Monday, November 12, 2012

Testing the teacher

Staving off the tedium of cough-recovery inactivity, I was ploughing through yesterday's Sunday Times when I came across a piece about the proposal to raise entry standards for wannabe primary teachers. (Actually I'm not certain about that last qualification - the paper was certainly talking about primary teachers, but there was a lack of clarity ...) Anyway, I had a flashback to my own primary education, during which I was taught by two men and five women, six of whom were Glasgow MA graduates and one a BSc. They all wore their hoods to prizegiving. They were fiercely proud of their work and of the school, and some of them were also pretty fierce, in a respect-inducing sort of way. The only time I ever saw one of them at a loss was the hapless BSc who taught us in P7, for he became entangled in the thickets of English grammar and had to appeal, in a note home via me, to my father for assistance. Less strange than you might think - they were old buddies, and when I came in with homework that was different from that of the other 39 in my class, he realised he was in unsuspected deep water. (He might not have noticed the juxtaposition of metaphors in that story, but the formidable Miss Campbell would not have liked it).

When I was a secondary teacher, I never felt out of my depth in my own subject. Had I had to teach P7 maths, it might have been another story - though I can still do long division, for what it's worth. Perhaps  a subject-based degree is not such a useful qualification for a Primary teacher - but its possession at least shows a level of study and competence without which an underlying confidence might well be lacking. I still tend to rate people by their ability to write competent and properly-spelled English as an indicator of basic education, and I still expect teachers not to come out with such expressions as "I seen" and "I done" - or, worse still, "Ah seen" and "Ah done". It's even worse when this is a common feature of the speech of the English teacher of one's own child - and when the same teacher, who is also a colleague, tells you "But you're posh".

Posh I am not. But I was well taught, fairly rigorously tested, and instilled with a passion for language that has grown with the years. I cannot say that the similarly good teaching managed to get me beyond the basic competence needed for Higher Maths and Higher Science (remember, if you're older than I am, that that was awarded after a single paper in both Physics and Chemistry; they split the two, if I'm correct, in the early 1960s) - but the MAs who taught me were bright enough to do the biz in Primary and my teachers after S3 had a real uphill struggle against orchestra practices and other distractions.

So: how on earth do you get accepted for teacher training without demonstrating enough ability and education to have room for manoeuvre? And whom does a lack of rigour help? Not the teacher - horrid to find yourself the butt of sneers from a ten-year-old who knows the answer you don't; not the pupils, who have perfectly correctly spelled words marked wrong by the ignoramus charged with their education. No: there are no winners. There don't seem to be teacher shortages either, not right now.

Seems pretty bloody obvious to me.

8 comments:

  1. And to me, Christine. I blame the day they decided to stop teaching grammar. Sadly that means that there are now many teachers who never had any training in formal grammar during their own education and now they are being expected to teach it to their pupils. And while I'm on my hobbyhorse, surely accurate grammar and spelling enable self-expression and creativity, rather than impeding it which, back in the early 1970s, was the reason given to my student teacher mother-in-law for why she shouldn't correct her pupils' grammar in their creative writing.

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    1. Gosh - at least I was allowed to correct grammar in my first job (1968-73)! But there was so much nonsense spewed at younger secondary pupils in the 90s, for example, about "taking your brain for a walk" and not bothering what came out of it as long as it showed imagination - and then they reached Standard Grade and Higher and found that correctness was the key to the higher grades ...
      I remember more than one pupil telling me they went back and put the punctuation in afterwards. So much for its being an integral part of the writer's art!

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  2. 1962 was the occasion of the first diet of Ordinary Grade examinations. I know because I was there. Speaking entirely selfishly, this had one good and one bad effect.

    The good was that, when Science was split into separate subjects, I was able to acquire an O Grade (should that be hyphenated?) in Zoology and cram enough extra knowledge in to enable me to sit a mandatory Science paper in the Glasgow University Bursary competition - and thereby, for another time mayhap, hangs another sad tale of standards lowered in the name of progress. [I don't like the two instances of 'another' so close together either; but it is late and my lonesome neurons are firing fitfully]

    The bad was that they moved the diet from March to May/June. This meant that the school opera was cancelled, since the Rector thought either that there would be no time for sufficient rehearsals or that it would interfere with our scholastic efforts - or possibly both. Having been a successful Koko in 1961, I was looking forward to another enjoyable romp. It was all the more galling that, having experiened the initial diet, the Rector overturned his decision the following year. Rats!

    Good grief! I've just realised that all this happened 50 years ago. Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni, as the man said.

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    1. I too sat a few of the 1962 O Grades: arithmetic (cos we all had to); Maths (because I might not get anything if I only sat Higher); Physics & Chemistry (same reason); Geography (cos I wasn't going to sit H in S5, being too idle to do 6 Highers in a year). I can remember the classes further up the school waiting for their results to be announced in the Hall (in Hillhead, so you can picture it). Later, I wondered if the corporate grief/exhilaration/relief was easier to bear than the lone envelope-opening in the middle of the summer holidays; the latter certainly cost more in phone bills.

      I grow old, I grow old ... but do you roll the bottoms of your trousers because you have shrunk with age?

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    2. No... but I do tend to wear purple a lot.

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  3. I have an article about schools in Finland which will interest you Chris. (Coffee? Seasons?) I quote....'it simply nurtures superbly trained teachers (to get a permanent teaching job you need a master's degree), gives them stability and the social esteem usually reserved in Britain for doctors - and then trusts them to get on with the job. There are no exams in Finland until children are 18. Nor are schools inspected, or measured against each other...kids stay in the same school from 7 (when they start school), with high flyers staying in the same class as slow learners....'

    In global comparisons they are in the top six countries...! Fascinating.

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    1. How fascinating all this is! I think that coffee is long overdue - I'll mail you or we might have half the blogosphere turning up ;). I was in the same school - two buildings - from P1 to S6 - which meant the school itself became very important to me. However, there is an interesting piece on teaching and learning in France here which seems to point to the other side of the coin when it comes to the education of teachers. As they used to say in literature exam questions: Discuss!

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  4. Have found the article - http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/music/classical/article3151869.ece

    It's about music in Finland!

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