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

Gove is right to shake it up, but I would suggest a book every fortnight of a really wide range. If it's something complex like Homer perhaps a chapter or two. They could easily fit 15 books in every year. And give them an an e book thing.

And stop bickering you lot over there!

Not really. I'm pretty experienced myself but I'm not so arrogant as to assume I have nothing left to learn or that I am automatically better than the NQT down the corridor. With a new specification, everyone is in the same boat. Bleating on about what things were like in 1978 or 1995 is utterly irrelevant.

I thought this was a thread partly about how things ought to be, or could be, not about how stuffed you all are with the new specification? So in what way is past experience irrelevant, if there are actually good things we could learn from the way things were done in the past? Why does every change have to throw the baby out with the bathwater? Some of what was done until recently and is now being chucked out was good - and some of what was done a 20 or 30 years ago wasn't too bad.

Ponders whether EvilTwins has also now offended history teachers, who are all obsessed with the past...

ps as for how can it be too easy to get an A... I thought the A was introduced because it had become too easy to get an A, so they needed to differentiate between a really good A and a not-so-good A? If it can become too easy to get one grade, I see no reason why it can't become too easy to get another. Particularly when you are an exam board competing for business.

Past experience is irrelevant because no matter what anyone says about it, Mr Gove has spoken and the decision is not going to be unmade.

Then this whole thread is irrelevant, because it's asking what people think about something that Mr Gove has already decided upon.

The point about it being "too easy to get an A" with OMAM is different. I actually disagree with the sentiment in general. In my subject, last year, students had to get 59/60 for an A. However, in this case, my point was that exam board set the texts, questions and mark scheme for their exams. They're not going to have one text for which getting an A* is easier.

Yep, you're pretty much right there.

EvilTwins - if such a high percentage of students have studied OMAM over the years, the cynic in me says it's partly because a lot of teachers have thought it's an easy one to get higher grades for all their students in. If all texts were equally easy, there would be a more even spread of books studied.

As for your approach that Gove has spoken, so you know exactly how you are going to teach under the new specification and will not listen to anyone who suggests that methods used in the past might now have to be re-employed to deal with it, for better or worse... I know Gove is a tyrant, but has he really spelt it all out so specifically that there's no point in talking about how you're going to do it???? DO you know exactly how you are going to do it?

Could it not be that teachers are just really good at teaching OMAM? And that they have, over the years, learned the best things to teach and the best way to teach it?

Nothing wrong with changing the spec, but I think the scrapping of popular texts is a shame and the lack of tiers is a mistake.

As for my approach? I'm not teaching English in the foreseeable future - I'm doing Performing Arts at the moment. Another one Gove is about to piss about with.

EvilTwins - how did so many teachers manage to get good at teaching OMAM? Is it partly because, being short, it's easier to teach?

Oh well, Gove's a loon. It's a shame he's been given so many lives to mess about with. He's so convinced he's right, everyone else is wrong - even cabinet colleagues.

Bleating on about what things were like in 1978 or 1995 is utterly irrelevant.

In 1995 top students were being bored to tears by Of Mice and Men. It's not a new phenomenon. I wonder when it was first put on the syllabus.

I can't believe people are questioning change here, there are billions of books on the planet to choose from. What young people need is a broad picture of genres so they can at least get something out of their time in English lit classes. Reading the same passages again and again to scrape out meaning and literary nuance is pointless until you're at A level and millions of children have been doing this for probably decades. It doesn't work, it puts children off reading, doesn't turn them onto it at all.

Gove hasn't gone far enough afaiac.

Hmm. Yes, there are billions of books on the planet, but Gove wants to limit the choices. I think the issue is that as soon as children start preparing for GCSEs, they stop studying anything that isn't specifically on the syllabus. That's when it all gets really boring. Some schools even spend 3 years preparing for GCSEs.

What would you teachers do if you were education minister? I have made my suggestions,

I'm not a teacher. If I were education minister, I'd ask myself what the purpose of the GCSE exams was before I changed them. Why do children take exams at 16? Who is really being tested, there, the children or their teachers? What are we really wanting to test for? What are we trying to find out? Have ever improving GCSE results led to a better society, better schools, more work-ready school leavers, more thoughtful, engaged, fulfilled and resilient human beings? What do teachers think about it all? I'm not sure my answers to those questions would be the ones Michael Gove has come up with, given that the teaching profession does not appear to think he listened to what they had to say, he seems to have fallen out with Ofsted, universities seem a bit upset with him, the world of business does not seem entirely convinced, and he doesn't seem to get on too well with half of his cabinet colleagues.

The problem with politics is, you can't bring in controlled change at a sensible pace, because the next election is always coming up. Michael Gove just seems to have been in a tearing rush to make sure that nobody can put back what went before, but will have to start again one way or the other. I really don't understand where he thinks he's heading, tbh - he's been in such a rush to change everything, I think he's lost sight of why he's doing it.

Ok rabbit if you wanted children to reach age 16 with a wide understanding of literature and be able to answer a few quiz questions and write or discuss why a book was written in the way it was written, what would you do?

Remember this is just English lit, not govian politics we are discussing.

Evil
I've been away from this thread for most of today but i wanted to pick up a couple of points you made to me.

First, my post about longevity wasn't posted for you- it was posted to someone else who seemed to think that having taught for 15 years gave them some kind of authority. I pointed out that when you have been teaching for almost 40 years you gain a different perspective.

Secondly, I never said anything about my ability as a teacher or how I was 'better' than another teacher.

What I gave was my opinion on the set texts. I gave that opinion as someone who has been in teaching for 4 decades and has seen how texts have changed.

This is not a case of being unable to appreciate change if it's a change for good, or being stuck in some kind of time warp where the old days were the best without questioning them!

Evil They're not going to have one text for which getting an A* is easier.

Really?

So why do so many teachers choose it from the selection available to them?

Because it's easier than others.

If yo can't appreciate that you are very naive.

English teachers are saying that losing Of Mice and Men will make English Lit GCSE less accessible to the bottom sets.

However, given that making GCSE less accessible to the bottom sets is the entire point of this reform, this is unlikely to cause any u-turns. There is a wider issue here - anyone looking at the new maths GCSE sample assessment material will see that it is also more difficult. I assume the other subjects will be similar.

The big question is whether GCSEs in academic subjects should be accessible to bottom sets.

I guess, since our schools are not all the same, given the huge differences in wealth between areas, and huge differences in cultural mix (or lack thereof), I'd have to decide before anything else what I was going to do about that - allow, effectively, different sorts of literary education for different sorts of area, to meet the differing needs and expectations of the different audiences (thus potentially encouraging people to polarise even more), or create my own idea of England and what English literature is, and then impose a GCSE syllabus on all schools that fitted that idea, regardless of reality, or in the hope of altering reality through education. It's hard to say which approach would ultimately be the more divisive! Either could cause riots... Obviously, the approach which favours "English classics" (particularly Victorian novels and Shakespeare) would work well for pub quizzes, because then everyone would know what the accepted "classics" were... I get the feeling Gove favours the imposition of his idea of English literature onto the GCSE syllabus. My cultural background means I, personally, have no huge objections to his choices, my only objection is that I don't want my children in a class with other children who can't be bothered to read the books and don't want to talk about them.