (though make sure it’s not the Lib Dems because ‘Sponsor Managed Schools’, sounds rather scary, and alarmingly vague)
• Labour have promised to protect budgets from spending cuts, but they’ve not said how, and I’d like to know being as they haven’t managed to do this so far.
• The old problem of how you really establish what is ‘Good’ is raising its ugly head again, especially if teachers are to be paid more if they’re Good, under the Tories. I just think this will lead to lots of teachers trying to hit ‘good’ targets (which are arbitrary at best anyway), without actually teaching.
• I am very concerned about Labour’s plans to have parents ‘initiate change’ at schools. How, when, why? When most of them can’t be bothered to feed or discipline their kids, why on earth do they get a say in how I do my job?
• How, and in what way, is the Education Standards Authority any different from Ofsted?

Overall, it just reeks of more of the same – which means they seem to think things are ok with education. Which they are categorically not.

Today’s image is from: i.thisislondon.co.uk

I don’t know how many education academics it takes to change a light bulb, but if this article in the Guardian is anything to go by, it takes at least 14. Of course, most teachers are able to change a light bulb by themselves, as long as they have the required health and safety permit for using a ladder!

The article isn’t actually about light bulbs, though. It’s about a group of 14 leading education academics who – presumably after extensive research, pondering, and tea-drinking – came up with the revolutionary idea that political intervention in schools is ‘counterproductive and damaging’.

Now, education academics don’t change light bulbs themselves. They prefer telling other people how to do it then analysing the results from the safety of their university campuses. Sometimes, this results in great teaching advice. A lot of the time, though, it just results in fads that aren’t practical in a real classroom situation.

This time, however, I think they have done themselves proud and come up with a very sensible solution. Placing emphasis on the actual lightbulb-changers and letting them use their lightbulb-changing experience to change light bulbs effectively, without being micro-managed by a bunch of politicians who’ve never felt the hot glass of a freshly burnt-out bulb on their own fingers, is a great idea.

It’s such a great idea, in fact, that I’m surprised it hasn’t been thought of already. Hang on a minute… It has already been thought of – by just about every teacher in the country. When two people invent or discover the same thing in different places with no influence on each other, it might be considered independent invention.

However, when an entire profession comes up with the same idea, it’s just common sense. Why does this common sense have to reach the government in such a roundabout way? Why can’t they just go to a school and ask a teacher?

I’m not proposing that schools should be based entirely on suggestions from teachers, but when the feedback channels between teachers and those in charge become so convoluted and clogged up with paperwork that even simple, common sense needs to be delivered to them by education academics, it’s time for a change.

Maybe some of the changes suggested by these academics will be taken on board, maybe not. Either way, I applaud them for getting these ideas into the public eye. It’s just a shame that it needs to come from educational academics rather than directly from teachers in order to get any attention.

Today’s image is by Gabriel Del castillo.

I’ve been following the ‘Balls vs. Johnson’ Latin debate avidly over the last few weeks. Being a bit of a linguist myself, I find the debate about whether the fact that Latin is not a living language can be compensated for by how useful it is in academia or its propaedeutic values when learning other languages later on.

While I was doing some background reading on Balls and Johnson, I was a little surprised (and disturbed) to find out that the ‘Balls Johnson’ dance is a kind of male genital gymnastics.

The thing I was most surprised about, though, was that the comments on all the blogs I’ve read about this debate seem to centre on who would win a fight between Ed and Boris rather than whether or not Latin is actually useful to learn at school.

The Guardian’s article, as well as the customary mention of Boris’ £250,000 salary for his column in the Telegraph, offered such gems as “Is he going to butt him in the Ed or the Balls?” from commenter ‘Spoonface’.

The fightin’ talk in the comments beneath the original article on the Telegraph’s website was a little more surreal with one commenter calling for “40 lashes with a wet noodle!”.

The best ‘Balls vs. Johnson’ article I’ve seen so far is over at adamsmith.org. It has a great picture of Ed Balls rocking out and looking a little like David Brent. It’s also well-balanced and contains a lot of common sense. The main reason I like it, though, is because mentions that Balls thinks Latin is ‘harmful’.

I can think of a lot of negative adjectives people use to describe Latin. ‘Boring’ or ‘irrelevant’ are the first two that spring to mind, but I don’t see how learning any language could be ‘harmful’.

Teenagers like ‘harmful’ things, though. ‘Harmful’ things are ‘cool’. Warnings on cigarette packs don’t put kids off smoking, they just make it more intriguing to them. Maybe language teachers could harness this reverse-psychology make language-learning ‘cool’. Are modern foreign languages as ‘harmful’ as Latin? I’m not sure, but if I can make them seem ‘harmful’ enough, maybe my students will concentrate as hard in class as they do on avoiding getting caught smoking.

Right, I’m off to stick “Warning! Language-learning is harmful and my cause cleverness” labels on all my textbooks.

Original photo by Jenny Rollo, edited by SimonSays.

Thanks Flickr

Ah, another day, another ridiculous idea from the silly men in nice suits. New teachers are to be tested on their desk side manner, apparently.

 According to the BBC tests will be done to ascertain whether teachers have the “empathy, understanding and passion to ensure they have the qualities to be a good teacher.”

 Every new teacher is positively brimming with empathy, understanding and passion – at least for the first week or so, until the great machine of educational doom sucks the lifeblood from them and leaves them the same as their more experienced colleagues. Brow beaten, defeated and really pissed off. These traits do not a good bedside manner make.

 The test will be done not with actual children of course, but with a range of ‘on-screen questions’; a foolproof plan surely?

 When confronted with a screaming child, do you:
a) run away

b) try to calm the child down

c) quit your job.

 You answered b? Well done, you may now progress to a real classroom for you are ready to inspire young learners.

 This is classic, classic ignorant crap. You are testing a teacher’s ability to empathise with, understand and show compassion to children – without actually exposing them to any children. Genius, pure unbridled genius that is.

So, Micheal Gove has been talking about the need for weighted subjects, to stop schools entering students in supposedly easy subjects to improve their overall scores.  If this is indeed the case – as Matthew Taylor belives it is - then we do have something to worry about in education. Because purposefully getting children to underachieve is a frightening concept.

And yet, this idea of introducing weighting isn’t the solution. Firstly, we already have it – with maths, science and english (too right) being given special precedence – but then so is IT. And even the rest of the subjects we teach are privvy to a more subtle rating that centres around prejudice and misconception - (is media studies really a ‘monkey subject’? Some of my brightest students are taking it. And the art class puts in more after hours time than anyone else in the school.) The problem with this is that it forces perhaps the more creative and bright students to struggle through a geography A-Level they don’t want to do, because Drama and Art aren’t considered the right ‘level’ of qualification.

It’s all just more election crap – and if the Conservative solution to an apparent endemic of apathy in our schools is as unimaginative  and ineffectual as rating subjects then we really are in trouble.

The news recently about failing primary schools is putting everyone on edge; only this morning the assistant head Janet subjected me to a ten minute lecture – in front of the rest of the staff – for finishing the last of the coffee in the staffroom.

And now little Bobby’s parents Mr and Mrs Perpetually Irritating want to have a meeting with the head, which apparently I have to attend, about how this will affect their precious boy’s development and what we, as a school, intend to do about it. I expect what we shall do about will be what we always do which is to work our proverbials off, spend most of the holidays coming up with new action plans for Ed Balls, and then fail to meet his mercurial targets because they either don’t actually apply to us, don’t make sense or are impossible to achieve.

My most favourite of royals – I have a thing for people with big ears, bygones – Prince Charles has waded into the education fray again to say that constant reforms and new initiatives are failing teachers, who as a result don’t have time to train. Thank god someone has finally had the (Ed) Balls to say this.

Training for teachers is woefully inadequate, and while I don’t hugely want to spend my precious holidays and weekends ‘improving my craft’ I wouldn’t mind the opportunity to spend a few days every term away from the classroom with other teachers, sharing ideas. But there simply isn’t the time. Our non-contact time during the day usually involves detentions, speaking to parents or internal meetings and the entire rest of my life, it seems, is spent marking. So when are you supposed to improve?

That said, I doubt Prince Charles’ comments will make much difference, we’ll still have to spend most of the day chasing our tails and filling in reports about one agenda or other, but at least someone’s noticed.