Nuanced observations from Harry Hutton about what he will be doing next (and why), in the education line:
Just called the British Council to see if they’ll give me a job. The thought of teaching English again fills me with acute suicidal instincts, but I'm running out of money and it's either that or sell one of my kidneys. The British Council is better than most language schools. It's run by the UK Foreign Office: all the other language schools I worked at were run by drunks. They could use this in pamphlets as their "unique selling point." It would be an improvement on "Creating Opportunity for People Worldwide," which is the current slogan.THE BRITISH COUNCIL
At least it's not run by a drunk.And when people ask me what I do I will no longer have to stare at the floor and mutter that I am a teacher "but I do other things as well". I can look them squarely in the eye and say, "I work for the cultural arm of the British Embassy, and if I don't get some respect around here I shall have you all shot."
The other advantage of working for the British Council is that there are no British Council inspections to put up with: they don't inspect themselves. Other schools have to be "accredited" by the BC, which means that every so often some bearded fuck with a clipboard will appear in your classroom, poking his long nose in. Usually, he wants to see your lesson plan, which I never have, lesson plans being strictly for poofs in my opinion. "Oh," he says, "You don't have a lesson plan," and writes something on his clipboard, deeply shocked by such depravity. When the class is over you get feedback, and he will express disappointment that you aren't using the phonetic alphabet. And do you want to know why I don't use the phonetic alphabet? Because my students couldn't tell the difference between a plosive, a fricative and a poke in the eye with a burnt stick. And if I tried to force them to learn it they would rise up and pelt me with fruit.
… and about the same amount as that more. Ever since I called this man "terse" he has been mouthing off like one of those mad people in the street.
However, the point about having a job that supplies you with a good answer to the question "And What Do You Do?" is a very good one. As are the points that follow about how "Teacher Talking Time" mustn't be too high. Don't you dare teach the buggers, in other words.
By the way, the comments at Harry's blog are often worth reading. They are even sometimes quite funny, which is rare with comments at funny blogs, in my experience. (See Barry, Dave.) This bit of comment, for example, from "dsquared", is good, and relevant to proceedings here:
Of course, some economists question whether there are not productivity implications if you have a system where only the second-raters are left to carry on actual production, while people more able than themselves try to prevent them, but that's a problem for the future. It's rather like Atlas Shrugged but with more box-ticking.
Ah box ticking ...
Category: Languages • Sovietisation • The reality of teaching
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Yesterday afternoon I had my last visit to before Christmas, and, in retrospect, it went okay, although at the time it was a strain.
When I got there, it transpired that Boy One and Boy Two had hatched a plan, to the effect that I should see both of them together for an hour, rather than each one in turn for half an hour. Okay I said, since it's my last visit before Christmas. At that VRH course we were warned about taking them in numbers greater than one, but I agreed, on the clear understand that if I didn't enjoy it, and that if they didn't behaved as I wished them, it would be back to the old system.
Not having done any regular teaching of boys of that age I was startled at the transformation that overtook Boy One especially. Boy One, when with me alone, is the soul of mature politeness, not to say charm. When he's trying to get me to do what he wants, he is very nice, very plausible, very winning, and we get along excellently (for I too can turn on the charm when I am seeking things that I want). But when faced with me together with Boy Two, whom Boy One obviously regarded as a puppy below him in the puppy hierarchy, Boy One focussed most of his attention on shouting at Boy Two with a view to subjugating him. Ingratiating himself with me was cast aside. I spent most of my time telling them to keep their voices down, Boy One especially, please, or I'll get into trouble.
Boy Two, who tends to be a tad despondent with me alone, seemed rather happier and livelier, which was probably because of the general air of relative anarchy that prevailed, compared to the one to one sessions, plus the fact that he had a bit of company of his own age, which he seems to like a lot. When with me alone he tends to fidget in a rather alarming and One Few Over the Cuckoo's Nest sort of way. There was none of that today. When physically irked, he would run to the other side of the room.
I have been urging both Boys to do some reading, or at least submit to me reading to them, so that the idea of books as sources of information and entertainment is fixed in their minds to work its future magic, even if the notion has no effect now. They submitted to another two pages of King Arthur and his endless conflicts with the diabolical Morgan le Fay, the source of all trouble in Arthur-land, it seems. Then they mucked about with coloured pens and paper. Then they played cards.
These cards are of the ones with soccer internationals, each card having a picture of a soccer star and a list of individual information, like country, year of birth, weight, height, number of international goals, number of years of international soccer, and so on. The cards are divided … oh to hell with it, who cares what the rules are? But the point is: these rules involved comparing the information on your card with the other fellow's card.
I seriously don't think that they realised they were reading.
It was a long hour. They seem to welcome the fact that I will reappear in January, which was pleasing to me, but at the end of it all, I was tired.
What looking after twenty such, all in a pack for a whole day must be like, I dare not speculate.
I'm not sure myself what I think of it, especially when governments are so heavily involved, but one of the biggest education stories that has emerged while I've been writing this blog has been educational globalisation.
The BBC presents two contrasting views of this process. Our Education Minister Mr Clarke is for it, and wants only to encourage it, although politicians encouraging something doesn't necessarily mean that it will actually be very encouraged. Here is a BBC report of his globalisation thoughts yesterday:
The UK must be a serious player in the global market for students if it is to prosper, says the Education Secretary, Charles Clarke.He told a British Council-organised UK International Education Conference in Edinburgh that this was worth £10.4bn a year to the economy.
However, as a result of this report, I found myself following a link back to a warning given by Robert Reich to British higher education:
Britain has been warned of the dangers of following America in the "marketisation" of higher education.The warning came from Robert Reich, a professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis University and a labour secretary in President Clinton's administration.
I've had a busy day and am still studying Reich's thoughts, but a cursory look-through suggests that this is a particularly important point:
There is also along with the marketisation of higher education there's a greater and greater emphasis on vocational and pre-career university courses and the advertising and marketing of vocational and pre-career - accounting, law, economics, finance, engineering, applied sciences - these are becoming very, very popular, undergraduate curricula in these areas are expanding dramatically, a faculty who are teaching in these areas are paid better and better. And so more seriously the classics – literature, history, some of the basic sciences - have become poor stepchildren. Because you see it follows that as you envision higher education as a system of private investment for private return and as that sinks into the public's mind it naturally follows that the concept of a liberal arts education or an education in humanities or the education in broad-based social sciences or in classics or whatever has less and less justification in the public's mind.
But is there not also another explanation for the decline of the humanities, which is that the potential consumers of these services are distressed by the nature of the product. "Liberal arts education" is surely the bit of US higher education that has degenerated most spectacularly in recent years. This is where bias, ignorance, and hostility to all the kinds of values of the kind that such an education used to promote has run riot most riotously. Vocational courses have a built-in mechanism to enable their quality to be assessed. How well to the products of such courses then do in their careers? This, I submit, has kept them up to the mark and created meaningful competition, in a way that relates to what those customers want from such courses. No such mechanism is built into humanities courses.
And there is also the simple fact that only a few are drawn towards the academic life. The recent trend towards marketisation has accompanied something which might have happened anyway, without such marketisation, which is simply: expansion. Do more higher education, and you are not going to churn out the exact same proportion of historians and literary critics, unless you are very foolish. Could Reich be blaming marketisation for something which is actually just plain common sense, and if he is right to blame marketisation, would it not make more sense to praise marketisation for registering the wisdom of such an alteration of educational emphasis? Would America really be a better country had the universities unleashed a million more humanists, or whatever they are called?
Just a couple of thoughts, which are of course related. I have more homework to do about this piece, but that's no reason for me not to link to it in the meantime, as I hope you agree.
It's … Ben Durham, the 21-year-old blind-side flanker, was the beating heart of Oxford's dominant forward effort, both with ball and in the tackle. Still, despite Oxford's attempts to keep him, Durham’s brain is even more sought after, and next September he heads for the City to work for Goldman Sachs, eschewing a professional rugby career with Gloucester."I’ve been at Oxford four years now and I should probably think about leaving," Durham, who earned a first class degree in economics and management and is studying for an MSc in economic history, said. "I played as a professional with Gloucester until my second year (at Oxford) and I found it quite dull. I should imagine if you are Jonny Wilkinson it's fantastic, but being a professional in the Premiership does not appeal.
"With an Oxford degree behind me I think I should go and explore some wider options. Besides, they (professional clubs) won't pay me enough."
Durham, who was educated at Pate's Grammar School in Cheltenham and studies at Keble College, won his third Blue and enjoyed a first win. "I'm glad we won, or I might never have left Oxford," he said. Instead of making hay in the mud at Kingsholm come September, Durham aims to start his job in UK mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs, the American investment bank. This may even have been his last game.
"If I play I want to play good rugby, not just kickabout stuff, but you never know, I might get bored in the City," he said.
Steve Hill, Oxford's director of rugby, has not given up hope of keeping Durham. "Ben is one of the brightest boys we’ve had in the team," Hill said. "He's expressed an interest in being captain and he has secured serious funding from research bodies at Oxford to stay for another three years if he wants it. Maybe his bank will defer until after next Christmas."
Decisions, decisions.
Good to remind ourselves that for some, education still manages to work out quite well.
Oxford won 18-11.
Worried about your child or pupil not talking until quite old?
There is a joke about a German child who said nothing until he was about eleven, when one day he did speak, to complain about something. When asked why he had not spoken sooner he said: "Because until today everything was satisfactory."
Take heart from the fact that apparently something similar really did happen in the case of Thomas Carlyle, later the author of many learned books and writings. Young Thomas said nothing for year after year. His first spoken words, as recounted by pinko thesp Corin Redgrave on Quote Unquote last Sunday came when Carlyle was, if I remember it rightly, seven. Then, an aunt (or someone) poured boiling water on him, and apologised profusedly to young Thomas. Who then said:
"Thank you madam, the agony has abated."
Relax. He's just hasn't yet had anything important to say.
I can find no Internet reference to these words. But more about Carlyle is to be found here:
Thomas Carlyle was born in Ecclefechan, Dumfries and Galloway, as the son of a stonemason and small farmer. He was brought up in a strict Calvinist household. At the age of 15 he went to [the] University of Edinburgh, receiving his B.A. in 1813. From 1813 to 1818 he studied for the ministry of the Church of Scotland, but abandoned this course and studied law for a while.Carlyle taught at Annan Academy (1814-16), at Kircaldy Grammar School (1816-18), and privately in Edinburgh (1818-22). …
It's off message, but I also like how Tennyson defended Carlyle's marriage, to someone equally strange, against various critics of it:
"By any other arrangement, four people would have been unhappy instead of two."
UPDATE: I tried again, and this time I did find a reference to this literary late talker tale. And apparently it was Macaulay, not Carlyle at all.
Macaulay also wrote many books and writings.
More on turning your hobby into your career, from last Saturday's Telegraph:
Six months into to his first year at Leeds University, Nick House ran out of money. He'd blown all his grant on partying, hanging out on the burgeoning Leeds club scene and throwing the odd party.So, like any desperate but resourceful student, he went to see his bank manager to appeal for an extension on his loan. "I remember being handed a form," says House, with a wry smile. "It said something like 'reason for loan (tick box) books/education/training/computer equipment/other'."
House ticked "other" and added the explanatory couplet "nightclub promotion". Needless to say, he was refused a loan.
But the plucky young man, who during the past few years has been largely responsible for revolutionising the student events scene in the UK, wasn't to be deterred.
House looked at Leeds's lively network of 20-30 nightclubs – crammed at weekends, rattling the rest of the time – and dreamt of filling them with the hedonism-hungry student population. He hired a club and raised the cash for his own off-campus, exclusive NUS night called "In Your Dreams". Investing £1,000 of his own money, he printed flyers and hired a DJ. More than 400 Leeds students turned up and had a great time, but House lost a small fortune."I was too emotionally involved," he says. "I had fun, got a huge ego boost and gained lots of cred, but I lost money because I was a naive 18-year-old. I knew nothing about print costs, venue hire, distribution, DJs or profit and loss. They even charged me for the hire of the lighting rig, which is a joke."
House learnt from his mistakes. These days his student promotions outfit, Come Play, lures about 20,000 students into nightclubs across the country every week of the term.
And of course this story is also a reminder that as higher education gets to be a mass experience and not just an elite experience, that makes the student a major entrepreneurial target.
One thing puzzles me though. At the top of of the story it says that Nick House ran out of money. Yet later he manages to invest £1,000 of his own money. What gives? Or more exactly, who gave?
The BBC1 TV show Hard Spell is big news in India, because girls of Indian descent came first and second.
This BBC report tells more, although "disequilibrium" is surely a poor example of a word which is hard to spell.
Much of the coverage that I read in the Sunday papers yesterday was were very critical of the show, on the twin grounds that it was cruel, and that in any case spelling doesn't matter.
A. A. Gill, for example in his TV complaint column in the Sunday Times Culture section, had this to say:
No television ever made is worth an 11-year-old’s tears. I was really shocked by this show. How could anyone imagine that it was entertaining to watch small children being pressured to the point of breaking down with so little enjoyment? It was cruel, plain and simple. The evening news had just told us that umpteen kids are being excluded from schools every day. Last week, Tony Blair made tackling bullying a priority. Well, you get out of children what you put in. This programme publicly picked on, humiliated and bullied kids when we should all be respecting and protecting their status and their importance to our future.Now, you may think I'm overreacting to a game show. Well, perhaps I have an interest. I'm excused spelling – I have a note from my mum. The truth is, it doesn't matter, not a jot, not a tittle. Spelling only matters in Scrabble and to retired civil servants who write dull letters in green ink and teach their budgerigars not to split infinitives. I just pressed the spellcheck on my computer – 805 words misspelt out of 1,200 – and you know something, the bottom line is I get paid the same for the wrong ones as for the right ones.
The claim that spelling is unimportant is bollocks, or bolix as A. A. Gill would perhaps spell his proudly illiterate version of that ancient insult. The proof? That if the Sunday Times were to print Gill's writings in the misspelt form that he boasts of submitting them in, they would make very, very public idiots of themselves, and in fact would never live it down. (Look what has happened to the reputation of the Grauniad, as it is affectionately known, on the strength of about as many typos in a year as A. A. Gill claims to perpetrate in each of his pieces. Clearly someone at the Sunday Times has to be able to spell, even if it isn't him. Imagine what A. A. Gill himself would say if road signs, or the writing on the front of CDs, or the instructions for his DVD player, were routinely miss-spelt. What a W-A-N-K-E-R.
Nor is the perhaps excessive pressure that this first batch of kids have been put under an incurable state of affairs. The show just needs to be managed a bit differently and a bit more humanely, and no doubt it will be next year. Because this thing is here to stay, I'll bet you. And a good thing too, I say.
Anything that gives the swot tendency a bit of national recognition is surely worth encouraging. I'm not saying that we should deliberately make children cry on national TV and on principle, merely that this is a risk worth taking in order to create what I will, I feel sure (I hope anyway), soon become an impressive national institution.
