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?

I have had a monitor on to check my blood pressure...
the week before SATs
that was fun!!

Hey, don't do yourselves down, teachers! 16yo dd1 is horrified at how well her teachers know her! Needless to say, dh and I were very impressed that they had dd down to a tee. I have to say, though, that her classes are all 20 pupils or less in a (state) school of 8-900, so it must be much easier to get to know your pupils then. Ime, most primary teachers know their pupils well and try to accommodate their needs. But we don't have the NC or SATS in Scotland and perhaps that makes a difference to how teachers teach.

7yo Dd2's teacher is fabbie. The class has 14 children, covering P1 to P4. The children each have an individual plan and really, it's like being in a huge family ratehr than going to school. I wish every school was able to dot he same.

What do the teachers here think about human scale education? Do some of the problems lie in the sheer size of schools? I believe America has had success with hse - has it been tried in the UK? My boys were at a senior school of 1400 and I think the individuality goes out of it when you are dealing with such big numbers.

Popsycal, re the booklet you've produced. Dd's school in Indonesia had a similar one for parents. I think the govt should produce them as a matter of course for parents, then it would be easier to get involved. Mind you, with the way things chop and change they'd have to reprint every year...

Ps I don't think leading Brownies = teaching school, either.

I hope both appts are OK too, Hulababy (why does DD need the Dental Hosp?) Is your irregularity/palpitations anything like the Tony Blair thing? As hmb says, I can imagine your heart's behaviour while teaching would be very interesting to monitor!

raising head above parapet, I think robinw was trying to discuss things with you, not wind you teachers up. In discussing education, she is drawing on her own experiences of teaching, even if they are more limited than classroom teachers. Is she disputing this? Is she saying that most teachers are worse teachers than her? I would have to read the whole thread again, and I don't have time, but I am not left with this impression.

If any of us non-teachers are to discuss education with teachers, we have to do the same, otherwise there's no discussion.

I can see how the video thing wound you up, and the no qualifications thing, too. But Robin was also saying generally (I think) that inspiring teaching makes tons of difference. And singingmum was also saying that individual attention counts for lots too.

I have only skim read this thread, but neither poster seemed to get that personal.

Oops, forgot to say, hope your heart problem is sorted out soon, Hula.

suedonim, agree 100% with your final comment but am keeping head down (just waiting now to hear about the "teaching mafia". Most of the teachers my children have had have been fabby too - and that's quite a lot of teachers all round, like you! Some have been spectacular.

I so wish I could say that most of my son's teachers have been fab. I very much like his teachers at his present school. I think they do a fantastic job and I have total admiration for them.

Before that well... my dh is good friends with the ex deputy head of my son's old school. He's now a teacher elsewhere. He said that only ONE teacher in the school was a really good teacher. One out of, three classes in each year group, so call that 18 or more staff. The rest, he said, were in the wrong profession . But it is a school with big problems so probably not the norm.

Suedonim - there is a HSE thing in this country, and several small schools. Don't know much about them, but they seem like a great idea to me. None very near where I am though!

You are quite right to say that robinw has a right to voice her view. However, the title of this thread is 'For teachers- do your pupils learn something new every day?'. All the teachers have answered, 'Yes'. And then people pop up and say that this isn't the case because their child's teacher is crap. Well, fair enough, I'll bow to their superior knowlege of how good that teacher is, I've never met them so how would I know. But I have met me, and the other teachers that I have worked with and I know that we teach new things each day.

Many people are posting on this thread with memories of what it was like when they were in school, in many of these cases their children are not in school yet, but they all think they know what schools are like now based on what they were like when they were in school. Bad teachers still exist, the schools are not perfect, but the majority of us work very hard and take our teaching seriously.

And frankly to have my job compared to helping in brownies is damn insulting. I may as well call myself a doctor because I gave someone an aspirin once. And to think that you can teach GCSEs and A levels without any qualifications is just plain crazy.

People are intitled to their opinion, but so am I.

And I agree that smaller schools are a good idea. Not too small because then you limit subject choice. The biggest issue to me is class sizes. The smaller the class the better. Down to about 12 in the class, so that you can still do small group work with the kids. Class of 20 with a TA, yes please!

I thik we are being quite defensive ( i speak for myself here - hula, hmb, etc will speak for themselves) due to some earlier comments on this thread
Like anyone who has completed a degree and a post graduate course, beig critcised for not needing to have this to teach is rather hurtful. I have spent my time training (and am still very conscious of keeping up to date with training needs) and have now been teaching 7 years. I have had a middle management post for over 2 years in a big 9 - 13 school and work my arse off even though I have a 17 month old ds whom I love to spend time with. I get in before 8 on a morning, rarely leave work before 5, work between 1-3 hours on an evening, don't have a lunc break and work half a day during the weekend. that is a normal week. I haven;t got a martyr's complex but funnily enough i do object to some comments made on here and another related thread.
I do not claim to be able to know each child as well as their parents know them - I would feel dreadful if I thougth someone knew my son better than me and dh - however, please don't criticise us when you don't know us, have never been in our classrooms, have never had a child in our school.
I know that attacks were not personal - however, since the responses were made directly to teachers on mumsnet they are personal by sheer implication.
And I am making a serious gesture here....come and see how it REALLY works
To those whose pupils who have had bad school experiences, I am truely sorry. But please don't make sweeping generalisations

second line should read being criticised for not needing A DEGREE to teach
there i am a bad typer aswell as the rest

I hope that nobody has interpreted anything I said as being anti-school or teachers? It is difficult - I am pro-HE, but I DO think that teachers are doing a sterling job under far from ideal conditions and mostly deserve far more recognition than they get.

If i didnt care I would have left on the first day of my final teaching practice when a 7 year old told me to f**k off and go back to your sad posh student life

hilarious actually

No Oakmaiden, I haven't been offended by anything that you have said.

And I'd have gone when one little charmer said, 'why don't you retire? we all hate you'.

And one of my mate would have gone when she was told to fuck off.

And another was punched.

And another was wrongly accused of head butting a child.....it was the other way round and all the other kids supported the teacher. The parents threatened him with the police, until the other kids backed the teacher. No appology from the parents BTW

The more I think about it, the more it is like running a brownie pack.

re sad posh student life
i went to newcastle university
i have a broad geordie accent - these chldren were more 'posh' than me!!!!!