Gove kills the mockingbird with ban on US classic novels ...what do you think?

[mrz]

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/article1414764.ece?CMP=OTH-gnws-standard-2014_05_24

DD1 and me recon you can only stay in SM for a limited time before all the teachers have HMI/Ofsted ready lessons ready for each topic and it all turns into a total farce.

If it wasn't already.

Good grief - no need for going into SM. I teach in a 'good with outstanding features' school & we have entire e-folders full of ten years' worth of snazzy one-off lesson plans to tickle Ofsted's fancy with.

Name me a year group & a topic, give me two minutes, & I can download a lovely oven-ready lesson plan & resources that someone got an Outstanding with last time the Dementors bobbed in.

Nonetheless, they do look at things like pupil progress too y'know. It's not quite so simple as 'Bring on the dancing Ofsted lesson!'.

Your dd1 could usefully google what dear Oscar had to say about cynics .

What got an outstanding ten years ago would probably barely scrape good these days.

In primary (and I assume secondary isn't very different) we are subject to the whims of different teams and their experience with this age group. One team's outstanding can be another's satisfactory. I've never understood the idea of "OFSTED lessons"

Sadly given the go Ofsted had at destroying our best off time table activity, Dementors sucking the joy out if everything was about right.

I think this is a better quote for DD1 and me-
"Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist."
George Carlin

True noble, but since proper Ofsted stopped grading individual lessons in 2009, I'm more concerned about scraping at least a 'good' on my Performance Management lesson & assorted random learning walks than I am in throwing myself about for the Dementors once every five years...

That's also an excellent quote Nocomet.

The problem is that 'set one or two chapters to read at home' doesn't work. Some of them don't do it, ever. Then you're left with a lesson planned which makes no sense to those who haven't read. It's part of the attraction of 'Of Mice and Men' - it's short enough to read the whole thing in class. Especially if you have an entire class who won't read at home, will lose the book if you let them take it home and have no parental support.

I'm sure there are schools where all Year 11s do all their homework. I've never had the good luck to work in one.

Only if you plan your lesson on the chapters read IHeartKingThistle.

The point is some teachers aren't reading the whole text, just key extracts. So the reading at home would simply be to fill in the gaps between the key extracts that are studied in depth in class. All that would be needed is for those that have read at home to sharee a 5 minute summary with the class.

Key extract teaching is a crying shame. But you can't just do a 5 minute summary of 2 chapters and move on if it's the set text! Possibly if it's a coursework/controlled assessment text and you know the bit they're reading at home isn't relevant to the essay. But they have to know those exam texts inside out.

Personally I think the whole text should be read but I'm told by English teachers on this thread it's just not possible so suggested a compromise

if the chapters aren't read at all in school they aren't going to know the texts at all are they

I suspect this may be a big factor in why it's so hard to get the undergrads at the university I work at to read anything. And why they think we're so unreasonable when we get annoyed that they haven't read the set reading (never mind anything else).

CalamitouslyWrong I can't see why, though.

I didn't read the Aeneid in its entirety for my Latin O or A Levels, but I was able to understand that it was a reasonable expectation when I trotted off to Uni to read Classics.

You progress from spending 2-3 hours a week on a GCSE subject, to rather more for A level, to full time as an undergrad, surely?

Given that the G in GCSE stands for General, you're teaching an awful lot of people who will do perfectly well studying a range of Eng Lit or whatever, but will have absolutely no interest in taking it further; presumably by the time you rock up at University you've picked something to study that you're actually interested in.

I'm not disagreeing with the theory mrz! It would be a good compromise, I agree, and better than just extracts.

We used to be able to read all the texts in full in the two years but the syllabus is huge now. Lots of schools start the set text at the end of Year 9 because there is no other time. "Hey, 14-year-old, let's read this book. It's great! Then we'll spend the next 2 years periodically revising it until you're sick of it, then at the end of Year 11 you'll get to do an exam on it." Madness!

Now you would assume that the students at university would be motivated and realise that they'd need to so work or that they might be interested in the subject, but sadly the reality (certainly in my university) is quite different. A very large minority of our first and second years seem to think that a quick glance at ehow.com (or similar) is all they need to pass. They get really quite annoyed when you point out that they are supposed to read the stuff on the reading lists.

Do schools have less English timetabled per week than in the past?

And, for my subject, students are looking at 5 hours of class time a week in first year and 4 hours in second year (they will have some other classes in both years). But, apparently, it's unreasonable to expect them to actually read in the many hours a week they've not got classes.

4 hours per week for English at my school. Same for Maths & Science. Everything else gets 2 hours.

No, it's controlled assessments taking up huge amounts of time.

so now they have gone will there be more time to actually study full texts?

Surely, if you can't or won't read the whole set text, you should in all fairness fail your exam?...

What a very inclusive attitude, Rabbit. SEN student who can't (or won't) access Great a Expectations in its entirety and therefore deserves to fail. Lovely.

What's the point of an English literature exam everyone passes?... Surely you can do an exam in English without pretending someone has studied any literature?

You could look at an extract from Great Expectations for English Language, couldn't you?

You wouldn't expect someone tone deaf who hadn't learnt any pieces in their entirety to pass a violin exam, would you? You'd probably wonder why they'd entered themselves for it.