to be horrified at the behaviour in bohunt school

[SEsofty]

Just watched the programme about Chinese teachers in uk. Whilst I appreciate that it is reality tv and thus exaggeration for effect I was still horrified with the apparent number of children who were talking in class.

I'm not that accident and went to a very normal school but talking whilst teacher did simply didn't happen. I don't agree with the Chinese methods but talking whilst someone is trying to teach you is simply rude.

I thought they were a bunch of very complacent teens who had no idea of anything beyond their own very limited corner of the world. My impression was that they were very disengaged from their own lives, very disengaged from feeling responsibility for their own future, and with very shaky emotional foundations.

There were comments that I have since read from a student named Rosie (iirc) about her feeling that the teachers acted as if they thought the students weren't up to the challenge. I don't think they were -- I see the challenge here as ability to adapt, ability to perform at their best in an unfamiliar situation, ability to get over themselves and get over the novelty, and try. I saw a lot of students not trying and instead playing for laughs from their fellow students. These children do not have confidence or the kind of self esteem that comes from competence at anything.

I do not think it is the welfare state that does that to kids. It's parents who do not make it plain that they have expectations or possibly they do not have the determination to stick with children and make sure they do what is expected of them. In other words, the parents allow the children to develop without a sense of personal discipline.

There is too much of a mob culture among teens (parents allow this) that springs from young (and older) teens being allowed to roam the streets in the evening together. Students get very full of themselves when they are allowed this freedom, and very used to the untrue idea that their opinions have equal weight with the opinions of teachers and other school authorities. They enjoy the freedom of people who are much older and they get sucked into a group dynamic that sets them apart from family culture and any positive values they might absorb from adult culture around them.

Dd goes to a school which according to her has a crazy amount of disruption in class. The stories ive heard over the years sicken me but the teachers don't seem to do anything.

Dd got smacked round the head with a chair once and the teacher didn't even notice! Dd says there's regularly a girl who throws herself on the floor, sobbing and screaming and the teachers ignore her while she has a tantrum for ten minutes. Other kids swear at the teachers telling them to fuck off, sit under the desk and refuse to work or walk out the classroom and refuse to go back.

Exan results have dropped in five years from 56% of kids getting 5 gcses to something like 37%. Headmasters response is to make the school day longer. He needs to sort out the discipline first! I don't know how anyone can learn effectively.

OFSTED reckon low level disruption is the thing that affects progress most, don't they?

In any case, it does happen.

Well, Bohunt must be doing something right- have you seen their results? And did you see the level of maths those year 9s were doing?

And I'm pretty sure I couldn't stay focussed and attentive for 12 hours of note taking........

I didn't see it but Bohunt isn't far from me and it has a really good reputation. My dc are still at primary school though. I might watch it OD.

mathanxiety - I really liked your post of 5:51 and agree with a lot of it.

Nevertheless, I think parents are sometimes as much victims as their children of an ambient culture that tells them that they should (both) be at work and that their children "ought" to self-manage during the bits of the day (often several hours) when they have no classes and parents aren't at home. Certainly in France, in some (MC) areas/schools, that message is very overt despite the generally unhappy and underperforming DC that culture delivers.

Yes I think its normal. I'm a TA in an 'outstanding' school and the amount of children who sit and chat has astounded me. Some teachers simply will not tolerate it so it stops. Some take the easy way out and choose to ignore it.

I thought they were pretty good kids on the whole. There were only a couple who were irritating - my teens were laughing 'god there's always THAT kid - so annoying!' but if you look at the majority of the class they were OK really - and had been at school for about 12 hours! I thought they were generous in spirit when engaged wirh an activity (the morning excercise for eg), were encouraging and supportive to the young man who struggled with PE, and showed initiative in seeking further help after their maths lesson. Well edited maybe, but pretty true of this age.

Interesting that people are focussing on the couple of kids who misbehaved, and not, for example, on the girl who said that she understood something for the first time when the Chinese teacher explained it, or the group who went at lunchtime to their maths teacher because they were worried about being left behind, or the other group who led the morning exercises. Or the attentive purposeful way the class went about solving the complex puzzle given to them. Or the way all but a couple got down to the test set the, refusing to be distracted by one of the class "characters". Or, indeed, Bohunt's spectacular exam results.....

As usual, the emphasis is on characterizing comprehensive schools and their pupils as feral lawless dens of iniquity. And people do love to have their prejudices shored up!

Yes it is normal even at Bohunt. To to gain class control takes supreme focus, consistency and planning, which we will inevitably see by the end of the series. My guess is it will have a 'happy ending' with all students focussed and achieving. Don't forget this is Gove's favourite school. The new curriculum focuses on wrote learning of facts. Note how young the heads of department are-teachers burn out quick under the current regime.

I won't comment on the programme as I haven't watched it yet (recorded it to watch later), but I wanted to comment on a post that was written earlier.

I help in DS's class. He has just finished Y5, so still in primary, but I am always shocked by how many children talk whilst the teacher is addressing the class. Expect it in the younger classes but by Y5 I would expect the majority of children to be able to be quiet whilst an adult is talking to them.

There's no excuse for that behaviour. I teach in primary, have always taught in Foundation or Year 1, and would expect the children in my class to listen when I'm talking. Even 4 year olds can be taught to sit quietly when the teacher is talking.
There should be lots of pupil talk in a primary classroom - but it shouldn't be when the teacher is talking to the class.

I guess expectations vary from school to school. If I've gone into a class to observe a lesson, or if I'm on non-contact time and have popped in to give a message to the teacher, then I always see children sitting quietly during whole class teaching.

I teach in private and nae fucker talks in class when I'm talking!

It would be interesting to know which particular backdoor selection method Bohunt uses.....

I can't begin to say how frustrated I felt watching that programme last night. Bohunt is not far from me, and I expected to see something SO different from what I actually did view...

Apart from the continual back chat and general disruption, I found their approach to the physical challenge the hardest to comprehend. They seemed to have no comprehension that in the world beyond their school, life is tough, it's challenging and they need to 'man up' a bit and just get on with it. There was a comment about how it should be a test 'against themselves'.

Their first job interview won't be against themselves, it will be against a whole heap of other people. GCSEs arent a test against themselves, it's a test. Life's like that!

I may sound like an old granny who grew up post war when things were different, but I'm under 50 with teenage kids, so I'm not far out of touch.

I'm not sure I can watch another episode.

Seriously? There were about two kids out of, 50 I think, who were blubbing about the run. Most seemed to give their times in quite happily at the end.

I haven't seen it but know from the interviews that the children don't normally behave like that. They had an agenda and they chose the children to fit it. Had they chosen the ones who would have kept their heads down and got in with it it would have been a boring programme.
The left cameras running with no operators and the children played to the cameras.
Had they been told 'you are on camera' and there will be severe consequences for any poor behaviour' it would have been very different. It was a nonsense.
The Chinese teachers should also have been able to use the school's behaviour policy and had the support of senior management for troublesome pupils. Again it would have made for poor TV!
As it was it gave the Daily Mail and similar chance to say how wonderful Chinese schools are and how badly behaved UK pupils are. That was the agenda.
I am not sure whether I will bother to watch it.

There was another thread on here about this and someone who seemed to have inside information said that the kids were told to act up for the cameras by the film crew. That this isn't common practice.

I didn't watch the programme but I'm often amazed that people really don't know what it's like in a classroom now.
Talking while the teacher is talking happens all the time and there are few sanctions available to staff.

I say this as a teacher in an outstanding school, including outstanding for behaviour.

I appreciate that parents are often at work, and that they are tired or feeling that their energy and attention are divided, or feeling guilt in some cases, and many parents have to work or face poverty, etc. There are parents facing difficulties in relationships, job security, and other issues. Nobody's life is perfect though, and even if you can only make a little effort, it is better to do that consistently than to do nothing much at all and let your problems swamp everyone. From my own observations, I think parents need to start working on their children no later than 7 or 8 to get them going in the right direction. By the time they are 13 it is often too late.

The children themselves admitted it in interviews.
You can just imagine them being hand picked for the lively ones that would take a mile if given an inch.

Apart from the continual back chat and general disruption, I found their approach to the physical challenge the hardest to comprehend..""it's challenging and they need to 'man up' a bit and just get on with it."

What, like the 48 or so out of the 50? Oh, and the one who found it incredibly difficult but finished in the end?

And of course you test yourself against your PB- how else do you improve?

Right or wrong, all of these kids will be used to spending time in a classroom where they are asked engaging questions, encouraged to think critically, and expected to work collaboratively. The lecture-style simply isn't used in schools in this country very frequently, so they will have struggled to engage.

I'm a teacher in a Good secondary. I don't have problems with low-level disruption. Some of my colleagues do. Much of that is down to the delivery of the lesson and the relationship between the pupils and teachers. It shouldn't be that way, of course; I do believe that pupils should be polite and respectful to all members of staff, but that isn't the culture they know. I have pupils whose parents will tell them not to attend detentions, won't support the homework policy, and will actively support their disruptive child.

The show is an interesting experiment, but it's short-sighted to say that the Chinese teachers are failing, or that the British students are failing. There are too many significant cultural differences to make the experiment truly conclusive about the 'best' teaching methods.

I attended a school in Dublin in the 70s and 80s that featured plenty of very disruptive behaviour in general classes arranged by alphabetical order in First Year -- fights breaking out in Art, books being thrown, pens and other missiles thrown at teachers, lots of loud background noise, After First Year streaming took place and classes were peaceful for the most part for me.

The tendency of boys in particular to own classroom turf by challenging teachers' authority had a bad effect on the attainment of girls in the lowest streams. I had a conversation with a former teacher many years later who said she thought it might have been a good idea to separate boys and girls in those streams. She actually felt the girls' right to education had been infringed. At that time my school used to hire only teachers with top honours degrees in their subjects. This did not always translate into effective classroom management. It was a good strategy for the higher streams, but more was needed for those in the lowest streams.

I wonder how much of the Bohunt students' difficulties in the subject areas was due to previous classroom disruption? How much was due to putting up some sort of mental wall against the new regime? It is hard even to be the majority that seeks to knuckle down and do the work in an environment where disruption can often be only a few seconds away, with the question not being whether it will happen, but when. You cannot get into the habit of concentrating for long stretches when that is your normal environment.

I think it is a shame that certain quarters have predictably pounced on this programme as an example of the general agenda they promote, because imo there were questions the programme provoked that will probably be overshadowed by the 'debate' the DM wants to have.