School curriculums and exams

[Rule One]

This year's exams have got me stressed out as we're heading towards what would be exam season and there's still no indication of what to expect in terms of how things are going to be assessed and the way its going to be implemented. 

Junior was the victim of Gove's wackybacky laureate revision when his year group were the first to undergo the changed year 6 SATS tests. The stress it put schools, teachers and the kids themselves was immense and squeezed about 3 years of teaching into one mashed year. He was bringing homework back that was then expected of kids in year 8 and 9, it fried their minds and put a lot off education. 

Now his year group are in another heavily pressurised situation which has not yet been organised properly and up until Christmas was geared up to do exams on the governments hellbent ignorance and insistence.

I'm confident that whatever comes he'll be able to pass but week on week it's becoming more of a battle to keep him going in that direction and a lot of his age group feel/are discontent with how they've been hung out to dry. The government failed to learn after last year's mess and a damming indication of its failure is that it came into this year heading full force in the same direction and the complete lack of preparation for anything different is astonishing. I particularly feel for educators who've been battered pillar to post and left as an afterthought by the government and media. I can't thank all those who waded through all this for their efforts, I can't imagine how hard its been to keep it all together throughout all this. 

I'm worried about my sons and his peers future education, prospects and the world he's/they're going to fully grow into. The time for change could have come whilst all this is going on but we're doomed to repeat until someone comes along who doesn't bury their head in the sand and is interested in how the education system can evolve and improve to provide a better experience and quality of life for all involved. 

Exams shouldn't be the be all and end all but it is. The question is, how do we change that? 

[Michael_3165]

5 hours ago, Vamp said:

The question is whether children are actually learning these things for life in that structure or whether its just drilled into them to regurgitate in an exam and never think about again.

Its much like how schools teach specific books rather than fostering a love of reading.

I still find it ridiculous that I was taught how to balance chemical equations but not how mortgages work.

This. 

I hated school and did terribly because I was in no way interested or drawn in by the subjects. Then went to university and got great results. It's really something about that way of learning that has worsened over the past 15 years. My sisters were in turmoil over their exams, told if they didn't remember minute details they would fail in life. 

For me I never understood why I needed tto learn that stuff, so why bother? I've never used equations in real life. Nor have I created chemical compounds or needed to point out Tuvalu on a bloody map. The whole system is bullshit. Teach kids how to think not what to think. 

I really worry for the mental state of kids nowadays. When you fill kids brains w that amount of  cortisol (stress hormone) over the course of a secondary school career it's hardly surprising they are often panic attacking, suicidal wrecks. School needs to be fun and help kids make sense of the world arround them. Rarely do I come across anyone who remembers anything they learnt at school. Cos when you are thaat stressed you can't think, it's all nonsense. 

Edited January 28, 2021 by Michael_3165

[BomberPat]

23 minutes ago, Michael_3165 said:

For me I never understood why I needed tto learn that stuff, so why bother? I've never used equations in real life. Nor have I created chemical compounds or needed to point out Tuvalu on a bloody map. The whole system is bullshit. Teach kids how to think not what to think. 

I really worry for the mental state of kids nowadays. When you fill kids brains w that amount of  cortisol (stress hormone) over the course of a secondary school career it's hardly surprising they are often panic attacking, suicidal wrecks. School needs to be fun and help kids make sense of the world arround them. Rarely do I come across anyone who remembers anything they learnt at school. Cos when you are thaat stressed you can't think, it's all nonsense. 

The point is that, taught properly, learning something like how to complete an equation is teaching kids "how to think". Very little about schooling is teaching you what to think. 

You might not have knowingly solved for X or balanced an equation since your last Maths lesson, but you have presumably extrapolated a solution from incomplete information, or solved a problem that required you to weigh up the data that was available to you. That's the sort of thought process that learning algebra teaches you - and say that as someone who was, and is, fucking awful at Maths.

 

The stuff around mental health I largely agree with, though (pandemic aside), I don't think school today is any more or less stressful than it was twenty or thirty years ago. That's no ringing endorsement of school twenty or thirty years ago, though - I find it grimly fascinating how many adults still have anxiety dreams and nightmares set in school. There is either something formative in your development at that age, or something about the school experience, that gets its claws into your psyche in a big way. 

[Michael_3165]

24 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

The point is that, taught properly, learning something like how to complete an equation is teaching kids "how to think". Very little about schooling is teaching you what to think. 

You might not have knowingly solved for X or balanced an equation since your last Maths lesson, but you have presumably extrapolated a solution from incomplete information, or solved a problem that required you to weigh up the data that was available to you. That's the sort of thought process that learning algebra teaches you - and say that as someone who was, and is, fucking awful at Maths.

 

The stuff around mental health I largely agree with, though (pandemic aside), I don't think school today is any more or less stressful than it was twenty or thirty years ago. That's no ringing endorsement of school twenty or thirty years ago, though - I find it grimly fascinating how many adults still have anxiety dreams and nightmares set in school. There is either something formative in your development at that age, or something about the school experience, that gets its claws into your psyche in a big way. 

Working a mentally ill teenagers I'd say it's made massively worse over thhe past twenty years. The levels of anxiety, depression, stress, self harming etc is offf the scale compared to what it was. And that's backed up by the data. 

[ReturnOfTheMack]

Me and my wife went to very different schools.

[PowerButchi]

I have an MA, but I couldn't tell you what a Verb is, a Noun is, and the other ones are. It's a fucking irrelevance. So asking 10 year olds to sort it out is beyond the pale. Get them to love words, not overly analyse them. 

[Fog Dude]

If you have an MA in anything other than languages, you shouldn't need to know about parts of speech (though I'd still recommend it). Last spring I was meant to take translation diploma exams in a sports hall, without a dictionary, all done and dusted in 3 hours. Then the pandemic came along and they switched it to longer and more difficult texts, but you had 72 hours to complete them wherever you like, using whatever resources you could find. All of which reflects working in the translation industry far more than a traditional exam, but it took a global public health crisis for the examiners to realise it and not be set in their ways.

Before that I learnt more about grammar and its technical terms via other languages, which has fostered a fascination with all that kind of stuff ever since. The idea that you need to be introduced to those ideas at 10 with reference only to English, instead of alongside different languages as a teenager, is a nonsense. If I'd been forced to learn all those concepts in my first language in an abstract way in Year 5, it could've put me off for life. 

I disagree that mortgages should be taught in schools, mind. The fact that you can call yourself a "homeowner" in this country when it's actually the bank that owns your house is a convenient legal and social fiction. Housing is a human right and children shouldn't be taught that market forces being involved in it is normal. Knowing where Tuvalu is or how to balance a chemical equation might be something you never use in practice as an adult, but it's helpful for teaching you how to think and it's actually based on real scientific and geographical fact, rather than a man-made economic construct.

[PowerButchi]

23 minutes ago, Fog Dude said:

If you have an MA in anything other than languages, you shouldn't need to know about parts of speech (though I'd still recommend it). 

Wasn't the point I was trying to make bud. 

[Millard Rausch]

Mr Blair's "education, education, education" never quite materialized, did it. There should have been a great leveling up akin to the creation of the NHS after the war, but it never happened.