Education, Education, Education
Recently, we've been visiting the local Comprehensives, in a quest to find the best school for Jessica to attend next year.
This is a new thing for me, and for Eleanor, too. I went to a 400 year old grammar school and she spent her schooling partly in South Africa, and partly in Zimbabwe being taught by nuns. As a result I know nothing about the variety of subjets they seem to teach at Comprehensives, and Eleanor is good at shooting people and then repenting about it.
When I went to school, the subjects were obvious. These days there seem to be subjects such as Textiles and Humanities. What the hell are these? The kids can choose from approximately 400 million different subjects to study. I suspect this is why the GCSE passes are rising every year, because half of the subjects are stupid. How do you fail Drama, for example? I've discovered a good indicator on actual results is that they list results with English and Maths included in a seperate column, because this figure is always lower. 11% lower in the case of the school last night. I don't like this, as in my opinion they are the two most important subjects and should always be included, especially as they are compulsory.
One subject that always irritated me, to go off on a slight tangent here, was Art. I was absolutely no good at it. I can't draw a straight line with a ruler. I am officially the worst artist in the history of mankind. Yet, I was made to do Art. Why? What possible benefit did I get from this? It did nothing to prepare me for the outside world. I didn't learn anything. The time would have been far better spent studying some other subject, but I had to take it. I was also rubbish at CDT (Woodwork), but at least this had a practical application in later life (an Ikea furniture building class would have been even better). But Art? If you have an aptitude for it, fine. But don't flog a dead horse in trying to get me to do it.
Anyway, these days there are computers in every room, along with interactive whiteboards. We had blackboards and a single computer room filled with BBC Micros. Yet my school managed a 100% pass rate at 5 or more A-C grades. It still does this, but I don't know if it has all this modern technology or not. The point is, that it can't make much difference really because we all managed to become educated before computers. It's just that now it costs a fortune in equipment whereas before all was needed was a piece of chalk and a board eraser to throw at misbehaving pupils (incidentally, when did pupils become students?).
One school we visited (currently our favourite) is now a specialist Computing & Mathamatics school. All schools have to have a specialism now, because they get more money from the government. Being the software engineer that I am, I wandered into the ICT (as they call Computing these days) suite and engaged the head of ICT in conversation. I wanted to know if they did any programming. He said they do a bit in Year 12 (Sixth form to thee and me) if they want. This suprised me a bit - as they specialise in Computing I expected compulsory programming classes or something. But apparantly there isn't really a Computer Science GCSE or A-Level anymore, but rather some weird qualifications instead that I've never heard of. It all seems to be geared towards using computers, i.e. you get good at MS Word and Excel but when asked what a stack or a heap or a FIFO buffer is you'll have no idea. And you won't get the 10 people in the world who understand binary joke, which is just saddening.
I favour a return to old-fashioned teaching methods. I may be a person whose livelihood depends on computers, but I say toss them out! Tear down the interactive whiteboards and replace with a good-old blackboard and chalk. Remove the useless subjects and replace with extra Maths or English lessons. And elocution lessons. If I hear Humanities pronounced youmani'eez again I shall throttle the child that said it. Along with those who pronounce a th in the middle of a word as a v and a trailing l as a w, i.e. toogever and schoow instead of together and school.
With the money saved on equipment, perhaps we could invest more in the actual teachers.
This is a new thing for me, and for Eleanor, too. I went to a 400 year old grammar school and she spent her schooling partly in South Africa, and partly in Zimbabwe being taught by nuns. As a result I know nothing about the variety of subjets they seem to teach at Comprehensives, and Eleanor is good at shooting people and then repenting about it.
When I went to school, the subjects were obvious. These days there seem to be subjects such as Textiles and Humanities. What the hell are these? The kids can choose from approximately 400 million different subjects to study. I suspect this is why the GCSE passes are rising every year, because half of the subjects are stupid. How do you fail Drama, for example? I've discovered a good indicator on actual results is that they list results with English and Maths included in a seperate column, because this figure is always lower. 11% lower in the case of the school last night. I don't like this, as in my opinion they are the two most important subjects and should always be included, especially as they are compulsory.
One subject that always irritated me, to go off on a slight tangent here, was Art. I was absolutely no good at it. I can't draw a straight line with a ruler. I am officially the worst artist in the history of mankind. Yet, I was made to do Art. Why? What possible benefit did I get from this? It did nothing to prepare me for the outside world. I didn't learn anything. The time would have been far better spent studying some other subject, but I had to take it. I was also rubbish at CDT (Woodwork), but at least this had a practical application in later life (an Ikea furniture building class would have been even better). But Art? If you have an aptitude for it, fine. But don't flog a dead horse in trying to get me to do it.
Anyway, these days there are computers in every room, along with interactive whiteboards. We had blackboards and a single computer room filled with BBC Micros. Yet my school managed a 100% pass rate at 5 or more A-C grades. It still does this, but I don't know if it has all this modern technology or not. The point is, that it can't make much difference really because we all managed to become educated before computers. It's just that now it costs a fortune in equipment whereas before all was needed was a piece of chalk and a board eraser to throw at misbehaving pupils (incidentally, when did pupils become students?).
One school we visited (currently our favourite) is now a specialist Computing & Mathamatics school. All schools have to have a specialism now, because they get more money from the government. Being the software engineer that I am, I wandered into the ICT (as they call Computing these days) suite and engaged the head of ICT in conversation. I wanted to know if they did any programming. He said they do a bit in Year 12 (Sixth form to thee and me) if they want. This suprised me a bit - as they specialise in Computing I expected compulsory programming classes or something. But apparantly there isn't really a Computer Science GCSE or A-Level anymore, but rather some weird qualifications instead that I've never heard of. It all seems to be geared towards using computers, i.e. you get good at MS Word and Excel but when asked what a stack or a heap or a FIFO buffer is you'll have no idea. And you won't get the 10 people in the world who understand binary joke, which is just saddening.
I favour a return to old-fashioned teaching methods. I may be a person whose livelihood depends on computers, but I say toss them out! Tear down the interactive whiteboards and replace with a good-old blackboard and chalk. Remove the useless subjects and replace with extra Maths or English lessons. And elocution lessons. If I hear Humanities pronounced youmani'eez again I shall throttle the child that said it. Along with those who pronounce a th in the middle of a word as a v and a trailing l as a w, i.e. toogever and schoow instead of together and school.
With the money saved on equipment, perhaps we could invest more in the actual teachers.
posted by Nej at
11:21 am
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