Education

[georgew]

Well you have to come up with a different one then. Fewer holidays and longer days so that there is more school time? Or less work done and less stuff learned?

Well.....it doesn't work that way.

We already know that reducing working time may result in increased production and that to suggest that more hours equals more learning is misleadingly simplistic.

The funny thing is that once I stopped going to school I started to be happier and to learn better. One day at the Technical College and four at work really suited me - in fact it was the best experience of education that I’ve ever had. We all have a pace at which we can assimilate knowledge but unfortunately the education system as is doesn’t accommodate that sufficiently.

What length the optimum school or working week is is something that I don’t know, but as it will vary between individuals one size fits all will have to do. My suspicion is that four focused days of work are more efficient than five, but I’m also fairly sure that if we all changed to that way of doing things then we’d soon discover it was flawed too.

The education system is littered with inconvenient truths, and the first of these is that children should not be introduced to formal education at the age of four or five years of age. Children will learn better if this is delayed to six or later, in common with other European countries as children will then learn more efficiently and more quickly as their brains have now developed sufficiently to cope with formal education. The whole paraphernalia of testing and academic qualifications need to be overhauled and something similar to the Finnish model should be adopted which has been proved to be a resounding success. In addition, teachers should be carefully selected, highly qualified and trained, and they then should be left to create an education programme without interference from Government. Again, it should be recognised that there is no correlation between the school educational qualifications achieved and the quality of the subsequent university degrees.
As has been already suggested, a parallel path of vocational training should run in parallel with the academic one which should be porous and allow easy transfer from each to the other.....I see it as important that this vocational path should enjoy a similar status to the academic stream, as it does in Germany. This would militate against the vast amount of waste in the present system whereby students drop out in the early years of university.

[pwa]

My wife has been teaching in a secondary school for 29 years, and on every single one of those 29 years she has been effectively told that the system of teaching she did last year was no good and a new system was coming in. Lesson plans carefully drawn up last year have never been re-usable the next year. The syllabus she has to teach has been constantly changing, so that "resources" she gathers together one year cannot be used the next. Required teaching methods have been constantly in a state of flux, so that she has been effectively told "that thing we told you to do last year (that you didn't think would work), well, it doesn't work, so do this new thing (that you also think won't work) until next year when we will come back and say that didn't work either. She has been doing her best to teach children of varying ability as best she can in spite of all these changes. She does something right because when she meets former pupils in the street (some now in their forties) they always tell her how she was one of their favourite teachers. She gets embarrassed at that but she deserves the kind words after all the work she puts in.

[reohn2]

Actually, I think it would benefit most kids to be treated a little more like adults.

Youre right of course,my bad I was thinking more about smaller children that need guidance.

A few years ago, we moved Mini V to a private school that has a Montessori based system. They aren't fully Montessori, but there are a couple of key things that mean it works *much* better for her than a traditional classroom environment.
Like adults, the kids are given goals, things to work with, projects to do, etc. and spend little time sitting in a classroom having stuff explained to them. They only do this when a new topic is introduced, then they work with or on it in their own ways, with guidance and help from a teacher, afterwards. This recognises that kids learn and work differently, and doesn't require that each does stuff the same as the next. The other important thing they do, is when a child is working, they do not interrupt to make them do the next subject, or whatever.

For her, the most important thing is that about half of her school day, she organises for herself, with the goals of completing certain things by certain days. They don't even always check that the kids have done every assigned exercise. Because the important thing is not that Mini V has done 20 long division problems, but that she knows how to do long division.

But this goes back to class size. Because that kind of system won't work with one teacher to look after 30 kids. Mini V's school group, which is year 7 - 9 together is about 60 kids with 8 teachers. They have 5 group leaders who help the kids organise their day, and provide information for general school topics, then they have 3 specialists in arts & crafts, maths/science/technology, health & physical education. There is also one other person who who helps them with cooking & recipes, (the kids cook hot lunch every day for each other in smaller groups on a 2 week rotation).

Montessori is something new to me(not that I'm any sort of educational expert),but it sounds a very interesting way of education.
I do agree that 30+ class sizes and overworked texhers ard swimming against the stream especially if one or two studwnts are bord stiff,which can lead to disruption.

[reohn2]

The system I outlined doesn't have young kids doing two hours a night. Forty minutes for kids at 13, for example, rising as they go through school. By the sixth form they have two hours work per school day to do on their own, but by that time they also have free periods during the working day in which they can get some of that done, so they don't have to take all of it home as homework. The idea is that they become increasingly self-reliant, preparing them for life after school.

I still don't agree with the homework system,students can do their work at school if school is structured properly and class sizes reduced where teachers have more time with each student.
I repeat,the problem's with the system and a shortage of funding as I outlined up thread.

[reohn2]

My wife has been teaching in a secondary school for 29 years, and on every single one of those 29 years she has been effectively told that the system of teaching she did last year was no good and a new system was coming in. Lesson plans carefully drawn up last year have never been re-usable the next year. The syllabus she has to teach has been constantly changing, so that "resources" she gathers together one year cannot be used the next. Required teaching methods have been constantly in a state of flux, so that she has been effectively told "that thing we told you to do last year (that you didn't think would work), well, it doesn't work, so do this new thing (that you also think won't work) until next year when we will come back and say that didn't work either.

What does that tell you/her?

She has been doing her best to teach children of varying ability as best she can in spite of all these changes. She does something right because when she meets former pupils in the street (some now in their forties) they always tell her how she was one of their favourite teachers. She gets embarrassed at that but she deserves the kind words after all the work she puts in.

She sounds like the kind of teacher the education system needs and could perhap teach some bozos in charge telling how to do her job their job.
I'm utterly convince the educations system in the Uk is on it's knees and it's not the fault of the teachers but the political idiots running it!

[Jdsk]

"Grammar and Writing in England’s National Curriculum
A Randomised Controlled Trial and Implementation and Process Evaluation of Englicious."

https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/wp-c ... Report.pdf

Jonathan