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?
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