After teaching undergraduates for two years at Trinity College Dublin, I realised that I loved the teaching more than the researching. I left with an MPhil and a hint of what I might do back in England.
I trained as a primary school teacher (may as well start at the beginning) and spent over ten years working in inner-city primary schools in Birmingham, London, Leicester and Great Yarmouth.
Having grown up in the kind of environment that some regularly state causes academic failure (my ex-steel and factory worker father is functionally illiterate and my textile factory worker mother left school at 14 in India), I find myself very much on the side of the traditionalists, who make no excuses for poor behaviour, who are seeking to resolve the actual problems in the education system and support appropriately, who spent their time developing their children intellectually in all subjects.
The debate is real, it’s needed and moving forward intellectual critique and challenge is required by and from all. Most of all the experiences of teachers need to be addressed, their questions and problems need answers and solutions. Data needs to be used to make our education system better not a stick to beat individual teachers with.
There are many positives that can come out of the Gove reforms and I believe that we need to meet the challenges with integrity, mature as a profession, and when we don’t agree with policies and ideas, come up with realistic alternatives. In short, it’s time to acknowledge the wrongs of the past, learn from them and move onto creating a best education system that we can for all children and not the best excuses for why certain groups continue to fail.
June 17, 2020 @ 12:59 pm
Well said.
(I used to teach 16-18 and over in colleges of FE) I started school in 1968 and year on year have seen a difference in the bar set for my own children going all the way through to postgraduate level.
I was once criticised by an Ofsted inspector for ‘alienating’ my students with a long word like ‘ergonomics.’ Some of my students, about half the class in fact, were Asian origin. Pakistani. I was alienating them. Apparently.
1 The subject was design history in a Business Studies A Level
2 The word was required as part of the syllabus, as was the other word he objected to; anthropometrics
3 I was not going to insult my students by underestimating their ability to learn a new word
4 Young people love the power of big new words, and learning means making leaps. That’s the whole point.
His comments were nothing to do with education, or even the needs of the class. It was some kind of socio-political snobbery in reverse. Which is to say, snobbery. My accent was ‘posh’ apparently.
Who was judging whom then?.
It does not serve our children well to enfeeble them.
Keep up the good work.
June 29, 2020 @ 1:59 pm
I’m sorry you had that experience. You are right though this is no way forward. We should be giving all pupils the benefit of our knowledge and experience not encasing them in one world. It’s funny as the same people then complain about why there is lack of representation elsewhere in the system but don’t make the link that it’s their own low expectations that are causing the problems.