Election and TES news

Hello from London once more!

After last weekend’s TES, and the many things that happened since my last blogpost, I wanted to write much sooner (as always), but alas, life happens :-) Once of my favourite things to take place over the last weekend was a theatre visit to the National Theatre and the great play Women beware Women. The NT has a fantastic scheme at the moment that they are selling £30 tickets in the best area of the theatre for £10 to students and if you are clever enough to bring a copy of your passport and the signature of someone who knows you, you can even sign up to their under 25 scheme and get the first performance for free (with further ones only £5!). This is amazing! I have really only discovered the theatre recently after watching Le Misanthrope with Keira Knightley, and then The History Boys two weeks later and with the NT giving away such cheap tickets, its sure that I am going to go down to London more often now to indulge. I especially liked the end of Women beware Women because it climaxed in a 5 minute scene where all of the central characters came together in the montage of a party where everybody was seduced by sin and many of them actually die. It’s incredibly dramatic and with a turning stage and pitch perfect music, really sent shivers down my spine!

If anybody is reading from outside the UK: Our general elections happened last week and basically resulted in a big mess where the winning party (the conservatives for the first time in 13 years) did not get enough votes to ‘dominate’ the parliament and provide us with a prime minister. The other party (Labour), which had been in power since the dawn of time, did only get a few less votes and now where is talk about them teaming up with the third party, the liberal democrats. All three parties have quite different views on how to run the UK and it is most entertaining to watch them try to sort themselves out. Most likely there is going to be another election, but for now, every day there are more news which tip the scale in different directions. Today, the old labour prime minister resigned (possibly to sacrifice himself in order to enable better conversations with the liberal democrats) and today the new prime minister, the leader of the conservatives, basically set an ultimate for the lib-dems.

One thing that really annoys me is that although the conservatives promised more state funded free schools, or new academies as they call them (see earlier blogpost), in a conversation with the TES Mr Gove, the possible next secretary of education, basically said that they would need to adapt to the exact same tests ‘with rigorous accountability’. Now, he might not have understood that the whole concept of free schools is to be except from state tests (with the possible exception of maths, one foreign and the native language in the Scandinavian model). Although I agree that the ‘teaching to the test’ would be slightly more creative in his 'new academy idea, it remains that the state dictates what children will need to know at a certain point in their lives and it disregards it whether they are ready for it or not and/or how quickly they will acquire the knowledge.

I also read an article about homeschooling in Germany and how it can result in the parents going to prison because it is illegal. At the beginning of this year a German family was even granted asylum in the US in order to be able to educate their children at home. As much as I am a supporter of homeschooling and greater freedom of education, I have to say that the article was quite radical even for me. Yes, of course it is wrong to punish people severely for wanting to educate their children at home, however to say that ‘parents are dissatisfied with conditions in regional state schools where classrooms are overcrowded and bullying and drug problems are not uncommon’ is, in my opinion and experience, quite an overstatement. Although I have to say that I went to a very good (state) school, I never heard about problems to this extend from other schools. I bet that they do exist, but not more than in the UK (teenage pregnancy rate, anybody?) and other countries in Europe.

Two and a half weeks until the end of my placement… Very mixed feelings.

Con-Lib?

My Year 7's had to take a French test this week (Reading and Listening) and this is the illustration I got on one of the backs of the papers. It summs up very neatly what I have been thinking about tests all along. To make it more bearable for everybody I try to be as positive as possible, but somehow it did not seem to have worked on this pupil. Bless...

On a more positive note, I passed my QTS Literacy skills test today. After only four hours of sleep because of the election chaos last night (eg Should I feel guilty for having mixed feelings about the Tories coming to power- or not), that was quite surprising. It feels like we are living in really exciting times and I so much wish that I could have voted- unfortunately my citizenship papers are still on the way...

Live, love, laugh

Hello everybody and I hope that you had a good bank holiday weekend!

Now it is only 18 more teaching days and 27 lessons. Time has flown by so quickly that it is crazy to look back to Christmas and the dreading of the long spring months. Although I have found it relatively easy in the last weeks, I know that many of my friends were quite unlucky with their schools, tutors and classes and my biggest respect go out to those who have maintained their high spirits. The tile of this blogpost is a tattoo that my friend Lucy got as an antidote to the PGCE a few weeks ago!

With the end of the course, Cam*Era is also coming closer and closer and you can find more information about the festival on our newly improved homepage www.cam-era.org. Tom Hollander and Samuel Barnett, one of the History Boys, have agreed to come along for q&a's and the program is looking more exciting by the day!

But onto some education things. I attended a department meeting today and for various reasons it was the first one at my second placement school. Although mfl discussions are fairly boring if also necessary (eg speaking exams, how to help individual students, etc...), there was one topic today which got me quite upset and exceptionally engaged (yes, you are not necessarily too enthusiastic when the meetings are about stuff you are not going to experience at the end of the year): Picking teaching and exam topics for Year 10s and 11s.

The argument was that a lot of the languages students struggle with the range of topics in year 10 and that the new GCSE, introduced this year, has just made matters more complicated. Theoretically students have to complete writing and speaking tests in different subject areas over the course of the year but now another school has come up with the clever strategy to introduce a topic and then structure both writing and speaking assessments around it, The two tests have a different focus (eg different questions) but still the same range of vocab and sentence structures.

This might sound like a very good idea- double as much teaching for the same topic, greater understanding on part of the students and as a result better exam results. However, it would also limit the topic syllabus to three a year and hugely limit the range of vocab that the students learn. They would only be able to discuss the few topics they have been taught rather than double as many as before plus subjects would become huge 'chunks' of many weeks and if you did not feel connected to what are are being taught there is no change for more than two months!

As I have only discovered today that there are a few people out there who are actually reading my blog, I would be very interested in hearing your opinion on this topic. Is less really more in the case of language teaching and education in general?

Edinburgh and the volcano

Good morning from Oxford!

(As it seems I am spending most of my weekends here now and I love the town very much (mostly for the people who live in it but nevertheless), I am not allowed to comment too much on the boat race and the University Challenge victory three weeks ago. Hihi...)

Travelling in my holidays was very eventful. Going back to Germany turned out to be much more relaxing than I thought and even with lots of Cam*Era work and my dissertation (An analysis of an email exchange with a native speaker class) to write, I still had a few days to spend time with my family and friends. It's funny how much you can get done in a place where it is 1) quiet and 2) clean and 3) you don't wish you were somewhere else all of the time. I think I might go back in August for a few weeks to get the ISFA going properly. It's going to be launched at Cam*Era but will require at least a month of getting in touch with people and hopefully finding some sponsors!

I only came back to Cambridge for one day, just to head off to the Democratic Schooling seminar at the University of Edinburgh early the next morning. Edinburgh and the weather were beautiful and thanks to my amazing friend Holly, with whom I had also been to the AERO conference last year, it was a fantastic three days. The seminar itself on Friday morning was really interesting, but long not radical enough for me. I had the feeling that neither of the speakers were actually advocating democracy in schools but that it was rather about education in a democratic society without the input of people under 18- what a crazy but common idea. Although the topic of 'student voice' came up once or twice, it almost seemed to scare them to think about giving students real power. Commenting on it, I turned out to be the most 'radical' person in the room and people came up to me later, congratulating me on my revolutionary ideas. Very entertaining :-)

Unfortunately we were in Scotland just as the volcano erupted, so Holly and I were both forced to travel back to England by coach- but at least in comparison to a lot of my friends I did not need to get a range of public transport and a few days to get back home! I got to Southampton just in time to film the Student Robotics Competition my friends put on every year and was actually quite excited to get back into the editing room this week. Editing is ultimate organisation and I really like that you can immediately see progress as soon as you spend a little bit of time with your film. Although some of my friends were stuck abroad, it was still lovely to see a lot of the competition people from last year again and the event itself went really well.

Back in Cambridge, it turned out that seven teachers from our school were not able to get back and I had to cover a couple of lessons as well as a parents evening. While the former was quite annoying (and I was still lucky to cover my favourite German classes), the parents evening was great. Of course I had been to a couple before, but actually being the only one sitting behind the table turned out to be hugely satisfying. In the UK parents come to the evening together with their kids and its really nice to be able to praise children who deserve it in front of people who are pleased by it as well. The annoying kids normally don't come, so I approach it more or less as two hours of making people happy. Of course I also have to criticise sometimes, but it's long not as bad as you would think. And it shows- the students are always nicer the next days :-)

Now it's only 24 more teaching days until the end of my PGCE and 54 days until Cam*Era!

Let the sunshine in

Hello to a very long overdue blogpost!

Once more I am on the train to London, not quite feeling productive enough to get on with some Cam*Era work and definitely not depressed enough to get on with some lesson planning, so here we go: An update on the travelling and education that is happening in my life at the moment. :-)

But first for some film! As you might remember from January, the National Student Film Association now has a new committee and my journey this morning will lead me to the National Theatre and our first (and possibly only) committee meeting for this year. New committee members are coming from as far as Scotland to discuss what we can do for film students in the UK and I really hope to make their journey worth as much as possible. Of course the past has shown that even with lots of talking, very little can get done, but I keep my fingers crossed! Screentest was, after all, a great success and there is definitely great potential to make the NSFA something outstanding. I have the feeling that one of the most discussed points today is going to be money and the question where we are going to get it from, what it will pay for if we get it and if the NSFA should ever be considered as an organization which pays its committee. Not that I am desperate to get money for what I love doing anyway, but again experience has shown that money definitely increases people’s commitment. Discuss.

Cam*Era preparation are also going fairly well. Although we have so far only received a disappointing number of films, the weekend itself is shaping up to be amazing with great speakers, Corpus Christi and the Picture House cinema as venues and alumni returning to the uni as judges for our awards. Lots of website changes are just under way and we are launching a major advertising campaign this week to get more people to submit. So, if you are reading this and have not yet joined our facebook group, waste another minute of your precious sunny Saturday by going on facebook and inviting all your friends. Please. Done? Thank you!

But on to something less fun but maybe just as exciting. Elections. What, I hear you shout? Exciting? Rather annoying. Yes and no. This is the first year that I am actually aware of the all the general election circus that is going on in the UK and of course my major points of concern are Education: Primary, Secondary, FE and HE. The former is the only one I am not involved in directly at the moment but as the Sats boycotts are on the brick of being on the way (or not?!), it still feeds into the everyday discussion in the staff room and beyond (be thankful if I have not tried to engage you into an outraged dialogue yet!). For anybody who does not live in the UK: SATs are generalized standard tests and all UK children have to take in Year 6, the end of their primary school time. If you have read my blog in the last year you will know that I dont like tests but that, of course, the matter is not as simple as that. The interesting bit at the moment is that of course every party has different policies on it (The Tories want to move it to Year 7, The LibDems want to get rid of it and Labour is not sure).

The thing that really gets me annoyed is that it is actually only the Democrats who are proposing a free school, or rather as it is called in the UK a 'Academy system': more independence for school leaders, teachers and communities and financial support from the government. Although the TES has recently taken to condemning it (and who could blame them, being the Labour paper that they are), which got me quite upset last week, I am still very much in favour of communities being able to administer their own schools and not having to 'teach to the test'. Have a look at the online discussion and I will give you my 2 cent when I have carefully consider whether I would actually dare to think about voting for the conservatives. Shudder.

Kings Cross! More news on the meeting for Democratic schooling in Edinburgh and teaching in Volcano Ash times in a bit :-)

Drink for thought?

'Now is the time to get drunk! To stop being the martyred slaves of time, to get absolutely drunk - on wine, poetry, or on virtue, as you please.'

~Charles Baudelaire, "Enivrez-vous," Paris Spleen, 1869

Good old Charles! But where to start? Spending most of the weekend in bed, working on Cam*Era and spending a Saturday night 22nd birthday party half asleep has made me realise how much I am actually wasting my youth. These are maybe my last months as a student and somehow I have to find a way to celebrate that a little bit more! The PGCE is rubbish for extensive shenanigans because I have to be at school at 7.45 every day, but after all that's what weekends should be there for. Staying in bed and playing Mario Kart half of the day is not really the ideal image I have of myself (bless Schopenhauer).

General boredom and the wish to escape life once more in the following weeks led me to ponder my two favourite questions: 'Who/what do you love?' and 'What makes you happy?' It turns out that after some months of inner calm and business, the answers are not as easy anymore. All I know is that my festival work is one of the answers to both questions and that teaching has fallen off the radar a little bit which was unexpected. But that also means that I now have to find a way to hang on to the event organisation stuff as much as I can.

Before I give up on education however (and I doubt that will ever seriously happen), two exciting events are still waiting for me. In four weeks time I am going up to Edinburgh to attend a seminar on democratic schooling, as mentioned in the last days. I think part of the reason why I am not so enthusiastic or rather idealistic about education anymore is because I am working in an environment where everybody is counting the days to the next holidays and dreading tests. Meeting some people again who love the concept of education and actually want to make things better for everybody might just be the spark I need. And then of course there is the AERO conference this summer- can't wait!

Finally there are going to be some adventures abroad again!

Homeschooling?

I started this article this morning at 6.30 when I was just having breakfast, listening to last.fm, and thought I would share two quick, education related things that happened yesterday.

The first one was a professional studies session on 'homeschooling'. As part of the PGCE, we have professional development for an hour a week and generally somebody from the school comes in to tell us about how to get a teaching job, consider special needs or approach A-Level teaching. So all in all very mainstream stuff. But behold, yesterday, the schedule came up with the interesting idea of 'homeschooling'. As you can imagine if you have followed this blog for a while, I approached the session with a keen interest to hear about the school's provision for children who can not/ do not want to come to school and who are online affiliated to and supported by it. Of course I was wrong. Homeschooling in fact related to the idea of liaising between home and school, so talking to the parents/ guardians whenever their child had done something great/very bad. While this was interesting as well, it was really not the glimmer of hope I was after and I felt clearly mislead by the term homeschooling. Although the homeschooling I had imagined is not illegal in England, it is still fairly uncommon. Currently, there are around 50,000 children who are educated at home.

The Easter holidays are now approaching faster and faster and I have decided to go up to Scotland for a seminar on European Democratic education. My flights are booked and hopefully I will be able to learn a lot which I will also be able to use able to use for my AERO workshop in June. I can't wait to see all of the lovely people at the conference again and wish I could stay more flexible with my plans for next year so that I had the option to just stay in the States. Unfortunately that is not possible due to general life admin (including the need to book flights in advance) and the dream might have to wait for another year.

The second education related thing that got me thinking yesterday was my first parents evening. A friend of mine who is doing the same course described it recently as 'speed-dating'. Everybody wants to hear something truthful but on the other side you really want to try to get along. In Germany, parents evening is only for adults while in the UK, students go together with their parents. I have to say that I approve of the UK version and it's nice to be able to talk to the kids one on one as well. Meeting the parents was fascinating and in a lot of cases explained a lot! A little, stroppy boy from my Year 8 class for example was clearly not even half as bad as his aggressive and defensive mother! I was there with the lady who normally takes the class as unfortunately I had only taught this group of kids three or four times and listening to her talk with extreme care and political correctness was really interesting.

I am not a parent and so can not imagine what it must be like for somebody else to criticise your own child. It was however very nice to see how a lot of parents clearly wanted to help their children. Funnily enough there were two sets of German/ Austrian parents and they were especially interested in how they could support the learning of their kids. Both groups mentioned that the amount of vocab learning is much smaller and that the expectations are much lower than in German speaking schools. This is really fascinating as I have not been in contact with German schools in a while and sometimes forget how much work we actually had to do for our language lessons- and I had English, French and Spanish in my last two years. At my school, the kids are barely given any homework in comparison and although I don't believe in homework being the answer and hope to inspire intrinsic motivation, maybe the parents were right and the standards are quite worryingly low- and nobody realises.

On a quick, film-related note I met this amazing young director last week at Screentest and I just asked him to come along to Cam*Era to talk about his work. It is very inspiring to actually find a really good young film maker amongst hundreds of good, but not remarkable ones! The quality of his film 'Who's afraid of the Water Sprite' is outstanding and I can really recommend to have a look at the trailer of his new film 'Bovine' here.

Only 8 1/2 teaching weeks left!

So Christmas and New Year whizzed by and as you can see we are already two and a half months into the new year. Madness.

I thought I'd update you on what is going on with my PGCE. Before the PGCE students went into the second block placement (6+6+5 weeks intersected by half term and Easter break), we were told that February was going to be a dark month. No sleep, continuous preparation, classroom management issues, missing support and lots of marking. Oh, plus our biggest assignment yet: 1C, with 8000 words to write on a study that we have to design ourselves. Now, I would love to be melodramatic and go: Boy, were they right! But the truth is that I am doing fine.

Yes, I have been very lucky with my school (which is only a few minutes away from my house), my mentor (who is awesome and tries to adapt the program to what I want to get out of it) and my classes (which the exception of one which I swear is made of monsters in training). I would not go as far as saying that I enjoy it all the time, which I don't, or that I don't feel challenged at times (see the monsters), but overall I am ok, sane and fairly healthy. This however is quite a stark contrast to a lot of the other PGCE students many of whom have not been as lucky as I am in either of the three respects above and sometimes don't get home until 6pm and then have to get onto marking books.

Through a miracle I am only teaching 9 classes a week and have time to be chair of the NSFA, run the Cambridge Student Film Festival and visit my friends in Oxford and London over the weekend. I have to say that the latter three contribute hugely to my emotional balance and that in a way, they make me enjoy my time at school much more because of the diversity of the things that I am doing. This afternoon for example I am going to meet up with people from the university to discuss collaboration opportunities for Cam*Era, the film festival. Sometimes it feels like the film projects are my real work- they demand more attention but also give me much greater high points once something works out. Last week for example, I paid in a cheque of £3000 sponsorship money for Cam*Era.

The one thing that is really exhausting about the PGCE is the continuous assessment. Being a teacher on a training course is a little bit like being an actor who has three auditions a day- you have to be good all the time. Professional teachers observe your lessons almost every single time and write comments on very scary blue sheets of paper with one copy going to the faculty of the university and one going to your personal mentor at the school. It is sometimes quite funny to see how a really positive lesson can turn into a nightmare on paper or vice verca!

I am still glad that I am doing it and it will ultimately also be very beneficial for my CV. As the majority of the PGCE students I have also had my doubts, but now there are only 8 and a half weeks left and I am sure that I will be able to complete those as well! What comes after will be another matter completely and I doubt very much that it is going to involve secondary school language teaching but that my future will rather lead in back into the direction of film or event management... We will see :-)