Radio Monday: Back To School

Let's do this.

In Which I Lecture You About Lectures

As someone who is on record as thinking university lectures are overused and often very poorly put together, I read Donald Clark's Guardian piece with some interest.  Alas, interest does not imply approval, nor in this case, does it preclude disappointment. Throughout the article there's a refusal to separate problems lectures come with built-in and problems caused by bad lecturing. Take this quote for example:

Imagine if a movie were shown only once. Or your local newspaper was read out just once a day in the local square. Or novelists read their books out once to an invited audience. That's face-to-face lectures for you: it's that stupid.

Jeebus, those are some terrible analogies right there. Even if we bypass the fact that movies and novels don't fulfil the same roles as newspapers - let's just consider the strict subsets of documentaries and novels with some genuine thesis underlying them  - if a novelist divided their reading into twice-weekly chunks which came attached to group discussion and small Q&A sessions, there's a hell of a lot one could learn from that approach.  The problem isn't the effectiveness of the lecture as a tool, it's whether the surrounding context supports that tool, and whether the lectures themselves are of the necessary quality. For instance:

What's even worse is that, at many conferences I attend, someone reads out an entire lecture verbatim from their notes. Is there anything more pointless? It's a throwback to a non-literate age. I can read. In fact, I can read faster than they can speak. The whole thing is an insult to the audience.

That's where the problem is.  Not that lectures are used, but because there's a distressing number of academics who don't bother to distinguish between reciting notes and teaching students.

The same problem surfaces when we get into Clark's 10 reasons for why lectures allegedly suck.  Points 5 to 9 are probably reasonable criticisms of lectures in general, though 6 ignores the fact that other sessions exist in university courses to combat that problem (see above), and 8 and 9 are at worst double-edged swords - the benefits to peer communication of putting people in the same room at the same time to experience the same lecture should be entirely fucking obvious.  Points 2, 3 and 10 are entirely aimed at poor lecturing technique, with 2 and 10 in particular not even remotely being solved by switching to pre-recorded lectures (in fact, those problems might be exacerbated), and point 4 is similarly unsolvable by the proposed switch to MOOCs and the like. Point 1 is just point 3 reworded so as to look smarter by mentioning the Babylonians.

Out of the 10 points, it's really only 5 and 7 that definitely hit home as reasons why lectures are fundamentally flawed, as oppose to far too often delivered by gitlizards. The ability to take in lectures at one's own pace is incredibly important, and by insisting otherwise lecturers are guilty of ableism.  I'm perfectly happy with the idea that lectures should be recorded. Indeed, plenty of students do so here at my current place of employment, though I'm entirely receptive to an argument that we should be doing it ourselves with visual as well as audio (generally the students only record my voice) and sticking it up online after the event.  But whilst as educators (as well as minimally decent human beings) we should make every effort to ensure those who can't get the most from a live lecture as we'd like are in no way disadvantaged by that, the general benefits of delivering material to groups of people who can interact with each other and you immediately afterwards (I can't remember the last time I gave a lecture which didn't then lead to some short but useful conversations with students just after finishing up) are real and shouldn't be wished away, in the same way that realising some people require Braille isn't a sensible argument for giving up on printing presses.

Every approach has its advantages and its limitations. Supplementation and variation are the approaches we need to focus on. And if too many academics can't even deliver a half-decent lecture (and I am as disgusted as anyone by the fact that so many can't) we need to teach them to do it better lectures, or kick them to the curb. Because these goobers can't manage a lecture, how can we trust them to deliver anything more involved [1]? We can't make teaching better without making better teachers, even if we try to rely on the online causes that Clark just so happens to make his shekels slapping together.

[1] I'd also like to point out the irony in Clark trying to sell academics on the idea that MOOCs would reduce the amount of time they spend teaching instead of researching, when it's exactly that attitude of seeing teaching as an impediment to research that leads to shitty lecturers in the first place.

A Failure To Add Up

It's not often I can say something positive about the Coalition, so I would like to take a moment and congratulation on their new education idea. For far too long naysayers have gotten away with insisting that best teaching practice might somehow be tied to irrelevant factors such as "culture" and "school-day length" and "holiday times" and "language", but finally some brave soul has taken a stand and announced in a clear voice: Chinese teaching methods must work better in England than English teaching methods, because they work better in China!

I eagerly await further announcements that Australians will be flown in to teach our sportsmen how to play in the sun more often, Paraguay military officials will be brought over to demonstrate how to defend a country without any naval units at all, and cheetahs will be employed to teach children to run faster by eating only raw wildebeest.

(Actually, all snark aside, I'm all in favour of sharing best practice across national borders. The problem here isn't the initiative, it's the ridiculously grandiose claims being made about its aims.)

"But... But... His Hair Is So Funny!"

Thirty years ago the developmental psychologist Howard Gardner published his most famous work, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Inside, he laid out a theory so obvious in hindsight it's amazing it took humanity so long to put it all together.  In brief, Gardner argued that "intelligence" is not a single quality, but a series of sub-divisions of skill within a person which may or may not be correlated [1]. Thus, simply describing a person as "intelligent" betrays a bias within the speaker towards certain forms of intelligence that are subjectively viewed as more important.

This should come as no shock to anyone who has taken an IQ test, which tend to focus on one's skills with linguistics, mathematics, and spatial relations.  Even there, cracks can appear; I do pretty well with the first, exceptionally well with the second, and utterly abysmally with the third.  Gardner argues that there are many other forms of intelligence (six more in the original book, though last I checked this had grown into something more like eleven more) that are no less real.  Musical intelligence, bodily intelligence, inter- and intrapersonal; there's a whole range of skills born within the mind that for centuries were viewed as either too hard to or not important enough to try and measure (or both),

I mention all this by way of a reminder that what it means to be called "intelligent" is in large part a social construct, just as it is to be called "beautiful". An IQ test measures (imperfectly) those strands of intelligence society has judged to be most valuable.  Not only does it prize linguistic and logical intelligence over interpersonal or artistic intelligence, but it prizes it's own conception of linguistic and logical intelligence over all others.  That's how western nations can create intelligence tests, pass them over to Africans, and then act surprised if they don't do quite so well (see Bell Curve, The).

As between societies, so within.  The rich and the powerful determine what the rich and the powerful consider most important to being rich and powerful, and then are amazed to find those qualities lacking in those not hoovering up seven-figure salaries. Doubtless certain forms of intelligence are very useful in making your way to the top. But in this country at least we may as well call those strands the "succeeding in a neoliberal capitalist marketplace" strands.  We can't draw any conclusions beyond that.  Perhaps we could call this strand "low cunning" for short, or even just "luck", as if the mechanisms by which you enter the world with high aptitudes for given intelligence strands weren't entirely down to luck in the first place.

There is no idea in the world more toxic to Boris Johnson's classical approach to Conservatism (the Jacobins would doubtless have recognised much in his comments, except of course they probably weren't "intelligent" enough to speak English) than the possibility that the systems by which some "cornflakes reach the top" are anything but the purest expressions of meritocracy, and moreover, that the merits the meritocracy reward are anything other than universal qualities worthy of equally universal respect.  The existential terror that the rich and powerful might have to share their riches and power with others less deserving - as defined by the rich and powerful themselves - can only be allayed by convincing themselves the world is better off with a strict social heirarchy in which those on the lower rungs accept they are objectively unsuited for a larger slice of the pie.

(Yes, I have been reading Corey Robin's Reactionary Mind recently.  Why do you ask? Jack Graham deserves some credit here, too, though all mistakes and bouts of idiocy remain forever my own.)

So is the game rigged, and those that rig the game comforted by hearing their own voices, louder than those they sit above, as they explain to people that it's really their own fault they haven't risen higher. After all, if they were smarter they could have rigged their own game, and reached the final level, where the only rule is to lie to each other over the champagne flutes.

[1] In fact, as I understand it Gardner was of the opinion that the correlations were very weak (I've only read bits and pieces of the original text, so I may have misunderstood, however).  I'm less convinced by this; I think it depends very much on the pair of intelligences under consideration and the population one is observing.  The key point though is that these correlations can be very weak, which is why trying to divide the population into "intelligent" and "not intelligent" is so ridiculous an endeavour.

Another Turdbrick In The Wall Street Pocket

Let's briefly dip into the teacher's strike going on right now in Chicago. Charlie Pierce has the jig pretty well nailed down here in any case, but it's worth summarising and repeating: anyone who looks at a profession suffering combined funding and recruiting crises and figures the best thing to do is start reducing the work-force has replaced their brain with bubbling tar.

One of the biggest problems in education - and I admit upfront I only have anecdotal evidence to link my experiences to that of teachers in Illinois - is that the best teachers are often found at the best schools.  This can hardly be considered surprising, of course, this kind of like-with-like clustering is true of almost any profession other than politics and whatever the fuck Mitt Romney tells himself he did before he spent seven years telling people he should be president because black people hate working for a living.

What this means in practice is the better the school, the easier it will find it to replace a teacher they don't think is bisecting the brassica seeds. Which inevitably makes it harder for the schools not having so good a time of it.  Schools that would melt your face if you spent ten minutes in their playground.  Schools where Cthulhu would cry into his tentacles if they asked him to cover a PE lesson.

These schools are often filled with wonderful pupils, and wonderful teachers, doing their best under circumstances that would crack most of us like a tea-cup between Megatron's thighs. This is a better recipe for producing Bolivian throat-warbling than it is high test scores.

So what happens when all those teachers get fired? Who do you persuade to replace the people who just got shit-canned for having miserable working conditions and stress levels that tend to be one student assault away from turning teachers into that poor fuck from Scanners?  These places are already hurricanes of anguish and exhaustion and ingratitude and actual physical danger (a colleague of mine was once poisoned by a student who'd showed up early for a voluntary GCSE revision session), and the best idea these people can come up with is to decrease job security? You might as well try and deal with a beef shortage by banning goat meat.

Teaching is a tough job. Not everyone who wants to do it is going to be able to. It is not clear to me how we address this by making it less likely people are going to want to try.

P.S. Charlie is on the money with his observations about average wage, as well.  It's always been a favourite tool of the right to utterly screw half the people over, then use their anger to justify screwing over the other half in the name of "fairness" (which, as Tomsk pointed out a while ago, is a concept which Cameron and Osborne have as much interest in as the ratio of gases in the Horsehead Nebula).  And right now it's certainly not a trick limited to the the right-wingers in government over the pond, either.

All Downhill From Here

One of these days I really should get around to slapping together a quick statistical analysis regarding GCSE results year by year.  Apparently this year they're actually down for a change, which, you know, is what can happen with such things as "variables".

Until I've had time to think and study past data, I've no intention of coming anywhere close to speculating whether this dip is significant, but I will confess to more than a little interest in how people spin this.  The Guardian's quotes seem to be going with the idea that this is too big a dip, which has been caused by overly harsh marking in order to bring about precisely this effect.  That's possible; I've no idea.

I'm looking forward to seeing what other people come up with.  What will those who have insisted year after year that the GCSEs are becoming easier claim this time round?  That this time the exam boards have got it right?  Or that this is proof that teachers are failing or that kids are getting less willing to sit down and learn?

A shiny penny for the first person to spot someone blaming "Broken Britain".

PS: Congratulations to everyone who got the grades they wanted.

Things I Have Learned

Today I have learned two very important lessons.  Firstly, I can't write on blackboards for more than three hours without developing a blister.  Second, I can't talk for more than four hours out of every six without developing a serious sore throat.

Obviously, the fact that I am a total wimp is not particularly surprising.  On the other hand, it's genuinely interesting to have proved I must spend less than two thirds of my waking life talking.  Who would have guessed?

Usain Bolt Twists The Space-Time Continuum

My delightful A-level tutee phoned this morning in a (mainly fake) thundering rage, because he's done so well this morning that he can't skip out of his first university choice and go to his second, which has with hindsight become his favourite.

Well, caveat emptor, I say (and I know he's delighted with his results, if not their side-effects); I at least can view this with unvarnished pride, having gotten him up two grades in reasonably short order. I am thus dreading taking a look at the papers today, since I have no doubt I will learn that either a) he only did so well because the exams have gotten so easy, or b) he only did so well because his teacher was failing him and I was there to pick up the pieces. These, of course, are the only two possible stories to be told when there is a variation in the pass rate from the year before, which is to say every single year.

I prefer it when it's a), to be honest. It always bugged me that my younger brother got much better sprinting times than I did when we were at school. It comes as a great relief to learn that that's only because metres had gotten shorter.

Those That Require Schooling

I was amused today to see The Guardian refer to Cameron's proposed new teacher recruitment policy as "brazenly elitist" three separate times, once in the link, again in the headline, and again in the first sentence.

Obviously The Guardian isn't trying to hard to hide where it's loyalties lie (or at least where they most definitely do not lie), but in fairness they could have quite sensibly gone much further. The problem with Cameron's idea isn't that it's brazenly elitist (a charge which requires some thought in any case), it's that it's completely, utterly insane.

First of all, though, we need to consider whether or not this plan is elitist. I think we need to be careful about chucking the term around in situations where a body responsible for training people for a job tells those people that their access to that training will be conditional on their level of ability. Is it elitist that I received funding for my PhD having received a first, and a friend of mine who got a 2.2 was required to pay his way to becoming a doctor? Surely not. There's only so many research funding to go around, and it surely makes sense to aim it at those who are most likely to do well.

Where the comparison falls down, though (and this is something Watt would have done well to mention) is that the assumption that getting a first makes one a good researcher is a much stronger one than the assumption that getting a first makes one a good teacher. Nothing in my three years of educational experience ever gave me reason to believe those who were more academically gifted taught more effectively. Often it made a difference to how high they rose within the hierarchy of the school (indeed, certain positions now essentially require masters degrees in education), but that's not the issue. We are not suffering from a deficit of school leadership (well, God knows a lot of schools are, actually, but that's a very different kettle of monkeys), we're suffering from a deficit of good teachers.

In that sense, then, there is an inherent assumption inside this plan that those more academically gifted are also more gifted at passing that information on to others, and that is elitist, I think, in the sense that it suggests academic ability somehow naturally translates into aptitude for being placed in authority. If we could prove such a link exists, or find a more plausible way to measure one's innate talent for imparting knowledge, I don't think I'd have a problem with the idea that some people might not be able to receive funding for their teacher training based on that metric.

Actually, that's not entirely true. If we had a large enough pool of potential recruits, maybe. But the big problem with teaching that Cameron is never going to mention, because it would involve spending money instead of withholding it, is that the reason why in certain subjects we don't have enough good teachers is that we don't have enough teachers of any kind.

In a minimally sensible world, any policy suggestion aimed at weeding out poor teachers would be legally required to come coupled with a plan to immediately replace them with better ones. And yet somehow politicians are allowed to continue suggesting that in a profession that is severely undermanned, the best solution is to make getting into it harder. To reduce the pool. If there exists a teacher out there who is so bad as to be inferior to leaving twenty-five children alone in a room for an hour, I have yet to meet them. Or to hear about it, save for that tiny percentage who break the law in the worst ways possible, and again, show me some evidence that academic achievement and predilection for pederasty have anything other than a correlation of zero.

The one correlation that I do think probably exists in all of this is that those with the highest qualifications are more likely to leave teaching. Teaching, as I can attest to, has something of a high casualty rate. In my case, when I finally decided the school I was working at wasn't for me (and it was more the school than the profession that was bothering me, though the latter was certainly in there as well), I didn't have any problem securing an alternative source of income. This is not necessarily the case for someone less qualified. If I didn't think I'd have found it easy to change careers (or even if I'd been to a few interviews and gotten nowhere), I might well have simply chosen to change schools, instead.

It's by no means a perfect correlation, but it seems obvious that since those with higher classes of degree have more alternatives when considering employment, it will be easier for them to leave teaching, and that means that assuming dissatisfaction is equal across the board, the teaching profession must lose highly qualified teachers more often than less highly qualified ones.

As far as I can see, then, Cameron's response to a horribly under subscribed profession is to make subscription to it harder, and to increase the proportion of subscribers who are more likely to not stay for very long, all whilst arguing that the only reason people like me didn't stay in teaching is that I didn't feel like the job was worthy enough for my attention. As a slice of counter-productive insulting lunacy, it's quite impressive, but I'd be surprised if Cameron doesn't top this one pretty quickly.

Evaluations

I'd manage to totally forget the abolition of maths coursework, but I feel no remorse whatsoever at its passing; it was a monumentally hideous and stressful task to corral children into getting it done in even the most cack-handed fashion, and the possibility of plagiarism made the whole thing pretty pointless (this is accentuated by how much I hated maths coursework as a child, though since I most definitely fall into the "cram at last minute" crowd, I guess that just makes me a stereotypical male). If you're going to make teachers (and those pupils who actually do give a damn about their progress) go blind with stress for a couple of fortnights a year, you should at least be sure you're getting something out of it.

The most interesting thing here (for me at least) is the suggestion that boys and girls should be assessed differently (for the sake of argument, we'll have to ignore the plagiarism aspect for now, since "should girls be examined in a way that makes it easier to cheat?" might throw off the debate otherwise). Off the top of my head, it would take some time to adjust to the new system, causing a dip in marks for a while, and I don't think it would do much for relieving teacher stress. There may be some philosophical/ethical issue to this as well, though I haven't yet come up with anything specific. I think the biggest problem, though, would be entirely practical. Coursework can only cover so many topics (one fortnight of geometry and another on data analysis, in the case of my teaching experience), so absent far more tasks, girls would still be required to sit a final test, simply with a lower weighting attached to it. The immediate question then becomes: what are all the lads doing during those four weeks? Are they doing the same task but for no credit? Are we doubling the number of maths teachers (or, more sneakily, swapping kids around to double the ability range of each class, which would bring its own problems)?

Or is the plan to modularise this stuff? Can a pupil choose the weight of their own exams, given the results of the coursework (again, assuming we could eliminate the cheating issue)? Since we already have modular courses in place, in which one can resit indefinitely until you run out of money or will (or have to get a job), I'm not sure it would be too much of a stretch. This would help avoid having to run parallel classes (though the temptation for students to blow off coursework because "they'll do it on the night" could well be pretty strong), and allow children to choose an assessment method that suited them personally, rather than attempting to make gender-specific changes across the board.

It's an interesting idea, at least.

While we're on the subject of interesting, I note that English results have had a wobble. I await the upcoming flood of people confidently stating that this is obvious proof that English exams are getting harder. I mean, that's the only possible conclusion, right?

Teach Them HARD! Redux

Since Chemie was kind enough to offer some links on the subject of A-level difficulty/desirability, I have a quick peruse of the TSR page on the matter. More specifically, I looked up the paper it referred to, which can be found here. It's worth a quick look, if you have time. Page 111 has the graph of their results (short analysis: science subjects are amongst the hardest, Spielbergo's sister can be rest assured that music is really tough too, Gooder might be annoyed to find that almost the only thing claimed to be easier than sociology is film studies), but it's also worth looking at Section 9.1 (beginning p115), which describes some of the criticisms of the method, that match and expand upon some of my concerns going into this. Section 91.4. in particular reminds us that:

[A] judgement about whether one subject is ‘harder’ than another depends very much on who happened to take those subjects. And if the characteristics of the entry change, so would the supposed difficulties.

This to me is the root of the problem; the very idea of two tasks being "equally hard" fails to take into account how "hard" is measured as regards the people selected for those tasks. There's also a brilliant point made by Goldstein and Cresswell that for any A-level with an average mark of X%, one could construct a sufficiently easy (or difficult) spelling test that would have an X% pass mark as well, but it would not be sensible to refer to them as "equally hard"; the differences in the two tasks make the comparison ridiculous.

Teach Them HARD!

An interesting article on the Conservatives' plans for school league tables. My thoughts on this one are kind of scattered, to be honest, but there are a number of issues in this that need to be considered.

• It is most certainly true that universities regard certain A levels as more important than others, and this is a fact made clear to students while they are choosing their A levels. That means that whether or not Ofqual are correct and there is no such thing as "hard" and "soft" A levels is completely irrelevant. If the universities believe that there are, then it's game over.
• Whilst on the subject of "hard" and "soft" subjects at A-level, though (leaving aside the alternative qualifications, and all things being equal I would rather keep those if possible, and don't find it at all surprising that the Tories don't), it seems very hard to believe that it can be said with certainty, by Ofqual or anyone else, that they are standardised. This is mainly because I don't see how they could be standardised. The skills required and marking methods applied vary so much it is difficult to believe they can all be considered level with each other. Obviously this may be ignorance talking, Ofqual might have an incredibly impressive method of comparison that I simply can't conceptualise, but I tend to doubt it. Certainly in maths, classes in our school who took maths and statistics consistently scored higher than those who take maths and mechanics, a pattern which had existed for some time before I arrived at the school I taught at, and continued despite having the least experienced teacher (i.e. me) handling statistics, and a ferociously competent former HoD on the mechanics side. There's also the fact that we were told in no uncertain terms to warn every applicant for maths that more than any other A-level subject their grades would drop compared to how well they did at GCSE. It is by no means unheard of for students to complete their A-levels with maths as their highest grade, but statistically speaking, that really isn't the way to bet. [1]
• Whilst wondering about how well Ofqual can possibly judge similarity of difficulty across the board, I'm going to embrace totally the fact that they've said (along with Ofsted) that there is no evidence of "dumbing down". This has been a bugbear of mine for years. Partially this is because I've seen a number of syllabuses from various years in my time, and what is immediately apparent is that they have grown more coherent, with topics feeding into each other and building upon each other far more than they did in the past. That has made understanding easier, but that isn't dumbing down, it's imparting knowledge more sensibly (and more to the point, artificially raising the difficulty of the exams to compensate would be ridiculous). More importantly, though, the reason this stuff pisses me off is that there are three variables to consider here: exam difficulty, pupil intelligence, and teaching competence. The third is always ignored in this discussion. "Either the exams get easier each year, or the kids get smarter" is an easy formulation to make (of course, from the perspective of A-levels the latter could be objectively true if seondary school teaching is improving, which I would argue it has, at least to some extent), but the truth is that compared with secondary school teaching, the syllabuses that A-level teachers work from are subject to remarkably little fluctuation, at least in subjects that are well established. Whilst GCSE teachers are constantly being knocked around by the latest new initiatives (some of which, to be fair, are good ideas, a few of which even work in practice), an A-level teacher has the opportunity to deliver almost the exact same material in the exact same way to students who have been admitted to the course using almost the exact same criteria. I have no evidence to prove that this is what is happening, but the argument that this situation means it is to be expected that marks will improve each year is at least worthy of some consideration. A more major overhaul to the syllabus would almost certainly see a drop in results, as teachers get used to the new material and how best to impart it. As I say, the fact that this theory is possible doesn't make it true, but hopefully it makes the point that the third variable should at least be considered.
• I think some of the proposed plan might well be a solution looking for a problem. In my entire life I have never met anyone whose choice of sixth-form college was based on more than looking at one or two options, and then choosing the closest and/or the one most of their friends were going to. The only time this dynamic changed was when certain subjects were unavailable in one place and available in another, a methodology the Tory plan would arguably make harder, since the highest rated subjects under their system are the most commonly taught, which means keeping the subjects around that might actually have affected a choice of school will be less desirable. Unless someone can show me that there are significant numbers of students shopping around for quality sixth-from teaching in specific subjects, then I'm not sure what good the measure will do for anyone but the universities, who already have these things called "grades" they can look at. I'd also like to see some evidence that there are schools using "soft" subjects to boost their scores to the point where their maths teaching looks good when in reality it's shit on toast, and that moreover this isn't trasparently obvious to the local population.
• The Tories are absolutely right that focusing on the C/D borderline takes up a disproportionate amount of time, at the expense of other children. It's almost as though a league system leads to schools trying to get high in the league. If the Conservatives can offer an alternative metric that involves no numbers or categories (both of which immediately lead to focusing on getting as many children past those number or in or out of those categories), I'd love to hear it. Not that it would make any difference, the very nature of teaching is that some pupils are focused on more than others, whether they be borderline students or borderline sociopaths. It isn't fair, but there it is.
• As a former comprehensive school student and descendant of a long line of socialists, the problems with attempting to link a school's worth with the universities their pupils go on to study at is immediately obvious. It would, in fact, entrench the problem of class bias in university acceptance (which as I understand it most certainly hasn't gone away), because the argument "if X is such a good school, why does no-one from X ever get in here" would stop being just sophistry and start being sophistry with a stamp of governmental approval (the fact that said government would be the Tories is no fucking surprise).
• Finally, I am sympathetic up to a point with Smithers' argument that we should just scrap the league tables, because of the damage they do for all sorts of reasons. What I do worry about it what would happen once they were gone. I'm not sure it would lead to teaching being any less of a political football; it seems more likely to my mind that it would simply become an even less well-informed debate than it currently is (if such a thing is possible). I'm also aware that whilst the teaching profession includes a great many people of tremendous talent and dedication, it can't be claimed that everyone is sufficiently self-motivated, and perhaps some form of external pressure isn't actually a bad idea. Whether that could still be effectively provided by Ofsted without the league tables isn't something I'm sure on at all. My point, though, is that granting schools greater autonomy isn't necessarily a great idea, even though each individual school probably thinks it is.

So there you go.

[1] Typing that reminded of the old "art student" vs "science student" debate that was endlessly bandied around whilst I was an undergraduate (well, it was bandied around by the science students, most of the art types were still in bed). An uneasy truce was formed by agreeing that it is both more difficult to fail or to excel in art subjects, allowing a much easier ride for the coasters, and a mountain to climb for those who wanted to reach the top. Whether this theory is true of A-levels (and I'm not sure how true it is of universities) I don't know, but one hopes Ofqual has a more detailed way of considering the situation.

More With Less

I've been trying to sort out how I feel about this new initiative to swipe talented professionals from other jobs and slap them into teachers. My original, visceral reaction was that, as tiresome as I found a lot of things in my PGCE, it's not immediately obvious how fully one-half of it could be jettisoned without adversely affecting the quality of the course.

I'm still wondering that, but I think that there's a series of more specific questions that need answering.

1. How is the entrance criteria going to be determined? It's all very well claiming only the most talented will be chosen, but how does one determine how well, say, a chemical engineer will do in the classroom purely based on his job performance to date? Moreover, why can't this litmus test, whatever it is, be applied to graduates fresh out of university?
2. What evidence is there that to suggest that there a significant (or even non-zero) number of professionals whose only reason for not going into teaching is that the training course is a full year? Low wages, high stress, and poisonous children are the reasons I've most often been given by those who have left teaching or who don't want to even try it. The latter two won't be changed by this new scheme, and if the pay structure is different for those who go through this alternate route, then that's going to cause real problems with regard to teacher morale. The unions would shit out their own heads, too.
3. Following on from the above, is the implication here really that half a standard PGCE course is designed to professionalise graduates and permit crappy applicants to get up to speed? Is there any evidence that either of these things is necessary in any case? In other words, what is it that prevents the current standard course from being truncated, other than the nebulous idea of talent?

With regard to that final question, I am of course willing to grant that there are plenty of crappy candidates that get on PGCE courses. I trained with some of them, and far more of them passed than were failed. It seems obvious to me that you have to be a pretty fucking awful teacher before you're worse than no teacher at all, which is why these people get through (and why anyone ever who starts wittering about kicking out failing teachers without changing any other aspect of the status quo is talking out of their arse).

So in theory I can get on board with the idea that you could tighten up entry requirements and then shorten the course without the worst graduates from your new course being any poorer than those of the original PGCE. As I say, though, how well can any set of entry requirements filter out those who aren't particularly talented at teaching? As a job it requires a pretty unique mix of skills, that are difficult to test in isolation and as far as I know impossible to test in combination, except by practice. Which is why it took me a year to qualify, because there's only so fast anyone can read up on educational theory, discuss it, and put it into action, no matter how awesome an accountant they used to be.

All of which is to say nothing of the inherent problems with running two simultaneous training courses, saying one is for more talented people, and then letting the graduates from both into the same job market. It's pretty worrying that the government's answer to PGCE's being insufficiently attractive is to tempt the best and brightest into an alternative scheme. If this goes forward, applicants for PGCEs will be those either rejected by the brand new uber-teacher scheme (now with 50% less actual fucking work) or be ineligible to enter it in the first place; why else sign up for six months you don't need? So on top of all the reasons people don't like the idea of teacher training to begin with, now you've got people with a chip on their shoulder and in some cases a priori evidence of being sub-optimal candidates, who have to work twice as long to get to the same place, and then compete against those who are coming down from the shining city on the hill for the same positions.

In summary, I'm far from convinced many people would want to take advantage of this scheme, and I'm even less convinced that it proving popular would be an even remotely good thing for the profession as a whole.

Update: I mentioned this to a friend of mine still in the profession whilst at the quiz this evening. We agreed that as far as we could see, training someone to be an effective teacher in six months would be impossible, though perhaps one could spend that time building a robot to do the job.

I should have guessed that the Japanese would be one step ahead...

Removing Parentheses

Over at Obsidian Wings Hilzoy makes a parenthetical point that I think is worthy of further consideration.

[I]t's odd how when politics enters the picture, people sometimes acquire a faith in the Svengali-like powers of teachers that makes absolutely no sense at all. In normal life, we know that overbearing or biassed (sic) teachers are more likely to annoy their students than anything else, and that even good teachers are not always believed. In politics, people sometimes assume that normal, obstreperous kids and adolescents are somehow transformed into docile, sheeplike (sic) beings who accept every word their teachers say. As a teacher, I find this very selective faith in us and our awesome powers quite perplexing.

Amen. There is a lot to be said on the topic of how political figures shaft the teaching profession on a regular basis (it's the educational equivalent of the player/manager dynamic, teachers fail and pupils succeed, unless its during an exam period, in which case the exams have been dumbed-down because we all know they used to be harder), but this isn't quite what Hilzoy is getting at, so I'll put away that particular soap box for another time. This about parents being terrified that the philosophy and morality of a school teacher will somehow trump their own.

Having said that, the two ideas are linked. My first thought upon reading the above was "This is Section 28 again". I've mentioned that particular law before, but if you're late to the party, Section 28 was an attempt by the Conservatives to prevent "promotion" of the homosexual lifestyle in schools. It was feared then, as now, that if teachers spent their time discussing homosexuality with their classes, children would get the idea that this is "the norm". I suspect that in this case (and I may be entirely wrong) that S28 was a deliberate sop to this particular subset of outrageous parents, rather than a deep-seated aspect of party philosophy.

I guess I've never understood where this attitude comes from. Looking back over my life, I can think of plenty teachers who were incompetent (usually because they either lacked the "killer instinct" necessary to keep a class under control, or because they were so relentlessly unpleasant that all higher brain processes were abandoned the moment they entered a classroom), many who were good at their jobs, and a few who were truly excellent. That latter category describes maybe three or four teachers across one's entire educational lifetime, and even then, their tremendous ability to impart knowledge and inspire interest and dedication is a separate skill-set entirely to persuading children to alter their moral standpoints. And this is coming from someone who tended to be one of the most attentive people in a class (more through fear of punishment than any deep desire to learn, it has to be said), and whose slowly crumbling faith in God meant I was already searching around for alternative philosophies. Hilzoy is quite right that proselytising teachers are going to be annoying rather than persuasive, and it's worth noting that it's hard enough to get children to accept facts [1] let alone your personal opinion on something.

What might just happen, if you're very lucky, is that once in a blue moon you'll find yourself in a conversation with a small group of children who are in the right frame of mind to ask and answer sensible questions, and aren't being expected to be doing something else right at that minute [2]. Outside of the "citizenship" sessions we had for twenty minutes a week (which to be fair did occasionally generate some good discussions), I remember pulling off this trick all of once, when I got to have a short conversation on whether homosexual couples should be allowed to adopt (given my opinions on such, S28 would have prevented that conversation had it still been in effect).

This, apparently, is what has people so frightened. From time to time a conversation may arise in which it becomes clear that a child's teacher feels differently on a given subject to their parents. The idea that a brief chat about such things will invalidate years of whatever philosophical indoctrination these parents have engaged in (and of course many and perhaps all of those claiming outrage will have had their church or whatever knocking this stuff into their kids' heads as well) is ludicrous. If it was that easy, no-one who went to a religiously-affiliated school would ever lose their faith (we'll bypass the self-evident truth that even sending your children to, say, a Catholic school, does not mean that Catholic parents will never disagree with anything discussed in class). Moreover, the idea that faith in one's dogma can be so easily overturned is both somewhat insulting to the pupils in question [3], and, if true, would mean the downfall of organised religion almost immediately, since preventing your children (or your flock) from ever being exposed to counter-arguments is manifestly impossible, unless you choose to seal yourself away and never have contact with the non-believers. Which is a viable choice, but be honest about it, don't send your child to school with everyone else and then complain when different opinions get raised.

I guess in conclusion I'd say that Hilzoy is right that people seem to have a funny idea of the level of influence teachers have, and that it's a wider problem than just on the subject of politics; parents often have a truly bizarre concept of the role, responsibilities, and effect we have on their children's development. I'm also continually baffled by the idea that faith is such a fragile thing that it must not be challenged, even indirectly, by coming into contact with other ideas. What a miserable, paranoid existence that must be.

[1] I once told a class of very bright Year 8 children that it was physically impossible to write down a googolplex (that's a one followed by a googol's worth of zeros, i.e. 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 zeros, in case you were wondering). Two weeks later I discovered that every time I hadn't been looking one of my pupils had been trying to write said number in the back of his maths book, so as to prove me wrong.

[2] I realised pretty early in my time teaching that kids had worked out they could avoid doing any work if they asked me a question I found interesting enough to answer in full; from then on I let them get away with it assuming I thought the question was more important than, say, five extra minutes of practising balancing equations.

[3] This is an extension to the "exams are getting easier" ..., the idea that children are so fundamentally clueless that they cannot do well unless the bar is lowered for them, and they cannot think critically on their own so must never be asked to defend their positions.

I Guess This Is How Voldemort Got Started

I always worried that I had a tendency to go a bit too far with entertaining my pupils. I had deals with some of the more truculent classes (and, in truth, those I was most fond of) that should they complete a given amount of work by five minutes before the end of the lesson, they could have a story (not to toot my horn, or nothing, but I'm pretty good at telling stories to children). It seemed a valid reward strategy to me (although with the benefit of hindsight I'm not sure the one about the Israeli Army's Circumcision Brigade was entirely wise), but there was always that nagging doubt that I should be going through one more simultaneous equation, or lecturing them on time-management, or something.

Now, though, I'm just glad I didn't work in Florida, and that I never tried to wow them with magic tricks. This is the sort of thing that is beyond parody, especially since, as the article mentions, even when the school (allegedly) trumped up reasons for firing this guy (a missing toothpick not generally considered a sacking offence in any job ever, one would presume), they listed them as being additional problems to his wizardry, as oppose to, y'know, the only problems.