October 19th, 2007
Look! Someone sensible
Posted by
chrislintott in
Uncategorized
Look at this. Someone making a sensible point about science education in parliament. OK, so it’s not a politician, it’s Astronomer Royal and cosmologist Martin Rees (also known as Baron Rees of Ludlow), but still. Hopefully someone’s listening, and he’s not shunned for turning up late.
(Incidentally, They Work for You is an excellent site for anyone interested in UK politics – try searching for ‘creationism’, for example.
on October 20th, 2007 at 10:18 am
I hope that neither Chris nor the people who will decide at the end of this academic year whether or not I achieve Qualified Teacher Status will mind if I jump up on my own soapbox here . . .
When I was in school and at university, I ranted about science teachers not seeming enthusiastic and turning people off science. But that was not every teacher I had, and certainly not every one I have encountered – the teachers with whom I am training are wonderful and so committed, and when we are not talking about the children we talk about science! It is the dream of many of us to change a child’s life in that one day they will become a scientist – or to achieve something else wonderful; the important thing is that they are happy!
I will be curious to read this report Martin Rees mentions. I wonder if it will go into the reasons WHY teachers are dropping out, and how to take some of the pressures off. If a child is turned off science, it is seen as the teacher’s fault. In many cases that may be true. In many other cases it may be because the teacher had no leeway to give the child access to real science amidst the pressure of a million targets and forms to fill in. It is one of the first things we get told as we buy our first textbooks on teaching that the time spent in the classroom is “the tip of the iceberg”. The other seven-eighths is spent on doing other things. If anybody doesn’t believe me here, I suggest they be a fly on the wall in a school staffroom and see how much of our time is taken up documenting everything we do, trying to find a way to help the children with problems (often bad enough that they are preventing the other 29 children in the class from getting anything done), and look up the “Every Child Matters” agenda.
Now that parents mostly have no choice but to work full-time, and schools are soon expected to be open from 8am until 8pm, we teachers are now filling in the gaps as the childrens’ parents. We are responsible for seeing that they are physically and mentally healthy, that they know how to talk properly, dress themselves and look after themselves, for their moral and social upbringing, and for a thousand immediate things – sometimes emergencies. The actual subject we teach can end up taking a very secondary role. Unless we’re in an academy (don’t start me on those), we have to stick tight to the National Curriculum which allows for very little extension into what will interest children – that has to be done in our and their own time, and in most cases that would mean it would detract from the rest of our time and lose us our jobs. (Oh, and we can’t possibly be alone with a child or we’ll have to sign the sex offender’s register and never work near children again.) In many cases, due to factors such as a department’s equipment, every lesson is jointly planned and has to take place in a specified slot – you can’t just decide “I’m going to teach this today” or you’re messing things up for the dozen or so other members of your department and for every class they teach.
And of course there’s achieving the right exam results. That is more like teaching a language than teaching facts. “You have to include this, this and this, and you have to include these three key words.” An 11-year-old told me that during year 6, the last year of his primary school, they did not study music because of the impending SATs. The best we can really do is sneak the real and enjoyable science in surreptitiously – “by the way, you don’t need this for your exams, but those two Rovers on Mars have found . . .” “I’m afraid the mark scheme says this. But actually pathology is really xyz/this is a better way but it’s not on the syllabus . . . but you have to write what the examiner wants or you won’t get the grade and won’t be able to do A level Physics . . .”
We really are trying, us teachers. Come to our science and astronomy clubs at school and help with them!