Teachers have to be wary if they want to contribute to education discussions, and they have to tread especially carefully in discussions about children taking holidays in term time. Exchanges have a habit of turning towards the long school holidays, and how teachers dare complain about families taking pupils out for term time holidays. Or about workload. Or pay. Or, indeed, about anything. But it always comes back to the holidays.
And since teachers get 11 weeks holiday (plus the bank holidays), it is difficult to challenge the view that it is a valuable perk.
So why does it bug me when we are attacked for our laziness? Because of the belief that worth can be measured in hours and the explicit assumption that long holidays equates with less work than other workers. And, generally, this is not true.
Government workload research regularly finds teacher hours around 50 hours per week term-time, which amounts to around 2000 hours per year, not including work done during the holidays (and this is verified by independent studies, such as from PWC). This compares to the figure for 'all professionals' of 39 hours which, taking 44 weeks worked (6 weeks holiday plus public holidays), comes to 1700 hours. Or, to put it another way, the average professional would need to work for 50 weeks of 39 hours to match the 39 weeks of 50 hours for the average teacher.
It has been a long time since the venerable GCE O-Level courses were retired in 1988, and with it the idea that more than 40% of 16-year-olds will fail any particular exam by design. Since 1975, when grading was standardised, A to E grades were passes, with a failing U for the remainder.
From 1988 these courses were replaced with the GCSE, the General Certificate for Secondary Educations, aimed at allowing education which allowed almost every child to receive a grade, and the concept of pass and fail were largely retired as educationally unhelpful. The grade range was increased at first to A to G, with a U still technically available
Students and I very often have different conceptions of what study is about.
In my mind it is about getting to grips with a subject at a conceptual level, understanding the links and implications, and learning enough facts and skills to be able to be able to demonstrate that understanding.
The bulk of my students naturally see the lessons and exams as tasks to complete with as little effort as possible. I say naturally, because that is how they have been trained for years to see their education: bite-sized chunks to reproduce in modularised exams since primary school, ideas that are so simple that a bright pupil can learn without any effort and a less bright one by rote memorisation.
I live on the edge of a national park, with hundreds of square kilometres of beautiful, rolling downland. It is a place I spend a lot of time in, walking and relaxing, driving and picnicking. But only five percent of the land in the park is actually open to the public. There are rights of way through much of the rest, but usually that is a footpath or bridleway with fences either side to stop anyone wandering.
Why is there so little open access? The biggest reason is that this national park is 95% owned by eight men: dukes, barons, viscounts and baronets.
With the Football World Cup starting soon in Qatar, lots of fans will be dusting off their little plastic national flags to clip to the doors of their cars to show support for their teams. You must have seen them around, little flags with the cross of St George fluttering above the side windows.
OK, so I object to anyone flying our national flag who feels the need for the word England to be printed across the middle. It smacks of the far-right Little-Englanders protesting the arrival of refugees from war zones on the basis that they want to take jobs that should by all rights be left vacant by born-and-bread Englishmen. But is there a better reason for banning the flags flown from car doors?
Having resisted all manner of education gimmicks and fashions that have been thrust at me by well meaning college managers, it was refreshing to read this piece written by renowned undergraduate textbook writer and educator, David Griffiths. Published in the Institute of Physics magazine Physics World, Griffiths reminds us that Physics sells itself to students if presented honestly:
Physics teachers are fortunate (I am among friends, so I can speak frankly): ours is a subject the relevance and importance of which are beyond question, and which is intrinsically fascinating to anyone whose mind has not been corrupted by bad teaching or poisoned by dogma and superstition.
Plenty could be done to relieve the Physics teacher shortage, but no-one in power really wants to solve the problem.
The Problem
A recent open evening at my college produced plenty of potential students to start Physics A Level next year, but there was a distinctive pattern in their origin: very many of them were currently at two schools on the other side of town and these talked enthusiastically about their current Physics teacher. However, there were hardly any from the very large comprehensive just a few hundred metres up the road (or indeed from several other close schools.)
Without being able to talk to those non-attenders, I cannot be sure, but one likely reason stands out. There is no Physics teacher at the school, and there hasn't been one for years.
Essential, foundational ideas of physics are being presented to children by teachers who know nothing about them themselves. Able children are being undermined by the belief that there is nothing in the compulsory science curriculum that cannot be taught by any science teacher and that physics teachers, bringing only enthusiasm to an inherently dull subject, are therefore not required for physics lessons.
It is easy, under the pressure of exams, to focus on revising the material as easily and quickly as possible. Creating and reading through summaries can give you that warm feeling of having made rapid progress. You copied key points from your textbook yesterday, and reading through your notes it all looks familiar and you feel that it has been learned. You go into class and your teacher reviews what was covered last lesson, and you recognise all that is said. You become more confident that you are done, that reading through your notes again before the exam will get you through comfortably. But the exam doesn't go well, so next time you work harder, write more notes, listen more carefully to the teacher in the reviews. You work harder and harder, but the grade improvements don't come. What is going wrong?
Amongst the most expensive activities in a modern society is education. Yet while teaching professionals like to think they are objective in the way they approach their sensitive task, there are always shiny distractions that attract the attention of educators away from the basics of managing complex social interactions. With a relentless focus on 'academic success', managers in schools are always on the lookout for the next drop of fairy dust to sprinkle onto their school's teachers. A nice, clean, top-down management intervention is an attractive way to appear effective in their role, but without a decent grasp of the changes required it is easy to make lessons less effective than before the intervention.