As some of you may know, I’m applying to do a PGCE and could be a teacher 2 years from now, eek! I’ve just begun work experience doing teacher training at a secondary school in Staines and it’s been a serious shock for me.
We’ve all seen on the news and in newspapers stories about children falling to learn how to read and write, and although I’ve heard it mentioned numerous times I didn’t really believe it. I feel you always need to take news stories with a pinch of salt as they just like to make a media frenzy of something really quite small and insignificant occasionally.
In my first class on my first day doing teacher training experience at my school I had the most hellish class of them all. The main teacher screamed at the class for 25 minutes with no avail to control them. Another teacher was called in to shout at them and try to make them feel bad for acting so badly and then after 3 pupils were sent to the head and 4 put on report we were able to begin any sort of work! And even then the class was not easy. There was one simple task set – to write up a report for the head teacher detailing how you would organise a Christmas concert for the school. I went round the class helping people who weren’t writing and doing some brainstorming with them to get them thinking. I experienced:
- Two girls trying to start arguments with the teacher so they could get sent out of class too
- Two girls trying to get me into conversation to avoid having to work and telling me they wish I could be their teacher…because they think it would be a doddle (mental note: must put forward argument to bring back canes)
- One boy who had written nothing. He wasn’t loud or disruptive but just didn’t understand what to do. I explained it to him again, talked through some ideas with him (he wrote down my points word for word) and then just told him to expand each point into a paragraph as I had talked him though how to do.
- I came back to him at the end of the class and he hadn’t written any more since I had left him earlier
- One boy who hadn’t even opened him book and was sitting back in his chair doing nothing. I asked him why he hadn’t started and he said he couldn’t be bothered. I asked him what sort of excuse that was and his friend next to him apologised for him and said that he wasn’t in the mood to work that day but he’d be working again by tomorrow. I asked him what would he do if he couldn’t be bothered on the day of one of his GCSEs and he replied he wouldn’t do them then. As far as he was concerned, school was a chore he had to deal with until he turned 16, or even better, until he got expelled. I told the teacher what he had said and she spoke to him but then left him there doing nothing – he wasn’t disrupting the class so he needn’t be sent out. How are we meant to deal with pupils like that?
The bell rang and everyone left – praise the lord! I was chatting to the teacher after the class and talking about some of the pupils – in particular I was most disappointed in the boy who had written nothing since I left him. She then told me that this class was particularly bad for pupils who could barely read or write. This class were 14 by the way. The three who were sent out were notorious for causing so much hassle that they had to be sent out. For a lot of teenagers in this situation, they would rather become disruptive and deal with the consequences than be seen as being “stupid” in front of their class and friends.
On Friday I helped out in a year 7 special literacy class for about 10 pupils who had trouble reading or writing. I thought this was a really great class set up by the school allowing children with difficulties to improve their skills in a smaller group and without the worry of being mocked by other children at higher levels. But even within this small class I was asked to sit beside one particular boy who needed special attention and liked to have a teacher to himself. In his primary school he had one-on-one time with a teacher all day every day and so, was struggling a lot in secondary school in classes of 20 or more and all at a higher level of understanding than him. This was such a heart wrenching case – I really found so upsetting. The class began with a spelling test, my boy getting 3 out of 10. He got upset and frustrated because he said he’d got some of these words right before and he knew how to spell them in his head but they came out wrong when he came to write them down. While the rest of the class went on to read Rohl Dahl’s The Witches, we did spelling corrections. I wrote out the word correctly and asked his to write it out 10 times below it for each word.
You’d have thought I asked him to write a 20,000 word essay from his reaction and he got very stressed and anxious about writing down so many words. At one point he made a mistake and he got really angry – calling himself stupid over and over again. I told him not to call himself that because he wasn’t and he said “why not? Everyone else does. I am stupid – everyone just laughs at me. I’m just a mistake, a mistake even to be born”. I scolded him for putting himself down like that, told him he wasn’t stupid and that it was a terrible thing to suggest that he was a mistake to be born, to which he replied “I am a mistake, my mum told me. She hates me”. Apparently the mum is a complete bitch – refuses to come into the school to discuss his progress, has no interest or involvement in his education and from what I saw, is seriously guilty of neglect. His uniform was dirty and I have never encountered a child so young with no self-worth or positive outlook on his life.
His case was an exceptional one, he has learning difficulties as well as a hellish home but in the case of all the others teenagers I met who could barely read and write (and there were many) I wonder how much can really be done for them. The problems seems to be that they haven’t learned to master it by the time they’ve left primary school which gives them an immediate disadvantage upon entering secondary level and a much harder chance of being able to catch up. Especially once they become old enough to rebel and no longer care about learning these crucial basics.
I found an article which is related to a documentary channel 4 showed: http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/dispatches/why+our+children+cant+read/937947. I find it really interesting how they’re finding new ways to teach children how to recognise words and learn to read and write – but are the teaching methods where the problem arises from? Maybe you don’t agree with me, and this is only my opinion, but I think the same thing about fat kids – it’s the parents fault.
If a child’s family takes an active role in their child’s education then they’ll have an enormous advantage. Especially as we know how quickly children learn at a young age, so they earlier they start, the better. I don’t believe the excuses of some people who say that this is too much of a middle class thing to do and that working class backgrounds are too busy working etc. to spend hours teaching their kids themselves and not everyone’s academic to do so – there is always time to have with yours kids and playing can be educational – learning the alphabet, being able to write your own name, being read stories in bed. Whether you’re academic or not is irrelevant – if you can’t read or write you’re at a huge disadvantage no matter what career path you take.
