To expect teachers to be clever?

[CJ2010]

I was visiting a friend, who has a 12 year old DC and she was telling me how unhappy she was about the school and her DC's education, or lack of. She showed me her child's workbook that contained comments from the teacher. My friend is getting really concerned because her DC's spelling and grammar mistakes are not being picked up by the teacher. She then told me to have a read through and to take a close look at the teachers comments, I did, and they were littered with spelling errors and poor grammar.

It got me thinking. I know a couple of teachers; we all went to school together and are still mates now. One is a primary school teacher, the other secondary. Both teachers only managed to get a Grade C for Maths at GCSE. One of them also got a few Grade D's in other subjects (not English or Science). IMO, GCSE's are a basic qualification and being taught up to GCSE level only really gives a broad, general knowledge of a subject. If they are only coming out as average / or below at this level, regardless of subject, are they really qualified to educate the next generation? They are not very clever are they?

I fear, that this this average educational ability amongst techers is quite common and wide spread. My DC's have yet to start school, but it is worrying for the future. AIBU?

GTP is by no means better as a route into teaching. I mentored two trainees recently. The PGCE student had a first from Cambridge in her subject specialism, the PGCE course itself was highly academic and focused quite a lot on research, which was interesting as a mentor, as we discussed its application in the classroom. The GTP trainee had a 2:2 in a different Science subject to his teaching specialism. His subject knowledge was not sound. His course was superficial in comparison to the PGCE, and my concerns about his performance were largely swept under the carpet. We employed one of them...

I know there are some excellent teachers who have cone into teaching via GTP. I have two in my department, and another starting in September. But to say that the route itself is stronger us not necessarily true.

[b]echt

And what makes you think that Bill Gates, Einstein or Faraday would make a good teacher of any kind whatsoever. Really? Evidence, please.[/b]

Well i can't speak for Bill Gates (whilst his lectures at MIT were over-subscribed, he was not a full time teacher), but both Einstein and Faraday were teachers. Einstein was a professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences and later at Princton, whilst Faraday was a professor of chemistry at the RI.

I'm not suggesting we neglect literacy skills, but there seems a theme in this thread that a person who got a C for GCSE english is 'not bright enough' to be a teacher. Well, my view is that perhaps they ought not to be English teachers but they may well be excellent at another subject. I don't think it's reasonable to judge a person's ability to teach a science or maths based upon their spelling and grammar.

cog I agree with your statement that proficiency in English is not necessarily an indication that they can teach science well. However. Being a university professor is very different to he type of teaching we are discussing here. To most university professors, teaching is secondary to their real purpose of research.

Nonetheless, my speciality is psychology, and i feel that i could just as well teach a small child about something basic like how vision or memory works, or a teenager at GCSE level, despite the fact that my spelling is often terrible and i don't know what an adverb is.

The problem as i see it, is that once upon a time the learning of children who went to school around the O-level days was that facts and figures were prioritised. You had to know how many ounces were in a gallon, when the battle of Hastings was, and the difference between a noun and a pro-noun. It was a fact based education. At that time, if you didn't know what a noun was, it was because you were not very good at school and that generally correlated with you being less bright than those who knew those things.

But education has changed, and other types of knowledge are given more priority over those things i mentioned. So now it's entirely possible to be bright and to be successful in school without necessarily knowing the facts that used to be taught. I got a B for English Lit and a C for English Language at GCSE without knowing the difference between a noun and a verb, and having trouble spelling (my spelling is a LOT worse when handwriting, by the way, because i have to some extent memorised the order of keys to be typed on a keyboard rather than the actually spelling)!

Supporters of the more modern way of teaching would cite Albert Einstein and Leonardi Da Vinci are examples of why there need not to be such a focus on vocabulary facts and grammatical rules like there used to me... not to mention that the current crop of thinkers and scientists seem to be changing the world and advancing technology perfectly fine without having had that o-level style education.

As such, it is easy to see where the attitude "A teacher unable to get higher than a C in GCSE maths and english is not bright enough to teach" comes from but it's an outdated view. It's because back in the day people who did not know enough facts and rules to pass generally were not bright enough to teach the subject IN THAT WAY, but people who don't know those facts and grammatical rules may well be capable of teaching in the modern style... which is roughly, to encourage critical thinking, the ability to assess information independently and a functional use of knowledge.

I agree with mega it's a different kind of teaching. I can't imagine teaching primary school and would be terrible at it. But I get good results with undergrads (and I love working with them, too). The more self-selected your students are, the more you're really collaborating with them and supporting them teaching themselves ... I think what is amazing about primary teachers is they are working with a class and those children have no choice about being there and no choice about the topics they study, but still the teachers are getting them to learn.

Being new to this forum, let me say how frustrating it is not being able to edit my posts to correct embarrassing spelling errors, esspecially in a topic like this! Please put it down to me typing at a furious speed and not spell checking because i on here whilst doing some other things. haha!

I agree with you a lot cog and I am fascinated by what you say about handwritten spelling being worse. Mine is too. I add 'e's at the end of words a lot. I think it's something to do with muscle memory not working quite right for me - and handwriting requires a different set of muscle processes than typing.

Don't worry about editing/spelling ... me snarking at LeQ notwithstanding (and I do it because we've had this discussion before and I can be reasonably sure she will happily give as good as she gets), most people on here will not judge you for your spelling or grammar, and will consider it a low blow to attack that rather than the content of what you say.

(LRD, that muscle memory thing is interesting. When writing I often put an e on the end of "with". I guess my hand is so used to writing "the". I wonder if there have been any studies done on this)

Boldfail

ariel - there are certainly known patterns to orthographic errors. Just before printing came in, it was so common to see an squiggly extra 'e' added at the end of words that there's a name for it - an 'otiose stroke', meaning someone's lazily added in something that doesn't really need to be there. I know as well that apparently one of the ways you can try to work out if a piece of writing is by a native speaker or not, is by looking at errors and the patterns to them. Apparently when people were trying to find British/American spies in the USSR, this is one of the techniques they used - because some letters in Russian look like the Latin alphabet, people's muscle memory would take over and they'd write the next letter in the Latin alphabet not the cyrillic.

I digress. As usual. See, I'd be a shit teacher!

Cog

Gates, Einstein and Faraday never taught they lectured, its a different set of skills to primary and secondary teaching.

Oh, the spelling mistake in the OP's title has been changed ... when did that happen?

My spelling problems are generally with words that have double letters and also the order of vowels.

So for example, i'd have to think twice before writing 'address' instead of 'adress' or 'accommodate' instead of 'accomodate'. Another example is 'their' instead of 'thier', or 'recieve' instead of 'receive'.

I just thought of another problem i have, and i think it's because of my accent and the very working-class uneducated way my parents spoke. I would have been inclined to spell 'accommodate' with an a, so 'accommadate' because that's sort of how i say it. Likewise, i grew up saying the word 'surprise' as though it were 'su-prise' so i might be inclined to drop the 'r'.

I also have problems pronouncing words because the way they are written doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Sometimes, before giving a lecture i have to go on youtube and find a video of someone saying a name like 'Jerry Fodor' so that i know how 'Fodor' is pronounced. Even with more vanilla english words that are not familiar to me, i cannot comprehend how they are pronounced sometimes and need to seek audio examples of the words. This doesn't help with my spelling because sometimes i just can't figure it out.

Sometimes if i look at a word long enough, it loses all it's shape. For example, the word 'phone'. If i glance at it, i know what it is. If i stare at it for 2 minutes then it no longer makes any sense to me.

I remember once when i did a mock exam in school for my physics class, i had a panic attack or something and totally forgot everything i ever knew for a brief time. I couldn't even spell my name, it was crossed out 5 times. I remember that in my panic i couldn't figure out how to spell 'the' because it doesn't sound anything like it's spelt really, and i remember spelling 'other' as 'uva' because i just lost my memory. I couldn't even count. I got 0% for the exam when i usually scored 90%+ and the next lesson the teacher had set aside a text for me and a couple of other people who failed the mock exam, he called us 'Team Foundation' (we were to sit the Foundation level paper following our poor results) and he even made a flag with a giant 'F' (for 'failures', one student proclaimed!) on a flagpole. He didn't even give me a chance to explain. This is why i got a C for the physics GCSE, it was because i had to sit the Foundation paper when the rest of the class was doing the Higher paper. Worst experience of my life. I lost all enthusiasm for school then and got mainly C's and D's despite originally being predicted all A*'s. Now THAT is an example of poor teaching, huh?! My mother complained by the headteacher backed up his employee, and my mother didn't know she could go to the authorities.

Pretty happy then that i've done well anyway and now teach myself.

set aside a desk ^, not 'text'

This is fascinating, cog ... I know what you mean about panicking. But isn't it awful that someone didn't see through this very minor issue of you spelling things phonetically? It was the same with me. It is so frustrating.

But, we get there, right?!

Muscle memory is very interesting indeed. My hand-written spelling is pretty damn perfect, to the point that I can write with my eyes closed, and all the letters will be in the right order. Except for one word. Alcohol. I remember once, when I was very tired, writing " alcho alcohol". I now go through that sequence EVERY single time I write it, and sometimes when I type it.

We can all come on and say how easy or difficult it is for an adult to pass the teachers' numeracy and literacy test, but compared to what?

DD has just done her KS2 SATs. I don't think the ability required in the teachers' tests is very high compared to the ability level of a child who got level 5 in their SATs. It would be utterly absurd for anybody who struggled with the teachers' tests to be teaching Maths and English at KS2.

Hopefully, I tried them when the first came out, in order to check the standards. It was bizarrely simple things like "You have 29 children in your class and they all have to pay £7.50 to go on a theatre trip, how much money will you be taking into the office in your little brown envelope?"

I was expecting something like, "Calculate the mode, median and mean SAT scores of this group of Year 6 students and compare them to the average for the Local Authority. Then look at the standard distribution of the scores for the whole Local Authority are. In which quintile are this group's scores?" which is the sort of thing teachers should be routinely analysing in order to understand fully the nature of their school and its position in the wider context of attainment.

Why, caramel?

You're saying you have faith in the tests ... but not why. Surely that matters?

FWIW, I was the first year to do SAT tests and I topped out at level 5, with no higher levels tested. I certainly didn't need to spell perfectly to do that - I know that, because my spelling was abysmal!

I do not want to be seen as a suffering saint or a martyr.

Teachers do not earn paltry wages , they earn above the average salary, in the secondary sector the chances for pot progression and therefore a higher wage are excellent . They also have 13 weeks of holiday and an excellent pension scheme.

LRD, I would expect a teacher at key stage two to be able to teach the curriculum to a child of level 5 ability. I don't know what was done when you were at school, but currently part of the SATs is a spelling test.

It would be absurd for anybody who found that maths difficult to be teaching in a primary school, because an able year six child would be able to do maths of that standard. If year six children are more able than some of their teachers, that is a problem.

WhateverHappenedToWinceyWillis

They also have 13 weeks of unpaid holiday and a pension scheme that is better than most.

I fixed it for you

caramel -sure, but you are assuming that these tests are the best markers of those skills. Why?

It is currently quite possible to excel on all levels apart from spelling and to do well, btw.

Also, LRD, I'm sorry but I don't understand your post. Faith in which tests?

LRD, either we are talking at cross purposes or I am misunderstanding you.

The teachers' tests are not just tests of spelling. They are tests of a variety of basic skills.

I'm not sure why you are singling out spelling.