I like this, from the TCS blog, by Daniel:
Following the lastest studies showing the benefits of computer gaming e.g. here I wonder how many households are moving from:Child: But MUUUUUUM - I'm on level 5!
Mum: Not until you've finished your homeworkto:
Child: But mum - I've got homework to do!
Mum: Not until you've got past level 6 of wolfensteim returns to zeldaland!
Funny. And profound.
More news of the shortage of people willing to be teachers from the Independent. Maths teacher Stephen McCormack (his title is "Can you find the teachers to sack?" - lovely) writes:
Pupils need to build on relationships with their teachers. If these are absent, the effect on learning and behaviour is marked. This, for me, is where successive governments have failed in the long-term development of adolescents.It would be bad enough if confined to poor and crumbling inner city housing estates, but it is not. Take Surrey: an affluent county with stable schools and academic tranquillity? Not so. Surrey's turnover rate is the highest in the country.
The current drive to do something in London might have its good points but it will undoubtedly make things worse in the surrounding counties. I am not saying that nothing is being done. One area where there has been a clear improvement is in the numbers attracted to teacher training. Applicants for places on PGCE courses are up, due in part to the bursaries on offer. But it's no good recruiting and training teachers if they don't stay to do the job.
Three years ago I was one of 13 idealistic people starting a maths PGCE course at a London college. Only seven of us will still be teaching in or near London this September. Of the rest, three have dropped out, two have left the UK and one has gone to teach in Devon. Not all schools face these problems. I could also point to numerous schools where turnover is low, and where most vacancies attract enough candidates. Fine. But that doesn't alter the fact that thousands of children are getting a raw deal because of our inability to get staffing right.
McCormack still thinks in terms of failure by "successive governments", rather than by the very idea of government, and says that in France things are done much better, and maybe that's so. But the story I hear is that things there aren't getting any better either.
Alice Bachini has a nice bit today (If that doesn't work try the link to TCS below - bloody blogspot) about her life as a teacher. What a loss to the profession. Seriously, I bet she was excellent.
But what I found especially interesting was this first comment from Emma.
It interests me that so many TCS-ers or TCS-interested people (judging by a wide scientific survey of reading some of the tCS list posts ) have backgrounds as teachers, lecturers, whatever, or still work in the education industry in some way.Do we get interested in TCS because we see ourselves co-ercing other people in our classes and think "I wouldn't like that to happen to me/my children"?
Or is it because we are trying to do our best to be friends/mentors/ information sources/whatever, but we come to the conclusion that the way people treat children in general makes it difficult if not impossible to do that cool thing within the system without being coercive?
I guess I should TCS-list this comment, but I'll leave it here too!
And now it's here too.
I'm sure that's right about the motivation for leaving, and then for wanting something different and better. And it illustrates why the present government plan for getting more teachers, which is based merely on the idea that there are lots of potential teachers out there who just have to be told to join the profession, and then they will. All it will take is a few TV adverts, and a few celebrities writing articles about teachers who inspired them, and the new teachers will step forward.
But what if those potential teachers have thought about it, along much the same lines as those TCS people, and they are staying away for the same kinds of reasons the TCSers went away?
Further to this, there's lots more arguing about just how clever dolphins aren't here.
I especially liked the commenter who said that her dog definitely learned, and then the commenter who said that his computer game definitely learned.
Can you teach a computer programme? I don't think that "yes" is a totally silly answer.
In a hundred years, will robots be going to college? I recall a Sci-Fi story about a robot who confounded his inventors by becoming an aesthete and wearing a flower in his lapel. Sounds like it could have been Philip K. Dick. Anyone?
(If you are a soccer fan, that could sound like Sukor on side. Ignore.)
David Sucher has a fascinating recollection of having been taught by Edward Said, and having been told by him about how to answer someone who seems to have all the answers.
Good teachers are sometimes forgotten at once. You learn what he's teaching you, and completely forget that it was he who taught you.
And good teachers are sometimes remembered forty years later.
As these people say, teaching comes in many forms.
Earlier this evening I watched Wildlife on One, the BBC TV birds and beasties show fronted by the saintly David Attenborough. Tonight, the subject was dolphins.
Dolphins and humans get along really well, both seeming to be fascinated by the other. Dolphins seem to want entertainment, and suggestions for things for them to do and copy, and an audience to show off to. (Dolphins are great mimics and natural performers.) And humans love that dopey grin that all dolphins have all over their faces, which makes dolphins seem to us smart but, crucially, also nice. Snakes they are absolutely not.
There were definite educational vibes here, in the sense that dolphins seem to be able to learn and to create. The humans were asking them questions and setting them little tasks, and the dolphins were doing very well. Not only could they do the (relatively) easy stuff, but they were coming up with clever and creative answers to trick questions or impossible tasks. They even know how to watch television. If Attenborough gave them a task by waving his arms about on a TV screen, they did it, just as if he was really there.
Dolphins, like us, are smart because they are social and because they have had a lot to gain from communication and from creativity. They chase after fishes not alone but in teams, and they often invent clever new ways to chase these fishes. Then they teach their children how the system works. Like us, dolphins have cultures, not just instincts. And when dolphins and humans get together, they immediately create a new shared culture, with both sides learning from each other, and both sides having a bundle of fun.
All of which got me to thinking: Why can't humans and human children get along like this? Why can't they be so obviously happy together and so obviously learning together?
Often of course, this is what happens between big humans and small ones. But on the whole, it doesn't. How come?
I don't want to romanticise just how clever dolphins really are. They are surely nearer to super-intelligent dogs than to humans, and one shouldn't confuse the fact that we react to them rather as we react to really nice people (because that's how they come across to us) with the notion that dolphins really are as clever as us. That three-year-old humans can often be rather harder to get along with than mature dolphins is not evidence that the dolphins are necessarily any smarter. Were humans to take againsts dolphins and to decide that they really, really liked how they tasted, and to start farming them, or if humans were to decide that dolphins posed a long-term threat to human domination of the planet and to decide to wipe them out, I wonder how clever the dolphins would prove themselves to be in the face of a menace like that.
Mercifully for the dolphins we aren't doing any that. As it is, not only do the dolphins entertain us by participating in David Attenborough programmes; they even help our fishermen by herding shoals of fish into their nets, in exchange for the left-overs. They've apparently been doing that for decades, at some fishing town somewhere.
So given that we don't seem to want to tyrannise over or otherwise torment our dolphin friends, how come the relationship between us is not just one of good intentions on both sides, but so enduringly harmonious and successful? What is being done right here?
I think there's another whole reason why humans and dolphins get along so well, besides the fact that we just do, which is that we each have our own homes, our own natural domains, and these are very different. We have our homes on land, and they have theirs at sea. What this means is that Mother Nature imposes a regime of Taking Dolphins Seriously on us, and Taking Humans Seriously on them. (I'm referring to the ideas of people like these people.)
What I mean by this is that when we are baffled or frustrated by the dolphins, given the rules we have imposed upon ourselves about not shooting them or something like that, what can we do? We can't make them go to bed early, or shout at them in a way they can't ignore, or otherwise torment them, the way we are all too tempted to torment human children. If we do anything like this, they can just swim away. If small humans run away from big humans in disgust, the big humans can chase after them and catch them, but humans just can't do that with dolphins. They can swim far better. And by the same token, if we make the dolphins angry with us, what can they do? Jump onto land and attack us? They can't. All they can do is swim away until they've calmed down. Nature imposes a regime of mutual civility.
It also helps that we aren't trying to bully the dolphins into becoming doctors or dentists or accountants and fussing about their exam results. Well, I expect some of the scientists get neurotic about things not unlike that, wanting their dolphins to be a credit to them and make them look good at their scientific conferences. But, see above, if the scientists do get above themselves like this, what can they do about it? The dolphins have the sea to protect them against all such foolishness.
The problem with small humans is that they don't have their sea. They live on the same land as us, and are defenceless against us. And we routinely do horrible things to them because … we can.
Here's an article in today's Telegraph by Elizabeth Rickards:
English is the backbone of our education. Without a good understanding of the language and an ability to write it formally, progress in other subjects is held back. A command of the subject is essential not just for academic success: it is the key skill in the workplace.How ironic, then, that English is in decline in this country whilst millions abroad study it because they fully understand its value.
Good intentions, endless initiatives, literacy hours, targets and league tables have still to make any real impact on the standard of school-leavers' written English. Employers and university lecturers alike bemoan the fact that young people cannot be relied on to spell, punctuate or write clearly. Even Oxford dons complain that some of our brightest students cannot write accurately.
But if it is true that employers want more literate employees than they are getting, then surely these employers ought to identify a satisfactory exam which if passed will ensure that the candidate is suitably literate, and make that a condition of entry. Problem solved.
Existing exams are not satisfactory, says Ms. Rickards.
It might not have mattered so much if GCSE English Language – the national test in literacy, which is being taken this week and next by nearly 700,000 15-year-olds – were not a fundamentally flawed exam. It is an inaccurate way of measuring literacy. Indeed, it is not really an exam at all.
Exam boards compete for business. They make a virtue of producing "friendly" options. In English Language GCSE, that means the exam may contain few surprises.
But if employers are so contemptuous of such alleged qualifications, why can they not establish their own standards, and create a different sort of competition, between examiners competing not to dumb down but to examine accurately the qualities which employers prize? Once this kind of exam system is established, this would be the one which teachers would prepare their pupils for. Seriously, why doesn't that kind of thing happen?
Instead of this, which is what happens now:
But there is more. Twenty per cent of the marks in English Language GCSE are for "speaking and listening". Many people who cannot write well can speak very well indeed. However, what employers and universities want to know is how good a student is on paper.The inclusion of speaking and listening in the overall marks distorts this information. It should be graded separately. Another 20 per cent of the marks are for coursework. As this is not supervised, it, too, is a less than reliable benchmark.
And it gets worse.
When marking the exam papers, OCR examiners are instructed not to mark writing in section A "unless the expression is so bad it impedes communication".In other words, for half of our national test in literacy, a sentince that had no fool stop or coma but contaned the rite anser in terms of meening (sic) could get full marks because the spelling and punctuation mistakes would be ignored.
Obviusly I coodent mis that parergrarf.
In other markets, the rich aren't the only ones getting a semi-decent product. I don't shop at Harrods, but I get good stuff at Tescos. So why can there not be semi-decent Tesco-style exams that regular people can study for and pass. And then they can enter the workforce with an adequate – and improving if that's what is wanted by those employers – ability to read and write.
Markets correct all sorts of other failings in the state system, like unsatisfactory maths or English teaching. People with the cash to spare on other educational extras sally forth and find them. So how come exams are such a shambles, and in basic English of all things? How come there is no "emerging private sector" in that?
My guess of an answer would be (a) the expense of setting up a new exam system, combined with (b) the phenomenon of "crowding out".
Start with (a). Establishing a successful exam brand is possible, but I would guess that it would be a major undertaking. It would be much more expensive than establishing a respected teaching system for example, because the key to success is getting a lot of people to respect the brand, all at once. Passing the exam if no one has heard of it is no good. Being the only employer who demands this particular sort of qualification would cause you to reject good people merely because they hadn't taken this exam. So the system has to catch on big time. It would be like launching a major software package.
Which means that (b), the crowding out effect, would be important. Crowding out is what the government does when it participates in a market, or threatens to, or is widely assumed to have to, in a way that makes it impossible to tell what it will be doing in two or three years time. If you want to start that brand new exam brand, your nightmare is that in three years time the government just might get its act together and start to compete seriously with you. It might, for example, copy what you've done but decide to be in charge of such a system itself, and cut you out of it, by bribing half your workers away from you. By the time it had become clear that you knew your business better than the government did, the damage would have been done to your bottom line. So, in a business like the exam business, best to stay out, and leave the field clear for short-termist cowboy chicanery, like selling the exam to the mere takers of it as something that is getting progressively easier, but which still sounds good – or which sounds as if it will sound good – to employers.
Which, I further surmise, is the world that the average pupil in the average state school now inhabits.
Hav er nise dei.
I was going to end this with that urmyoozing kwip, but I won't because there is another answer to this question, which is that there is an emerging market in exams now coming nicely to the boil. It's just that I haven't yet heard about it. If that is the case, have an even nicer day, and if you know about all this, please let me know about it too.
Category: Examinations and qualifications • Sovietisation
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Alice Bachini linked (go to her main site and scroll down to "anti-semitism" if that first link doesn't work) to this over the weekend. It's a denunciation, as Alice's heading indicates, of the new anti-semitism, of the sort that Islamists and the new left are now accused of.
My point is nothing to do with the fact that I personally agree strongly with the message being presented. (I might as well be honest about that, and acknowledge that it may have influenced what follows.) My point is that this seems to me to be very well presented argument, and a model of how to use the internet to put across ideas. Aesthetically it is very satisfactory. And it is well-written.
I loathe the use of the word "education" to describe propaganda, and this is propaganda. The central dishonesty in the education/propaganda blurring being that ideas are being put across which the protagonist of them knows to be controversial, buit he conceals the fact that they are controversial and instead trying to say that they are as universally agreed about as the facts, say, of which city is the capital of which country, and of what 62 + 35 equals. Nevertheless, this particularly item of propaganda, it seems to me, has a lot to say to educators about how to communicate with the latest technology.
I'd love to be told of other equally excellent (or better) examples of how to put ideas across on the Internet.
