Comprehensive schools, GCSEs and plum crumble

Today was my 7^th day at the Sawston Community College and as so much stuff has happened again in the last days, I thought I would update you on what is going on :-) At the moment, I am sitting in the staffroom, waiting for my lovely communting companion Catherine to give me a lift home. Days at Sawston are long: Staff starts at 8.15 and does not finish until half 3 and I am normally here another half an hour plus on each side. After that, I have to get stuck into lesson planning and uni assignments. Thank goodness, I have Tuesdays off, so my time is not yet quite as limited as it could be.

In my first week here at Sawston, I saw some very good and some questionable practice. One brilliant teacher engaged his students with short documentary clips and role play while another one just talked at them for an hour. I was also guided around the school by Year 8 pupils and had the chance to ask Year 7 students about their experience with the change from the primary school. All in all, I have learned a lot and many things became clearer to me. ‘Unfortunately’ I also realised that the whole school and teaching idea is not as easy as I thought. Having focused on alternative education and its benefits in the last years, I am having a hard time rejecting a lot of the ideas behind the comprehensive school system. One school that provides equal opportunities for all, no matter which ethnicity, class or ability, sounds great in practice but is, of course, impossible to sustain. Children from richer parents will generally go to schools higher up in the league tables that those from working class families.

When it comes to the practice I have seen in schools, it quite surprised me that the British National Curriculum and many new ideas encourage the individual, holistic development of the child and that many more options are available than I for example had in Germany. On the other hand, these ideas are not implemented and many schools and teachers only teach ‘for the exams’ rather than for actual skills the students will use later in life. They are much more interested in getting their kids through their GCSEs than to foster Claxton’s eight favourite skills: curiosity, courage, exploration and investigation, experimentation, imagination, reasoning, sociability and reflection. A teacher actually laughed at me when I started discussing these targets and said I would never get a job if I don’t ‘produce’ achieving students as a teacher.

And many students I talked to were just as caught up in their desire to ‘achieve’. I talked to a little girl about her Religious Education lessons and asked he why she had chosen them as one of her options. The answer was ‘because I am good at RE.’ Come on guys, religion should not be something you are ‘good’ at!! You might be interested in the concept of religion and/or might want to develop your faith but to chose a subject like that just to get higher GCSE grades is very sad.

The funny thing is that I only realised last week that only school makes people do/’learn’ something they might not like or be good at. Later in life, people (hopefully have the opportunity to) chose the job they want according to their own taste. Yes, I am all up for encouraging a well-rounded education, but many people go eventually into the area of work which they have enjoyed all the way long. So if you play computer games all day you are actually likely to become a games designer. If students are able to chose what they want to learn, they will be more engaged in the tasks and more active learning will take place. Further, they might also chose projects which will be able to make an active difference to the community around them, for example teenagers who like to garden will grow veg for their families and will feel a real sense of achievement.

On that note, I really miss looking after people so in case you fancy a piece of cake, just come to visit me :-) Tonight, there is home made plum crumble on the menu. Hmmmm...

Cambridge Matriculation dinner

OK, here we go. This blog entry is not going to be the brightest one because I have had quite a lot of wine but I am trying my best. :-) Just had my matriculation dinner at Homerton College in Cambridge and it was really good; the food and company was awesome and there was lots of free wine as well; good times! Homerton has ca 300 PGCE students and around 240 were there tonight. I met a few people from my course and from my placement but there were also a lot of new faces. At the moment, I am sitting at the train station in Cambridge and the next and last train to Royston is going to leave in 20 minutes so I thought it might be time to write some stuff for my blog again :-)

So, my first week of proper ‘teaching and learning’ observation is over and I have seen many positive as well as negative things. Plus there was always my book ‘What’s the point of school’ which challenged me all the way through and encouraged me to think critically about all of the things at hand- very much like a good teacher. I am not saying that all what the book says is right (as my friend Steve pointed out) but it is certainly interesting to consider different points of view and keep an open mind.

Today for example all of the 10 (female) PGCE students at my community college at Sawston were required to present what they had discovered in this week of observation and the focus was on ‘teaching and learning’. Now, all of the presentations were very good and I enjoyed them as well, the problem was just that none of the other people actually concentrated on the ‘learning’ criteria. As a teacher, I think you can get very tangled up in what you have to do; however how the students learn and what they think they are achieving is so much more important! Of course, you, as a teacher, should facilitated that learning, but all too often it is just the way you are responsible for the classroom or how many students are achieving your target grades that dominates your ‘learning facilitating’. ‘Learning is not about the teacher; it should all be about the students.

Tonight at my matriculation dinner, I talked to a few other teachers, expressing the view point that students should learn what they want to learn; that they should be able to learn at their own pace and that they should be able to have an influence on how their ‘learning communities’ are run; the basic principles of democratic education. Other students started to argue with me (which is great as it makes me question my own point of view and keep an open mind!) and I am truly enjoying finally being at a university where people are not afraid to voice their opinion. It is really amazing that I feel that I have finally arrived at a (geographical) place where discussion and interest are good things! Long live the geeks! :-)

Talking about which, I am going back to Southampton tomorrow night. I really think that I should stay here in Cambridge in the next weekends to make some more friends (and get to know the people on my course better) but I really miss my friends down in the South and can’t wait for tomorrow’s working day to finish. Although the journey down takes a very long time (3 hours) and is very expensive (£37 in advance) it will be all worth it- hopefully!

But back to Cambridge: Homerton College is really nice! After tonight’s dinner I can confirm that their food is truly awesome and that the people are really nice. :-) There was a candle light reception in the great hall for all of the new PGCE students (incl a drinks reception beforehand) and afterwards the principal of the college gave a really nice speech. Half of the people on my course and from my school are affiliated to Homerton and that seems to be the general statistics. The college is right next to the department so I guess that is one of the reasons why a lot of people chose it.

I would go back into my book and all of the stuff that I have discovered in the last weeks, but I am way too tired plus I don’t want to miss my stop which means that you will have to wait until tomorrow when I am on my train back to Southampton. Good night and I hope that you had an awesome week full of positivity!! :-)

'What's the point of school?' and Student Robotics

This week, my Post Graduate Certificate of Education started at the University of Cambridge. It is a one year long teacher training course of which 2/3 are based at placement schools. After this year, I will finally be qualified to teacher modern foreign languages (German, French and Spanish) in Primary and Secondary schools all around the world; extremely exciting! It will also allow me to top the course up with an MEd in 'Management and Leadership' to full time teaching a year later, which sounds very promising and will be all about initiative and innovation. The week has been extremely exhausting and rewarding and on Friday I already had my first day at the Sawston Community College, my first placement school and the first community college in the history of UK education. I am sure that there will be lots to report in the next weeks!

Thanks to all of my commuting time, I have also had the chance to start yet another book before the madness of the course will kick in properly next week and with it the required reading. The book in question is Guy Claxton’s ‘What’s the point of school?’. The best thing about this book is that it is actually English as in from the UK. I have read some wonderful education books from America, but to read something about A-Levels and GCSEs in the context of improving education is kind of magical! So, Claxton starts off with talking about why school is rubbish and then goes on to discuss what has already been done to change that (and how that has failed) and what really needs to be done to improve the situation. He calls for students to develop qualities of mind: curiosity, courage, investigation, experimentation, reasoning, sociability and reflection. Basically, skills that will equip them for the future. As a teacher, I absolutely agree, however I am still too inexperienced enought to be able to think of many activities that promote them. Something to work on in the next weeks! :-)

Now, one could argue that one of the ‘life skills’ is also reading. Although there has been a slight increase in students ability to read (although still many thousand students leave school without being able to read properly!), fewer and fewer actually enjoy reading. This is especially dramatic, as research has shown that ‘reading for pleasure outweighed every social advantage’ including the parent’s income. On average, students educated in ‘alternative’ schools or those who are un- or homeschooled, read much better and are more interested, absorbed and relaxed. In the end, it all comes down to the question 'What do children really need to learn'? A few weeks ago I would have said that children only need to learn what they are interested in, however, after observing what kind of skills are necessary to function within a society and be able to develop other skills, reading is one of the few things that I can not imagine somebody to live without.

I also started thinking about why students have so many exams and test. Of course they give teachers and parents the illusion that they are able to assess a learner's subject knowledge. What most of them don;t understand is that there are a million reasons why people can not do well in tests and that these don't necessarily reflect 'knowledge' at all. What is especially bad about the whole test system is the fact that the tests dictate what the students 'learn'. The modern foreign languages curriculum in the UK (which is enforced through tests and homework) tells students what kind of language they should be able to use at a certain point in their learning process. It does not encourage them to learn 'outside of the box' or use structures or vocab that have not been taught yet.

In my opinion, students should be able to chose what they want to learn (and say!!) and the main aim of education (in school or not) should not be to pass exams, but to develop students into healthy, happy human beings (‘Exams can be retaken for example while self-harm or drug addiction can require years of recovery’). Students in the UK are among the unhappiest and unhealthiest in the world! More than half (63%) of the students feel that school does not prepare them for life in the real world.

I could (and, probably in the near future, will) discuss some of other very interesting things Claxton touches on, however it is getting a little bit late and I just quickly wanted to tell you about the amazing weekend I had helping my friends from Student Robotics, based at the University off Southampton, prepare the 'Kickstart' of this year's robotics project with local 6th form students. Science in Action! :-) I Basically spent the time betwen Fri night 9pm and Sat morning 7am building and glueing together pieces of kit for the robots and then the rest of Satuday at the event itself. I had a fantastic time and it was so nice to see everybody!! The 6th form students now have 7 months to build robots and will return to the university in April for a big competition.

Two weeks ago, I submitted an article about the conference to the AERO magazine, which will be printed this week. Writing the piece took ages because I wanted to make sure that I described everything correctly and did not get too carried away by my enthusiasm :-D I hope that the readers will like it and of course it is quite an exiting prospect to be a published author very soon!

Democratic education in state schools

Three quick links to great articles about teachers and students developing a more democratic school life:

- 50 ways in which adults can support student voice by Adam Fletcher

- Issues by young people for social change by the FreeChild Project

- Boston Teachers' Union opens its own school, article in the Boston Globe

(Sorry this is a bit short, I am on my way to London! :-)

Primary experience, day 3 + Julie and Julia

So, I just wanted to write a very quick, very egoistic blog entry about how great my day was! Two fantastic things happened today (plus lots of little stuff) and both of them made me feel so good that I want to share that. Pkus there is a little bit of education stuff at the end. Just for those of you who just wanted to stop reading :-)

Firstly, I had another reall good morning in Barrington at the Primary School. I am spending every day in the same class and by now, I know some of the kids' names and they also know me. They also ask me for help and today I taught a Year 5 girl to round to the next whole number and decibel. In the end, she was able to do it on her own and even thanked me on her way out. Another girl showed me a fossil she had found on the beach and I also learned about story telling. Good times indeed. Maybe I should become a primary school teacher instead.

The second great thing that happened today was that I went to Cambridge to watch the premier of 'Julie and Julia' which I liked immensly. Although it is a little bit too long, I laughed a lot and the two stories and very well connected- it reminded me a little bit of The Hours, just much lighter. And the food!! My goodness, I got hungry just watching the fantastic dishes being prepared! :-) What I liked best however, was that both of the protagonists had men to cook for. I am a housewife at heart (although it really does not matter who I cook for!) and it is just not as much fun if you just do it for yourself.

Incidentally, with my new (own!) kitchen at my disposal, I started cooking my way through Gordon Ramsay's 'Cooking for friends' a few days ago and even started making strategic shopping lists instead of just buying what I felt like and then cooking what i had ingredients for. This is a kitchen revolution in my case! I am sorry if this diverges a little bit from the original theme of the blog but I thought maybe you should know that I am not just a teacher, student and education revolutionist but that I also love being in the kitchen. And that I am a dancer. And film lover and maker. And photographer. But enough complexity for today :-D

On a last educational note, I found Stop National Standarts today through Twitter and have started reading my way into the site. Powerful stuff although I am still not sure if some kind of standarts are not encouraging a more harmonious society. I am not saying that everybody should have to learn neverything and take tests to 'assess' knowledge, but I so think that every child should be learn basic maths, reading, writing and be introduced to science, history, sociology, politics and one foreign language. If they want to develop these basics once they are a little bit older: great! If not, they have at least been exposed to them so now can make the informed decision not to take them as subjects.

Democracy in universities and big bullies

(Peter Monkman, winner of this year's BP Portrait Award)

Commuting back and forth between Royston and Barrington allows me to find the time to get loads of cool reading done each day and of course if I am travelling all the way down to Southampton to see my friends, there is even more! So, reading the TES, the THE and my new book 'Why we teach' by Sonia Nieto this week(end), I came accross some interesting reading which I wanted to share with you.

In the Times Higher Education supplement, the topic this week was a comparison between UK and US Higher Education. Apparantly in the US, students have a lot more power when it comes to evaluating and as a result also firing staff. Of course uni is much more expensive, (in the UK the fee cap is at the moment on £3100 a year), and as a result they are comsumers and if they reject the 'product', their professors, they can easily be made redundant as a result. Although I am against the concept of individuals paying for their education (another whole topic of its own), of course I welcome to the idea of students having power over who teaches them! If a teacher is bad, he should improve or go; it's that easy! This level of power does not exist in the UK and on secondary school level, it can really only be observed in democratic schools. Apparantly in Bologna there was a university which was completely led by students- very exciting!

On the topic of uni fees, Nicholas Barr, professor of public economics at the London School of Economics has recently argued that universities should be able to charge higher and differents amounts of fees which I find absolutely horrendous. Yes, the quality of the education offered at different institutions may be different and may also impact on the graduates eventual earnings, but theoretically every student has the same chance to get into the 'better' unis which are already much wealthier than for example local colleges anyway. Poorer students will be priced out of prestigious courses because they can't afford them at the time and almost every student will need to repay a greater student dept- surely this is not the way forward!

It is already worse enough that subjects like Media and Film, the creative arts and sociology are treated as 'soft' options for college and uni students, but now New Zealand is thinking about rewarding uni students for taking up 'harder' subjects such as maths and science. This is a very difficult topic for me because as a film student, I would clearly argue that my media/film/engl lit/photography A-Levels were just as hard as the ones of my best friend who did Maths/ Further maths/ Physics. We both got 4 A's. However, I have to say that he had to work much harder for his uni course than I had to. Secondly, I am currently profiting from quite a big grant which the UK goverment is giving to all new language teachers so it would be hypocritical to write that 'rewards' for students taking up subjects the government classes as 'hard' are bad.

I also read about guns being allowed in US uni classrooms- as protection against students who want to shoot others. What the hell?? Is it not bad enough that hundered thousand of US secondary pupils are not going to school because they are afraid of bullies, do uni students now also have to stay at homes because they have to be afraid of guns???

My Primary School work experience- Day 1 and 2

In preparation for my PGCE, I am doing a week's worth of work experience in two different Primary Schools. Ones is a small village school a short train ride away with only four classes and the second one is the local town school in which there are eight. While the first one is Church of England 'owned' which means that the church only owns the building, the second one is (confusingly enough) 'aided' by the catholic church, which means that the church pays for both the staff and the building. I was actually only suppsed to work in the first one, but as it turned out that there are very few language lessons on offer, I decided to search for a second primary school to have a comparison and experience more mfl teaching.

So far, so good. Since this year, it is compulsary for primary schools in the UK (catering for Year 1 to 6) to introduce one modern foreign language from Year 3 onwards. This has both advantages and disadvantages. While it is great that children are exposed to mfl from a young age on, the school can choose which language they would like to teach and as such this might result in students arriving at their secondary school with different stages of knowledge of different languages. Secondly, almost none of the current primary school teachers are trained to teach a foreign language and many are scared to learn and teach something they have no experience in. With only 25% of GCSE students this year taking one mfl, this trend will only worsen in the next years.

Due to this reason, many teachers completely rely on pre-made books and resources. In a French lesson I watched in the local school today, the teacher proudly showed me how there was no further need to prepare lessons at all: you open the teacher guide book, start the smartboard and download a video from the internet. Very scary. But even worse than this was the horrible disciple in the school. Children were constantly shouted at ('Do what you are told, not what you want!'), bombarded with useless questions ('Why did you drop that pensil? Why? Why? Answer me!') and their spirits were constantly diminished by the teacher ('Don't stick up for your friend, it is not worth it!' and 'I don't want you in my class and I bet the teacher next door does not like you either'). One girl who had started crying because somebody else had hidden her shoes on the corridor was screamed at to pull herself together. Nobody listened to the children and frankly I was more than posivily surprised that they even participated in the lessons at all.

My original school however, Barrington Primary School, is a lot better and in my opinion that has very little to do with the fact that the school and the classes are smaller, but primarily with the staff. Every teacher addresses all of the kids with their names and they are always treated with love and respect. Even when they do something wrong, they are not made to feel that they are unwelcome but they are gently corrected and no big drama is made of the small mistakes. The whole learning environment is just completely different. The rooms are colourful and children are given time to complete their tasks at their own pace. There are still some questionable reward/punishment ideas going on (writing lines and gold stars) but i would much rather send my children there than to the other school!

Are schools prisons?

Through Twitter, I found this great, if also very controversial article this morning: Why schools are what they are by Peter Gray. He names the following reasons for the fact that our school system is so embedded in culture and society:

- school is what everybody else does; it's normal

- schools give parents they 'reassurance' that their child is being looked after in a 'useful' way

- you can 'predict' what children are being taught in schools

- schooling prepares children for 'high class jobs' which will give them a lot of money

- it offers an easy way to see who are the 'good' and 'bad' children

- schools give jobs (in the US there are 6.8 Million teachers alone)

- private and higher education makes a lot of money

Of course none of these reasons are really valid if you think about how unhappy some children are, having to go to school. However, I am emphasising some and with it disagree quite profoundly with Gray, who calls schools prison in his newest article Why students don't like to go to school. I know many people who were very happy in the school system. They enjoyed the social aspect of it (getting to know many new people you would normally never meet and of course seeing yor friends every day) and a lot of them also enjoyed the academic side and the fact that they were introduced to a wide range of subjects.

Grey would probably say now that they have been mind washed to accept the restrictions in the system and maybe that's true (, I am not going to argue with a psychologist about psychology here :-), but I have to say that although I did not really care much about my German school time (apart from finding many subjects a waste of time which resulted in me staying in the UK for my further education), I loved taking my A-Levels. I was able to research things I was very interested in, had adults who inspired me and whose knowledge was at my finger tips, had the resources available to me which I wanted and actually enjoyed the routine of the daily schedule.

However, it must be said that there is probably a big difference between US high schools and UK FE colleges! When I was in the US, I just found high school plain boring. The building was horrible, the teachers unfriendly and after a week, I was the best in all of my classes without making an effort (you see, I am very good in adapting to the system and maybe that's why I have trouble rejecting it as a whole- egoistic, I know). But again it did not feel like prison. Students were able to choose (in a limited way their time table and of course after school activities) and they were encouraged to take singing lessons, band, languages and music. And this is only again one specific example. I do not know what a 'real' high school in the US looks like. Maybe I should find out some time, considering how many children are actually 'trapped' in that system, to use Gray's expression.

Back in the UK

Crazy to think that I am already back in the UK since 5 days! My new flaat is great and on Thursday my furniture will be finally be delivered so I can move in properly. My primary school placement will start on Monday (after an NSFA meeting on Saturday in London) and uni will already begin a week later- where has the summer gone? :-)

To get back in the writing habit, I had another go at one of my old screenplays today and also wrote an article for the AERO magazine about the conference. Ron (Miller) is going to have a look at it tomorrow and I am looking forward to his comments and (constructive) criticism. Although I wrote around 40.000 words last year for my course, it took me a while to get back into the writing routine and I am already dreading the tons of assignments that are waiting for me on the PGCE!

Now that my four weeks in Paris have also come to an end, I wanted to drop down some quick thoughts on things you should not miss out on if you are in Paris:

- Walking up the butte de Montmartre in the evening, eating great ice cream and seeing Paris from the Sacre Coer

- Talking up a sport, in French, and meeting great people

- Going up the Tour Montparnasse at night, seeing the whole of Paris and the setting sun behind

the Eiffel tower

- Having a walk and lunch in the beautiful park of

the Musee Rodin

- Seeing Monet's Water Lillies in the Musee l'Orangerie

- Watching a documentary about Notre Dame in the cathedral at 9.30pm

- getting of at the Odeon Metro stop and wandering around St German de Pres

- visiting the Marais on Friday or Saturday night

- sitting on a bench in the Parc Luxembourg

- having lunch next to the crazy well of the Centre Pompidou

- experiencing free open air cinema at the Parc de la

Villette

- having lunch in the cute cafe on the first floor of the Louvre with a view of the Pyramides

- lying on the sun in the Paris Plage

- taking part in an awesome cycling tour of Paris

- having great, great pastries in the best patisserie in Paris, Laduree

- sitting on the Champs de Mars with a picnic

After all, I was very sad to leave Paris, but of course I am also extremely excited about the great things that lie ahead of me! Just the experience of working in a primary school is already something I am really looking forward to. May the new year begin!