OP
OP
icowden
Legendary Member
This was my favourite bit:-
I wonder *how* they are raising their hands. That sort of thing hasn't gone well historically...
Schooliform
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multitool
Pharaoh
He gets a mention, quite a long one actually, in this article about Race pseudo science in the dominant English education policy network:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883035522001306
And is the sole focus on this piece from a University of Cambridge education lecturer:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...8QFnoECA4QAQ&usg=AOvVaw3zRp0QUh10mkoamKw53EvI
Looks like he is aligned with Spiked.
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newfhouse
pleb
Top Googling, but I did say that I found his thoughts on the narrow matter we were discussing - enforced whole class reading at teacher speed - chimed with my own experience, and I stand by that.
AndyRM
Elder Goth
Reading with a ruler? I thought that would be a dreadful idea, but according to my fiancee (who teaches children with ASL), it can help children who are neurodiverse. But using something they've made themselves.
Still, good luck to them if they're forced to read Shakespeare's interminably dull historical plays. Nobody is having a good time with those.
Still, good luck to them if they're forced to read Shakespeare's interminably dull historical plays. Nobody is having a good time with those.
OP
OP
icowden
Legendary Member
I suppose it does depend on the type of neurodiversity though. I could read fluently by the age of 4, and well before I went to school. I thought school was a boring place for quite some time, and didn't see the point of it. My main battle was with the evil Mrs Barclay in year 2 of Junior school who insisted that I must finish the blue and white reading scheme before I was allowed just to pick books from the library.
Of course I refused to read the blue and white books and just read my own books or books taken out from the actual library. I was the sort of child who when asked to stand up an do a time table did it in abstract order just to make it more interesting. I don't think my teachers liked me very much...
multitool
Pharaoh
I've had a little look at the reading programme list for Yr 7 at a local RTL school. No Shakespeare. A really good range of literature, some of which they will like and some they may not.Looks like there is something for everyone in there.
I think the point about these RTL schools is that from what I can make out they are all, or nearly all, schools are in recovery effectively from a situation of breakdown of behaviour and learning culture. It is effectively a reset. But reading around suggests that they are viewing the initial 'behaviour' stage as part of an evolution where good behaviour becomes so embedded it ceases to be an consideration.
theclaud
Reading around the chip
OK I admit it was obvious bait.
The point is that the Miss Snuffies are not just a handful of rogue perverts running weirdo places for the children of people like them, but that this kind of systematic and mandatory control-freakery is arising from ideologically-driven forced academisation and the domination of schooling by edubusiness. What options are there for parents who don't want their children subject to zero-tolerance sadism, in whose town some nutcase Multi-Academy Trust now has a monopoly on secondary education?
multitool
Pharaoh
I don't think any of this is true at all. I'll set out why later.
AndyRM
Elder Goth
What does a "really good range of literature" look like in the world of @multitool? Because a lack of Shakespeare is remiss of that curriculum.
multitool
Pharaoh
Let's deal with the sadism first. Sadism is a comment on intent. Are you really suggesting that the intent of teachers and headteachers is sadism? That one endpoint goal is to make the pupils suffer?
It's clearly bollox, but I'll indulge your ridiculousness for a moment. A very short moment, because it doesn't take more than a cursory thought to compute that if the end goal is sadism, then the method is self-defeating. All the pupils have to do is behave themselves. Surely good behaviour cannot be what the teachers want?
Do I need to continue with this, or are you going to go and have a little think?
Is it arising from "forced academisation"? Clearly not, because almost all of the schools adopting it were already academies, and have been so for years. At most it is forced academy chain sponsor change...but what is wrong about that if the pre-existing sponsors had run the schools into chaos with appalling outcomes for the children? It is about the children isn't it? Or is it you that is driven by ideology and not pragmatism?
And here we have the most ignorant and ideological of your accusations...that these schools were, in their pre-existing states, places of kindness, calm and academic success. They weren't, for the simple reason that a school in a crisis of behaviour cannot deliver safety, care and above all relative academic achievement to its children. The teachers still get paid, but the children walk away with grades far lower that of which they are capable, and their experience of education is a negative one. These are the children destined for zero hours contracts or worse. Wishy washy ideas about education are what have caused the crisis of chaos in British schools. What options are there for the 94% of children's parents who want a safe effective education for their children but cannot afford private school fees? What option is there when the only school serving a sink estate is dangerous, has high truancy rates because children are too scared to attend and teachers spend their time firefighting behaviour issues instead of managing learning.
You've got this ridiculous notion that schools outside of the RTL system are havens. They are not. The RTL schools are.
There is a wider point to make about conformity within institutions. You are cherry-picking which institutions should enforce good discipline, on ideological grounds that don't make sense.
If you didn't, you wouldn't be active on the police threads saying that rape, sexual assault and harassment, racism etc BY police officers is a systemic problem that needs addressing at an institutional level.
You are arße about face on this. If you look at it through the prism of class disadvantage it is YOU who are ensuring the entrenchment of that disadvantage.
And here is the thing; everybody involved at a conceptual level at Michaela, whether it be Birbalsjngh, Toby Young, Braverman et al, is a horrible cünt. But that does not mean that the school's students are badly served. They aren't.
Nowhere is perfect, but these schools are addressing their basic function, which is to shape young people away from being horrible, destructive prïcks with no regard for anybody, and no motivation and into having self-respect, ambition and the willingness to work hard to achieve goals they had never bothered setting themselves because they never thought they could.
A local city school, once listed as one of the worst schools in the country, got its first 6tth former into Oxbridge this year.
You can't play class warrior, and bemoan the predominance of public school students in the elite universities, with all the advantages this confers, and at the same time attack the very approach that is likely to undo it. It's bullshît and you know it.
YOU are the ideologue.
But you aren't the only one. A whole bunch of you will be deciding how you respond on the basis of ideology, and not on the basis of the lives of children in these schools, about which you nothing beyond an ephemeral local newspaper clickbait headline.
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multitool
Pharaoh
No it isnt. Did you like reading Shakespeare? I didn't. Almost none of my classmates did either...and we were grammar school kids, supposedly the elite of the state system.
It can still be taught in English lessons, but why inflict it in a tutor time reading programne on kids from former sink schools whose bookshelves at home are stacked with DVDs and video games?
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OP
OP
icowden
Legendary Member
I have to agree with @multitool on this one. Shakespeare isn't meant to be read. It's meant to be performed. It's stultifying to try and read. You need to see it and explore it, act it out, learn what the lines mean by doing, not reading.
Fab Foodie
Guru
Kicked-off another thread on lit and education....
Electric_Andy
Regular
I must agree. We studied Shakespeare for GCSE, I hated it, so did everyone else bar about 3 girls who went on to do A Level English. I came out of school with an A and a B in Eng Lang. and Lit. respectively. I still couldn't tell you in detail what happened in any of Shakespeare's plays. I've never read any "classics" like Dickens or Hardy or Bronte, all I've read is about 90% of Stephen King's works which I loved. IMHO creative writing should be taught as "Language", using a few examples from past works but why oh why are we still forcing kids to read plays and heavy novels intended for adults!