Education? Ha!

Sometimes I need to escape the present, although mostly these days, I do try to live each day for itself. being one whose tendency is to look back rather than forward, it is easy to recall the past with rose tinted memories, and yes we do tend to bury the bad experiences wherever possible.

I am reading a book called "It's Your Time You're Wasting" by an ex supply teacher who worked in inner city schools. It is essentially a catalogue of bad experiences that illustrate the sad state of so many of our classrooms, that have been systematically saboutaged by endless tinkering and interfering by political parties and educational theorists who have, along with some bloody useless teachers, wrecked the education of so many students over the years.

Yes there are useless teachers, and yes they are hard to get rid of, but there are even more useless educational theorists and administrators who are even harder to shift.

I can recall teaching colleagues, whose every day experience must have been a misery for them. Men and women who had no control whatsoever over their charges, and who would preside over riots within their classrooms, day after day. No learning could possible have taken place and yet each day these people would turn up and go through the whole fiasco, seemingly impervious to what was going on.

There were others who the kids loved, because they never made them do anything, or would allow them to do more or less anything that they wanted, other than work. The system allows it to happen, and as long as these people can tick all the right boxes when inspectors call then they get away with it year after year. I knew one teacher who was so incompetent at administration, that he was never allowed to have a registration group. He claimed that he couldn't see well enough to mark a register, so while the rest of us were dealing with out daily charges, he would sit in the staffroom, or his office, reading the small print of the financial times.

There were still more who, rather than press kids into extending themselves would make every lesson a joy by providing cut and stick exercises, which of course is a wonderful way to control a class as they can talk about anything and everything instead of actually learning anything.

The system as it is stinks. GCSE and the National curriculum replaced a perfectly good system of GCE and CSE examinations, which prepared kids for choices post 16. Now everyone is equal and pushed through the same hoops in a ridiculous attempt to improve standards. The kids know that it is a con and so do the teachers. OFSTED is a joke and schools get plenty of time to prepare for inspections, rendering them more or less invalid.

I'd like to see local politicians making spot visits to our schools. They'd find out what was really happening and perhaps something could be done to rescue the chances of our kids.

There are of course many excellent teachers out there and they deserve to be rewarded for what they manage to do despite the odds.