Today was my 7th 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...
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