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?

lady - that sounds amazing - so they would agree? They feel language is changing?

Two half term holiday at a week each
Christmas and Easter at two weeks each
Six weeks in the summer

Sorry it is twelve weeks.

LRD, I'm not sure which bit of which post I've written in a way that you don't understand.

My last post may have been confusing because the second paragraph was written to the poster called Whatever. It may have looked as if it was written to you because I didn't bold the word whatever.

So approximately two months extra holiday to other workers, so I am working 10 months for twelve months pay. So after tax about £5k worth.

Maybe I would like a little more cash

I do think a related degree is an essential in a secondary teacher along with a strong academic record, particularly if you are teaching A Level.

lol just because the children are not at school does not mean the teachers are not working.
My husband always has one thing or another he has to go in for be it meetings work prep or whatever it is still work :)
Alot of people seem to think that though thats why people state it is an easy 9-3 job well hell no it is not . I would see ALOT more of my husband if he had a "normal" 9-5 office job.

caramel - oh, no, don't worry! It's still your very basic point I thought made no sense, nothing more complex than that.

Any time you want to explain, please do.

Anyway if I had a problem with one of my dcs teachers I would go into the school and speak to somone who could actually deal with it . Not make a comment about it on here to be honest. Maybe then it would get resolved. :)

I never said it was a 9 til 3 job. I am a teacher and therefore am aware of how much I need to work in the holidays. The answer is usually I don't.

Whatever, yes I agree that a related degree is important at secondary level. I just think that different skills are required at primary level and that a BA Ed may be preferable to a BA and PGCE for those teachers, although I understand that we still need the PGCE route because some people will decide to become teachers later.

I am not going to pretend to understand the mystery of primary teaching.

LRD, which point was my basic one? Sorry, it is probably due to me cross posting and so on that I've lost track of what we're discussing.

:) well your lucky can I just ask are you primary or secondary ?

LRD,

Absolutely! We listened to and read some Anglo Saxon poetry and some Chaucer so that they could see the way that language had changed in the past and speculated about why it might have changed.

We then went on to look at their own use of language compared to their grandparents and parents. A brilliant clip of Will.i.am explaining his approach to music to Miriam Margoles on Graham Norton's show brought home how quickly language is changing right now.

I discovered that, as a class, they have ways of using words which are unique to that group of 30 teenagers!

Sorry for hijack, but I find language change absolutely fascinating and I think that this is probably one of the most exciting times to be a linguist as you can actually see language change happening every day.

lol never mind just read your post (sorry)

Secondary. I don't think many of us do that much in the holidays to be honest. I tend to go away with some teacher friends for a few weeks over the summer and they never work when with me. From chatting to them etc I don't think they do much over the rest of the summer or the other holidays to be honest .

I think it varies, I have read varied posts on here and the TES in which some teachers do a lot over the holidays and others , like me, do very little. I suspect the latter are the happier bunch and children need teachers who are happy, interesting and have fulfilled lives . There is nothing worse than a washed up knackered teacher. The thing with teaching is that there is always more that you could do, you need to just stop.

Ah well my husband is primary so I would'nt know about secondary. He does tend to work too much somtimes :( However saying that he loves it so its got to be all good in his eyes I guess :)

caramel - forgive me, I got a little lost as to what you thought you were trying to say!

All I got was that you had this idea that the Key Stage tests - which of course, have no been around so very long - are in some odd way a good measure of a good teacher.

I do accept perhaps you didn't mean that and perhaps you meant that a teacher should know at least the skills taught at each key stage in order to teach that key stage. This just seems to me both a pessimistic, and an inappropriate sense of what teachers need.

Of course many teachers don't have Key Stage exams. They only came in really quite recently. Many teachers are actually quite good at their jobs, despite not having taken the same exams as your children!

It doesn't sound like it is all good in your eyes though and therefore he should start trying to do less .

WhateverHappenedToWinceyWillis
"So approximately two months extra holiday to other workers, so I am working 10 months for twelve months pay. So after tax about £5k worth.

Maybe I would like a little more cash"

I think that you need to look at your contract, because this is incorrect.

It probably is incorrect as I am talking off the top of my head. Please enlighten me.

What I meant was that I have twelve weeks holiday a year, not taking into account bank holidays, many of which fall within my holiday anyway. My husband has five weeks of holiday so I was being generous and rounding up/ down and saying that I have two extra months of holiday for which I am not paid. I earn just shy of 2.5k a month after tax and therefore this represents 5k of pay I could have in my pocket if I worked those two months.

Someone up thread said teachers deserve another 10k and I replied we earn less because we have extra holiday. I then realized that using my rather crude calculation I still needed another 5k.

I am probably talking bollocks, I am on my third gin and have inhaled a significant quantity of cleaning fluids.

WhateverHappenedToWinceyWillis

"What I meant was that I have twelve weeks holiday a year, not taking into account bank holidays, many of which fall within my holiday anyway. My husband has five weeks of holiday so I was being generous and rounding up/ down and saying that I have two extra months of holiday for which I am not paid. I earn just shy of 2.5k a month after tax and therefore this represents 5k of pay I could have in my pocket if I worked those two months."

that is correct, but it does not mean that you work 10 months and get paid for 12 as you previously posted. :)

Now I understand. I meant I get paid for ten months work but it is spread over twelve months.

LRD, yes, I'm not really arguing that end of key stage tests are a very good measure of anything at all. It is simply that teachers need to have the knowledge to teach the curriculum. Supposedly, the national curriculum is going to be changing again soon anyway.

I think we have entered a cycle in education. Certainly in my generation, many people were never taught punctuation or grammar. I have tried to pick up, as an adult, basic bits of knowledge. I've found out what an adjective is and so on from DS doing foreign languages. I found out last year what a subject and an object are from DS learning the nominative and accusative in Latin. From that, I've now found out that there are a number of rules about commas which depend on the subject in each part of the sentence. I haven't applied that properly to my own writing because it isn't ingrained yet and I would have to proofread everything several times to get it right.

I suspect many people are in my position. My sister has an English degree and told me she didn't think she could go into teaching because she didn't know what a noun was and other similar topics. Now, each of those bits of knowledge on their own might not matter very much. It might not matter that somebody doesn't know how to use a comma, or how to work out a percentage of an amount or what an independent and dependent variable are. But if a lot of people have large gaps in basic skills and knowledge (rather than just a gap in one small area), that gets passed on to the next generation. And I don't know how we break that cycle, but we need to, because a lot of people (whether they are teachers or not) need basic skills.