Diary of a Trainee Teacher

Well knock me down with a feather – Balls is starting to make some popular decisions! As a linguist, SATS at 14 were never going to affect me directly, but as far as I’m concerned any opportunity to free children and teachers from the stress of teaching and learning to test is a good thing. They just have to get rid of the tests for year 6 pupils and we’re halfway there.

Yesterday I had a lecture confirming Ranting Teacher’s assertion that education is full of BSAs. ECM (every child matters), NEET (not in education, employment or training) and BSF (building schools for the future) were among the ridiculously long list thrown at me during this lecture, along with a lot of nice words about the ‘core entitlement for 2010′ – that schools will have to be open all day every day for adult learning and community activities, there will have to be a variety of activities offered and there should be lots of support for young people, meaning that teachers will no longer be expected to deal with everything themselves.

I spent the weekend in the North (which seemed especially grim due to the torrential rain). I was wet and miserable and tramping around scruffy rental properties (with much too high price tags on them) in a rough area of Leeds. Not pleased. It turns out all the viewings we’ve lined up were in the same area and we hated the area. We found an area we do like, but it’s a bit late now. We’ll have to take another trip. Fortunately the area we like is where my French course is, so perhaps I can combine the french course with some quality house hunting. Mister Meanor can always trust my judgement. We just don’t have the time to take another jaunt to Leeds before the course starts. 

This moving house stuff is very stressful, I’m not looking forward to buying one, if getting a rental is this frustrating.

The state of sex education in our secondary schools has always been a controversial topic, but with the introduction of sexual health clinics attached to some schools in Britain the issue has become even more hotly disputed.

Kids in Britain today receive seriously mixed messages.

Girls: dress in sexy clothes, wear makeup and talk and think about boys all the time, because your self worth is wrapped up how you look. Sex is no big deal on the telly, and it is how you tell boys you love them.

Boys: being heterosexual is all important (being ‘Gay’ is a slur on your masculinity) so you need to prove your manliness by asserting your heterosexuality at all points.

Girls: it is your responsibility to protect your modesty, if you wear the sexy clothes you see in magazines then you are ‘asking for it’ and boys will think you’re easy. If you do have sex then it’s all your fault, because you failed to protect your chastity and deliberately ‘drew him in’ with your sexy clothes.

Boys: if they dress sexy they want sex, even if they don’t know what it is. When girls say no they really mean yes. You can’t be expected to control your ‘manly’ urges.

Because sex is glamorised, girls dress for it and boys expect it. In order to keep the boyfriends that they need to be accepted among their peer group they will sleep with them, because they’ve been led to believe that this is the normal way to keep a boy interested. However, adults also believe that telling school children all about sex will deprive them of their innocence and make them into mini adults.

The truth as I see it is this, from puberty your body is ready to reproduce. It’s no good telling the menstruating girl’s body or the boy who’s getting frequent hard ons that they’re not ready for sex, because their bodies are telling them something different. Physically they are ready, but mentally they often are not. This is the important distinction. We spend too much time telling them that sex is for grown ups, that it’s fun, but not for you. Of course they want to do it, just like they want to smoke, and drink, and stay out late, and watch scary films, and eat too much junk food. What we need to tell them is the truth, that sex happens, that it has consequences and that it can be a very positive experience or a negative one, depending on the situation. We need to teach them that they should always be responsible for their own actions, boys and girls alike, that no means no and that choosing not to have sex is a valid choice and that choosing to have sex should be an active decision. We need to show them how to avoid being pregnant, how to avoid STDs, but also how to avoid being infertile in the future, what to do if someone pressures you into sex and how to handle adult relationships. Respect, self respect and respect for others and their bodies is what’s important.

In short we should be looking towards Europe, Germany and Holland, where an open and honest attitude to sexuality have led to their young people having sex later and whose teenage pregnancy rates are very low, rather than America, whose emphasis on abstinence only teaching has led to a shockingly high level of underage sex and teenage pregnancy.  

I understand that this will necessitate an almost complete change of attitute, but I think it’s a step we have to take if we really want to safeguard our children’s best interests.

Ah, bureaucracy, sucking the fun out of life! Does anyone else agree that making host families (every member of them) have an enhanced CRB check before allowing them to play host to a foreign exchange student might make it more and more difficult to convince parents to take part? CRB checks are time consuming and frustrating, but a necessary part of working with children. You don’t need one to be a parent or to have a family, and that’s why you go on an exchange, to live with a family. I can also see a battery of fussy parents insisting that if they have to have a CRB check then the families hosting their children should have something similar. The hassle just means that schools will find it too difficult to difficult to do and they’ll stop doing it!

I personally loved my exchanges, they taught me that these languages we slogged away at school at are not just useless lessons, but that people really did speak them. They taught me to love German breakfasts, French wine, German beer and French music. They taught me that the French spoke in France and the German in Germany have as many regional varieties as the English we speak here. The Guardian points out the many different experiences that would be missed out on by the next generation, should Exchanges go the way of the Dinosaurs.

While I can (just about) see the point of a functional English GCSE for kids with English as a second language…but the claim that it’s suitable for “post-16s who need a language qualification but would not wish to tackle the reading requirements of the English literature course” is, erm, difficult to comprehend. If I remember the reading was one short novel and a small selection of poems.

Granted, English GCSE might be tricky for some people, but so are Maths and Science. If we’re not careful we might end up with a large proportion of the next generation having never read a poem or heard of Shakespeare!

I Stumbled across this today, and was incredibly saddened by what this tells us about our society. Anyone who works with children, but especially men, is subject to both outside scrutiny and internal self consciousness when it comes to the matter of touching children. As a society we have internalised the idea that to touch a child is somehow perverted. We are also wary of taking photos of children, even when in a public place, and I know that I am always very careful when speaking to children I don’t know that their parents can see very clearly that I don’t mean their kiddies any harm.

Touch is important for everyone, not just children. In the TV show ‘Pushing Daisies’ which I watched for the first time yesterday, one of the characters refers to a hug as an ‘emotional heimlich’, as a way of releasing pent up emotions and making you feel better. The writers and directors of this show clearly shared my view of the importance of touch, as the main character, who grew up wary of touching people (or even his dog) for fear of killing them is very clearly emotionally crippled as a result.

It depresses me that society has got to this stage, where young children may only be touched (and by this I mean in a friendly, nurturing way rather than a sexualised or fetishised way) by their parents and family members and older children are vilified by the media as hoody wearing thugs.

I might even argue that there might be some connection between children who are not touched and the thugs they grow up to be.

I just wanted to share this with you.

I know it’s about the US, but the lessons are the same.

Hooray! I’ve now received a notification from the Student Loans company, they will lend me some money (and give me some too) and actually I’ll be quite well off next year. That’s very good news.

Also, the deputy head of my former primary school as consented to allow me to do my primary placement with them, they sent the documentation directly to the university, rather than to me, which is why I didn’t know.

EDIT: I received my certificate of good conduct from Germany – so I am now really officially clear.

I’ve also approached the gym with a request to cancel my membership, so this means the to do list is now a lot shorter – find a house (and move into it), secure Mr Meanor a job and complete a french course.

Easy!

OK, so I didn’t make the title of this blog up, I took it from this article from the Guardian about maths exams and thought it was reasonably clever. The government’s current pet project (now that they’ve miraculously solved the next generation’s literacy problems) is to improve maths. Apparently there’s just too much innumeracy going on these days. And too many people are proud to say that they’re awful at maths.

Actually, I agree. I always hated maths at school, and despite getting an A in my GCSE I’m really not all that confident, especially in the mental arithmetic. I didn’t do very well here and I do worry about the maths exam that I’ll have to do in order to become a qualified teacher, as it involves mental maths, of the type I’ve never been that good at. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t consider myself innumerate, I just need a few tools to do maths, you know, a pen and some paper! Even without paper and a pen I’m fully capable of working out how much I’ve spent when out shopping and how much change to expect. I’d like to think that while I’m no maths whiz I can fairly consider myself functionally numerate. I don’t see why this is something I should be ashamed of, at least why should I be more ashamed to have a weakness (or at least a lack of interest) in maths, when many people declare proudly that they’re bad at French, or can’t read anything more challenging than the back of a cereal packet? How are the intelligent among us supposed to compete with the uneducated idiots (sorry, celebrities) held up as people to admire? (I think there’s another post coming about the damage the celebrity culture is doing to our young people’s educational opportunities).

The truth is that when it comes to academic matters we seem to be falling over ourselves to admit that we’re not good at something. It’s not cool to like to read, to speak a foreign language or be good at maths. Only geeks are good enough at maths to program a computer (never mind that the average cool kid’s life would be really dull if no one designed computer games) and only swots read a lot. If we want our kids to be functionally literate and numerate human beings we need to shake off this concept that educational achivement is somehow a negative thing.

I kid you not!

This article in the Times Higher paper highlights a worrying trend in our schools, a movement towards digital information as the only information available in schools. Google replaces librarians and their dewey decimal system and website replace books and newspapers as the source of all knowledge.  

I know I’m not the only person who loves books, many people do, and like most people my love of books and reading comes from plenty of exposure to books and libraries when I was young. By getting rid of libraries we risk marginalising books as sources of information and pleasure for a whole generation of children!

If we take a moment to think of schools purely as places where we prepare young people for the worlds of work and higher education (which I don’t, but just for arguments sake) there is still a case to be made for libraries. Using a library teaches you to sift through a mass of information to find what’s relevant. You have to do this on the internet too. When writing essays for university I frequently had my allowance of ten books out at any one time, and often had to do triage or photocopying to get the information I needed. I also copied or took notes from multiple print journals which were unavailable online, despite the fact that literally thousands of journals are. If I’d only used online sources I doubt I would have passed. By getting rid of libraries and information skills we risk narrowing the skill set of state pupils and putting up another barrier between them and the elite universities.

I always took great pride in announcing during tours of campus that our library housed ‘over a million’ books. This was something to be proud of, and often visitors were more interested in this than the computer suite right next door. My university is a very young one, but great, top 5 or six in the country every year, because it prides itself on links with business and constantly keeps itself up to date, yet it values the library, staffs it with subject specialist librarians and has just spent money redeveloping it and modernising it. Yes, there are more computers in the library than I would like, but the books are still there.