'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!