Friday 7 June 2013

Brilliant and depressing

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger join a GCSE Geography workshop at the Field Studies Centre in Essex.

I cannot fault it. If you are looking round here for support on the Geography IGCSE, then it is 100% on target. The workshop is highly organised, clearly structured, flawlessly delivered, with all points an A* candidate needs to make carefully laid out and indicated. 

Even more remarkable, the teacher leading our session was superb and - despite the fact that she must deliver this workshop a hundred times to know the script by rote - maintained interest and liveliness, and brought all the equipment safely back to base. More than I ever managed to do with 32 copies and a drawn out six weeks to plod through The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler. Give her a pay rise.

And Epping Forest is beautiful. I became totally distracted throughout.



 And look! I found nibbled flint, so there's some paleolithic digging to be done.


So yes, all encouraging, if Tinkertop needs to learn the practical measurement of river characteristics.

But the day told me more, too, in wider ways. What the learning culture is; how it relates to the exam process, how the school student is brought up to interact with their discipline. 

For that A*, do not deviate from the given answer one bit. Reproduce the bullet points. Supply keywords. Make the points concisely and accurately in the expected order. An excellent memory is needed, as is unquestioning compliance to the given answer, and the ability to pull off that pseudo-scholar trick: copy the teacher's answer in your own words. 

You can say this is a great advancement in the schooling and testing of 16-year olds, ensuring the high attainment of grades across the country. It is great for international tables and shows how England is producing truly world-class students. Look at the numbers of these A*!

Or it is a sad reflection on the times. By the end of secondary, it will not have been possible, under the present testing regime, to take the time to stimulate creative flair, originality, or independence of approach. Neither will the culture have seriously engaged with student-initiated work, genuine probing dialogue between student and teacher, nor exploration of problems from far-out angles or oblique perspectives.

But did not education go through a stage - post Plowden - when children were, within the schooling limits, invited to explore, make intellectual inquiries, given open-ended questions, and generally encouraged to work out how to achieve what they wanted to do? I can remember my project on dinosaurs even now! The further up the system you went, the less free-ranging that inquiry could become, and the PhD was like a straightjacket, but nevertheless, the spirit for your average school student was find out first, then see how you do in the exam at the end.

Now we are teaching to the exams from the word go. From primary - no, pre-primary - we have a straitjacket approach to learning. Play is restricted, free-range thinking discouraged, off-curriculum exploration labelled as time wasting and unproductive. Answers are delivered and repeated and routes beaten to achieve that A*, which is all that seems to matter.

So the workshop was totally targeted, focused, and delivered efficiently and more than capably. I recommend it for your exam focused Tinkertop. 

Even we are learning to play the game.




But still, I just hope there remain enough people out there who continue to obstinately believe that a child is not the sum of their grades, and that a questioning approach to the world - even if it earns a Grade D - can be a great reflection on a character. 

And who knows? In another 20 years, we might get Plowden coming round again.



8 comments:

Big mamma frog said...

Yep. We are getting very good at hoop-jumping here.

But I soooo need to step back and get a better perspective. I fear I have lost my way.

Did we really home educate all this time, only to conform to the (depressingly unimaginative) norm at the last hurdle..?

higglepea home ed said...

We have found the hoop jumping boring, soul-less and mediocre to say the least, but necessary to achieve the grades they need to move on into the higher fields they desire. They were an obstacle to defeat - no more.

What we have learnt is that by adding our own extra H.E spin to the learning process along the way, livening up lessons and giving a fuller broader more creative and individual approach to the subjects needed, the girls have gained so much more than their school attending counterparts.

This has been recently pointed out to us at college interviews. Where our H.E children stood out a mile from other candidates, we were told, because they had such a wide grasp and understanding of knowledge and individual thought. Not just rote learnt.

Yes they jumped all the hoops, but gained something extra and priceless along the way. x

Katie Pybus said...

I enjoy reading about the different approaches of children older than mine just as I liked reading about home educating 5 year olds when I had a newborn!

One area I've read a lot on is Uncollege http://www.facebook.com/uncollege (would be the rather clunky ununiversity in England) which suggests that for some careers like tech a route of going straight into work or an old skool apprenticeship might be better (and leave you with less debt)

Katie Pybus said...

Have you read this practical guide to learning at home age 11-18

http://thegallivanters.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/unqualified-education-part-two.html

I wrote a review of it on my blog and this bit stays with me

There are a few points in the book, just as in One-to-One, that I am not totally cool with, the author makes a couple of historical generalisations that detract from the book's credibility for example but.......as a way of thinking about committing to home educating for the long term and the practicalities of this it has certainly been really helpful for me. This quote, right near the end of the book: "Schoolchildren are consistently told that exams are important and some of this conditioning permeates through to people who do not go to school; they assume that their path must, at some point, converge with people who do go to school, and that the time will come when they must stop the work they are doing, however rewarding it might be, and sit some exams so that they can get qualifications, go to University etc."
and then he goes on to say "These assumptions deserve to be questioned........."
really struck a note with me, in my mind I can see now that there are at least two, and probably more, paths we can choose to travel and it is not necessary to have plans in place to build a bridge from one to the other. This type of visual picture is very useful. He is right of course, there is a widely held assumption that at some point you will once again hook up with the real world and hope that they forgive you your sins........

Irene said...

I discovered that when, in a biology lesson,I asked how a one day fly experienced life in such a short time and there as only guffawing from the teacher and the fellow students. Was his experience of life as long and rewarding as ours? There is no poetic thinking in academic life.

Grit said...

thanks for these comments and links, people. i'll be following them up and continuing to think my way through this one. xx

suzywoozy said...

We definitely consider it to be hoop jumping. The girls have opted for 5 each as an easy way to get onto a level 3 college course. we don't think exams are important unless you need them to jump through a particular hoop. but it not real education - and GCSE maths really killed off my dd2's love of just playing around with numbers for about 3 years! hopefully we're just done with that for a while - until ds decides he wants to start.http://wightweirdos.co.uk/ww/2013/05/hoop-jumping-and-real-education/

suzywoozy said...

We definitely consider it to be hoop jumping. The girls have opted for 5 each as an easy way to get onto a level 3 college course. we don't think exams are important unless you need them to jump through a particular hoop. but it not real education - and GCSE maths really killed off my dd2's love of just playing around with numbers for about 3 years! hopefully we're just done with that for a while - until ds decides he wants to start.http://wightweirdos.co.uk/ww/2013/05/hoop-jumping-and-real-education/