For teachers- do your pupils learn something new every day?

[jasper]

I am asking this due to the thread about taking kids out of school outwith holidays, where some of you explained it disrupted the teaching programme.

My question is do you really teach your pupils something different every day? This is a genuine question, not intended to provoke or criticise. I admire anyone who chooses teaching as a profession and the friends I have who teach are , to a woman, remarkable and inspiring individuals.
It's just that my memory of school (particularly primary school ) was of weeks and weeks of repetition of the same things.

That was my biggest compliant about school - it was boring and repetitive and I felt I hardly ever learned anything.

We were taken out of school for a week or two most years and there was never any notion of having to catch up or missing anything. Have things changed or am I suffering from false memory syndrome ? Might I have gone on to acheive greatness if it hadn't been for those fortnights in Harrogate?

So to repeat my question,which was not intended to rehash the holidays issue, do you teach a different thing every single day?

robin - i appreciate it will take you longer to prepare interesting activities for your dd than a teacher...but we have activities for lots of kids to run simultaneioulsy
34 in maths group
33 in english
31 in science
32 in both my history groups
and 32 in each of my 4 ict groups

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i ahve just spent several hours of my free time making a booklet for parents of my maths set as i had complanits that they didnt undertsand the methods that we were using in class for number work

so now they have a booklet showing them how we do it so they can ehlp their kids
probably will get more complaints now for being patronising condescending and ignorant in assuming that they are all thick
dont know why i bother

And different abilities to cater for. I have a year 11 'setted' class that goes from a predicted E grade to children with predicted A grades. I have a bottom set who range from GG rades to CC. Try putting them in front of a video and you have a riot on your hands and they would learn nothing. All they want to do is sit down and chat to each other.

And what do you do with the kids with EAD, and SEN? How do you 'unpick' their misunderstandings with a video?

The times Ed is online, not all of it, but the main bits are there.

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And being a crap teacher I only raised my difficult class to get 12 Cs and 1 B when only two of them are predicted C grades. They would abviously be better sat in front of the video. And there are better teachers than be in my department!

And if your Brownies told you to 'fuck off' and punched you, you'd ask them to leave. That happened to a teacher in my school and the child was excluded....for all of 2 weeks. Your brownies want to be there. Its not the same when you have a class of 15 year olds who hate school, teachers, parents and most of like.

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The kids I am talking about would laugh you out of town if you suggested that they go to guides. They would rather go out with their mates and get pissed. Spend a day with me, and tell me that if you madeschool more exciting they would behave better. They don't want to, they want to rebel, it is part of how they see adolecsence. you could take this lot to Alton towers for the day and they would still tell you that it was crap and that they were bored.

Yeh, own up, Hulababy, it was all your fault because the lesson was boring!

I admit it all, It is all my fault. My lessons are dull, I never mark books,I hate the kids, I'm as thick as two short planks, I'm always off sick, I never change the kids reading books (I'm not in Primary but what the hell it is all my fault anyway), I set the exams, I write the national curriculum, I put up the prices of the holidays in the summer, my holidays are too long, I never plan my lessons, I activly try to get kids to forget what their parents have taught them, I never set homework (except when I do, I do it to give parents more work to do, so that I don't have to do it), I'm crap, I admit it, it is all my fault, I shot JR and JFK and I wasd that icebrug that sank the Titanic.

There, is that better.

sympathies, hmb and hulababy. I am a secondary school teacher and just get so peed of with CERTAIN PEOPLE who drone on about how shit schools and teachers are and make ridiculous comments about how we should make all our lessons 'fun'and 'exciting' and be 'an inspiration' 24/7.why don't these people enter the profession themselves if they are so damn terrific? oh yes, that's right, low pay, constant threats of violence, internal and external pressures, targets and assessment criteria and report mechanisms which change all the time,ever growing class sizes, ever increasing contact time.......people are so ungrateful and ignorant sometimes.

Well I think teachers are wonderful, slurp slurp

Not all, obviously, but most - and even the ones that aren't do a better job than I ever could.

Oh please please don't get downhearted all you teachers on this thread. I think virtually all teachers work incredibly hard, and the vast majority are really good at their job. Amongst other jobs I have experience in higher education and have helped in primary schools since I was a teenager, and now help in my childrens' school, and nothing I have ever done compares to the exhaustion of dealing with primary classes, and secondary must be even harder because of the attitude problems. To attempt to compare full- or even part-time teaching with taking brownies would be laughable if it wasn't so insulting. It is so missing the point.

Hulababy, you have a heart problem?

Thank you tamum, that was much needed!

I'm just sitting here, planning how to explain to my year 8s the difference between heat and temperature. I'm not a physics specialist, and I do find it more daunting than my biology lessons. So to have someone post that teachers don't need higher education makes me go weak and want to give up!

robinw, your notion that 'helping out with the brownies' is somehow comparable to being a state school teacher is risible in the extreme. Do you really think anyone can take it seriously? I'd like to read your answer to hmb's question about coping with being punched and told to fuck off.Also, what is the ratio of brownie to helper? You may not be aware of this, but most of what you say really is not only patronising and condescending but also ignorant and foolish.In fact, all of your posts in which you try to make out you are school and teaching savvy just make the gaping holes in your knowledge more and more obvious, such as saying that unions are opposed to change???? is this really what you think??? which unions please, and which types of change?

hulababy, don't go. Just remember you are a brainy and beautiful woman.Don't let the blind and stupid grind ya down, babe.And no, my name is nothing to do with where I live,just a slight variation on my name. Oh and to tamum - ta!!!!

You're welcome

Oh, and I was so enraged about the brownies comparison that I had forgotten about the business of teaching A level biology with the aid of a couple of GCSEs. I didn't do Kreb's Cycle until I was at university and found it incredibly difficult then (I have never been a gifted biochemist in spite of my current job ). The thought of trying to explain it to sixth formers makes me go weak at the knees. I can see that home ed is do-able at primary level, but I can't for the life of me imagine how it would be possible to go even from having GCSE biology to being able to teach someone else to A level standard, even if you are "learning together".