tigerswiftly wrote:

Found out earlier today that one of my younger cousins - approaching her GCSE's - is quite literally being taught to memorise essays she can regurgitate at will. She's trying to remember the damn things word by word! All because the teacher is desperately trying to hit certain targets that those children are going to struggle to meet. Rather than teach them and have them - and her - "fail" if they can't pick it up fast enough, she's trying to coach them through it at the expense of actual learning. Disgusting practice.

For my French exam, the teacher sat in with us, would pause the tape to allow us to learn whatever phrase I needed, and then pressed play again when we had it down. I still failed as for two years she let my class do fuck all, we just sat around listening to DnB on walkmans from tapepacks I brought in.

I learnt the bars from Skiba on his Fabio/Grooverider B2B Nightlife mix, could proper roll off the tongue. Was a big glasses, Liam Gallagher haired skinny white BADBWOY.

Spock wrote:

That is fucking criminal, tiger.

Not really. It's a natural consequence of the method of evaluating teachers that has been embraced by our governments.

Spock wrote:

@stopharage, I feel you pain mate. Schools need to be judge but the current system is wank.  We're over due for ours by a month so the whole place has been at defcon 4, waiting for the call. The whole pupil premium thing is a load of dick too. A teacher is judged by their results, their peers,league tables, the kids, the parents, their line manager and ofsted, the latter of which spend less than 12 hours in a school over the course of three years to condemn or venerate the place. They're judging orchards by a few apples. Hope your last few week goes a bit better 

@Spock - cheers for the sympathy. The current OFSTED framework is an utter joke; key to getting through it is to know your data inside out. The key inspector said that they go into every school looking to give it no more than 'need to improve' and then judge the school's ability to argue against it to then give it a higher grade. And they have a huge bee in their bonnet about Pupil Premium. I put in a formal complaint to the Lead Inspector as they hadn't seen my department (which the Head had asked to and is also supposedly one of the best performing departments in the country). Then in the initial feedback they put that my dept was 'very strong' without seeing any of us teach. Mental. Key advice I can give you is know your data, know the RAISE online data and do mini plenaries throughout the lesson (recap on each stage basically).

@Igor - re: University standards - in agreement, although the huge growth in uni numbers means that the ability of your 'bog standard' student may well have dropped. And whilst literacy and numeracy are hugely important, we live in a world where our portable devices calculate all kinds of sums.

Your all a bunch of dicks, this thread sucks. I'm going to stand over their for a while.

In other news I think a lot of the problems people have with school leavers 'not being up to scratch' maybe has to do with the number of exams kids take these days. Kids are taking 13 or more GCSE's. We took 9 in our school, so did every other kid from other schools I knew. There also seems to be a lot more flexibility in what they can take as well these days.

Back when I did my GCES ('97), this is what the GCSE choice form looked like:

Compulsory Subjects:

Maths
English Language
English Literature
Choice of Chemistry or Physics

Compulsory Options:
History or Geography
French or German
Double Science ( Either Physics, Chemistry, whichever you didn't take as the compulsory one or Biology, you couldn't just do Biology on it's own presumably because everyone knew it was piss easy at GCSE) or IT

Then you had two free choice courses of whatever you wanted that the school offered. Weirdly there was no triple science option and I remember distinctly the head telling us that was because they didn't want kids taking triple science and maths as that was 4/9 GCSEs and they wanted everyone to have a decent mix of languages, humanities, creative stuff and the sciences.

I agree with the rest of you that a lot of the problems we have are probably down to the league tables and the effect they've had on how schools are perceived. It seems as though kids are taught to pass what's on the exams these days rather than taught the subject itself. Add onto that kids doing more GCSEs than they used to and they have less time to focus on each subject. Which ties into what Igor was saying about kids not knowing how to structure an essay. I get the feeling kids today are just told the answers without spending a lot of time learning how to get the answers yourself.

I remember we seemed to spend weeks and weeks nearly every year in both science and English learning how to structure an essay and learning how to structure a scientific experiment and then write them up.

I dunno, maybe it's still the same as that, but I don't remember people generally labelling kids out of secondary school as 'fucking useless' like they do today. The worst we seemed to get was that we sucked at mental arithmetic thanks to calculators being a thing lol.

I also think it's bullshit how much homework kids seem to have these days, I remember pretty much not doing any real homework until we started GCSE's and even then it was no more than an about an hour a day on average. I think most of the GCSEs we did were 60/30 weighted in favour of exam results over coursework.

Bollocks.

I meant 2/3, 1/3 but for some reason I wrote that shit.

In my defence I have just pulled an all nighter and my brain is about to dribble out of my ears at any moment!

My mental arithmetic was very good, but I didn't bother with GCSEs.

Classic yoot attitude. I wanted to increase my problem-solving capacity, not spend hours memorising known solutions against my will. Everything in our GCSEs is so widely-documented it's only ever a library visit away. A smart student could learn most of a GCSE in days to weeks online. And if they're not interested in a given subject, its content probably isn't transferable to their ends.

I used to enjoy gardening as a member of our specials' group. We had a great teacher called Ken (who let us call him that), who fought to teach us practical skills (bricklaying; soldering; woodwork...), but Head Badger disbanded Ken's team because we negatively affected his league result. Badger.

See the later post in the same thread. Off the back of that post, you should come in here off your own bat and apologise, right off the bat.

'Off the back of' is a pretty clunky idiom.

You're going to have to do lots of remedial work such as plastering, tiling and painting off the back of the rewire.

There's nowt wrong with that is there? Where does the bat fit in?

Hang on, I'll look it up on my dodgy PC that fell off the bat of a lorry. 

Off one's bat refers to somebody doing something under their own steam, whereas off the back of refers to something happening as a consequence of something. Although wouldn't you normally say on the back of?

Why are we still talking about this? Its fucking obvious. Stop it!