Science should not be enjoyable

Yes we have exam weeks but as you say it does not hang over them like a cloud or affect the way I teach.

Don't your schools have a lower school exam week? Every school I have ever been in has had one, sometime in the summer term.

It doesn't do the student any harm to get into the habit of revising and spending a week on exams. It punctuates their year.

With GCSE modules appearing as early as Year 9, it is important that they know how to revise, and how to do exams.

I don't really care that much about how my Year 7s do in their exams - it's not the end of the world to have a brain freeze at the critical moment - better in Year 7 than in Year 11. I have lots of other achievement data. I just want them to take their learning seriously and to do their best. Exams are not detracting massively from their education - it is one week, with some teachers in the previous week perhaps doing a revision lesson, and probably setting revision for homework.

For many schools, mine included, lower school exam week heralds the start of a fun few weeks of activities - house rounders, educational visits, whole school sports day, speech day, and lessons that are a bit more fun.

That would piss me off as well Mathsmad and it should not be happening.

well there's obviously less emphasis on actual exams in yr7, though it certainly was when DSS did yr9 SATs and GCSEs. sorry I didn't explain myself well there, I suppose I mean that it's all about learning a few facts, ticking a few boxes in terms of what they are supposed to know, without necessarily understanding and enjoying it IYSWIM? no exploring the subject, just fill-in-the-gaps worksheets

grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr flippin rubbish school rant rant rant

I agree with wastwinsetandpearls - my DS is oblivious to learning for exams and he is in year 8 and hopefully will be for a few more years. I think though once kids get into the GCSE years though it does become a problem, I went mad at DD1 once because she was complaining that a teacher was telling them things that weren't on the exam syllabus and wasting her time. It can be a battle to get them to retain a love of learning if they become too exam focused.

Why on earth would it all be about exams in year 7.

I can see much more exam pressure in year 13 they only have two and a bit terms. But year 7 seems mad.

glad to hear that from you wastwinsetandpearls. must be a good school you're at! unfortunately I can't say the same for the school my DSCs are in (DSS in yr13, DSDs in yr7).

cococake, sorry I hope you didn't think I was suggesting your DD's boredom is your fault - certainly not! it sounds like she's pretty enthusiastic generally, but as others have said the teacher is rather tired of it all.

it's all about the exams now, so if they don't enjoy the subject, students know they are just learning it all in order to write it in an exam and then they can (and often do) forget about it. that's not the education I want for my DCs

I am sure there are some children turned off education by the time they reach secondary but not all.

I teach eager interested chidren every day from 11 to 18, children alive with the love of learning and my subject. I also don't work with that many teachers in a constant state of despair, infact I can't think of any. Maybe I need to try harder.

As for the OP it depends on the situation. Sometimes children say they are bored because they are being rude and lazy sometimes they are genuinely bored. It is hard to tell. Not everyone finds everything intrinscically enthralling. If I discovered that my dd was not working as hard as she should because she was bored I would raise this at parents evening but I woud also give her rather short thrift tbh.

I think the teacher could have phrased it better. Or maybe he is just crap and boring.

I agree with LS my dd has a love of learning type B she gets that from us not school. It was there before she went to school.

IME, the overall love of learning (or as in so many cases, the idea that learning is boring/pointless etc) starts with the parents. If the parents are disengaged with education, the kids are much more likely to be. Unless they have absolutely brilliant teachers obviously!

Great post, LS.

I personally think that to little 'science' is taught in KS3 and KS4 now.

For example, I was doing a lesson on the Einstein's Theory of Relatively recently. The specification was not bothered about the actual theory at all, but how Eistein came up with it almost by accident (nuclear physics wasn't a discipline then, and it wasn't 'used' until the 1940s, culminating in the atomic bomb). Then we went on to learn about nuclear fusion - not fusion itself, but how scientists publicise their ideas and theories (by peer reviewed journals rather than press conferences). I, of course, injected some real science into the lesson, but a non-specialist or non-confident teacher may not have done that.

KS3 has moved almost completely over to teaching the scientific method, with very few science facts in there. This goes against the hierarchy of learning, which says you have to have a good foundation of knowledge (facts) before you can access higher level skills, such as application and synthesis. Needless to say, I teach pretty much how I have always been teaching, and bolt the HSW stuff on top.

Long post, sorry - I think this story raises some profound issues about our school system.

Here we go...

Learning stuff in any subject involves two types of fun; the extrinisic fun created by imagination, attitude, methods and personality (let's call that fun A) and the intrinsic intellectual fun of understanding something (let's call that fun B)

All subjects can be taught with greater or lesser amounts of fun A. If the government told me I had to teach the London phone book (say for an annual exam, the results of which would form the basis of the school's OFSTED report), I could make it fun by games, rewards, funny songs and so on. In a classroom, you can develop exciting and crazy ways of teaching the most mundane stuff. However, it would be extrinsic to the subject which (unlike physics) has little inherant delight.

Getting to grips with fun B is much more difficult, it depends on both teacher and student accessing the profound depths of a subject and the student starting to relish the thrill of struggling and understanding new ideas. This is intrinsic intellectual pleasure and it depends on the student's attitude, patience and ability - and the skills of the teacher too. And to get to it you do need to learn a lot of quite dull skills - hence the importance of fun A to keep you going. On the other hand, if a learner becomes addicted to fun A, they will never get to the point of fun B because it can be harder. Fun B is reached by wrestling and thinking, struggling even, and although it may be hard, the rewards are profoundly better and more satisfying than fun A.

In the context of the orginal post, I suspect you might have a teacher who is bitterly fed up with education in modern Britain, that expects all lessons to be full to the brim of fun A, led by an all singing all dancing teacher, who must keep every kid entertained at all times, and must make sure they all achieve fantastic test results at all costs. Our obsession with testing biases education towards fun A, as it's easier to get kids to learn stuff off by heart than wrestle with profound concepts they may not get. And the expectation is that if kids are not having fun something must be wrong with the teaching. Ironically, kids are getting more and more cynical about fun A and thus harder and harder to entertain.

As for your daughter, I would say that she needs to discover for herself the joy of fun B, and battling through the more dull bits of year 8 science will not hamper her in the long run. The suggestions of home reading, watching and experiments from other posters are excellent suggestions of how to motivate her.

Good luck to your daughter. I am sure she will be fine. I had dire physics teaching at school but still went on to study science it at Cambridge and am now a teacher.

I did my PGCE 15 years ago and the stipulation was that 50% of the degree had to be directly science-based.

I didn't do a science degree, but had to list all the modules I took to show that there was enough science content to enable me to get QTS in Science - Physics. You don't learn any subject content on a PGCE, so everything comes from your degree, fe qualifications, and continuing education.

However, once you are a qualified teacher, you can pretty much teach what you agree with the school, which is why there are lots of non-specialist teachers in the physical sciences and mathematics.

IMO, the difference between being a specialist and non-specialist teacher is not teaching the specification, but being able to add little anecdotes and illustrations, and then to give quality answers to questions the pupils raise. You build on this skill with teaching experience too.

at secondary school my Biology teacher didn't actually UNDERSTAND they systems she was teaching so hated any deviation in class from the text book.

She would regularly tell me I was wrong when I was right (because I UNDERSTOOD the topics and she only knew the systems in an 'off by heart' way)

my classroom grades dropped (but still got A in GCSE and B in A levels , because of a mixture of her only being able to give marks to answers that were word for word out of the text book, and my own frustration at the class being DULL (she discouraged discussion and questions because she didn't know the answers and wasn't able to say she didn't know!)

At university, science lecturers make the boring bits that have to be learnt off by heart interesting by talking about how they are applied - is that the kind of thing you are after?

lol riven. "they loved learning, even maths"

I won't take it personally