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

Sorry - was talking to unrealhousewife.

I'm starting to wish I hadn't asked Rabbit.

I think we lose soooo much by not exploring foreign literature and different genres.

All children need the same curriculum more or less or we lived in a divided society. If they were all forced to read two books each half term you could cover 12 in a year. Test them on the books regularly and there won't be a problem with them not reading them. If they have books they can have them read to them, shouldn't be difficult.

Brilliant. Go and give that a try with some real children (with real-life unsupportive parents) in a real school (with real pressure) in real time, then come back and tell us how it went

I have GOT to stop clicking on this thread.

Well that's a really constructive answer Thistle. Are you a teacher?

Teacher and examiner. Not that it matters - people who know what they're talking about are basically being ignored on this thread. Reality is inconvenient sometimes.

My ideals and ethics are as passionate as anybody's, before you tell me how shit I am. I do make my students read. But it's really not as simple as some of you are making out.

I totally agree IHeart

I haven't clicked on this thread in over a week for exactly the reasons you have just described.

So you just click on here to say something un constructive?

What would you do for English lit if you were Gove, do you think it's adequate atm because I don't.

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

But that's just daft. We wouldn't say in any subject unless you excel in it you shouldn't acquire any skills at all. I remember reading somewhere a while ago that English Lit is difficult to be very bad at (excluding dyslexia etc) but equally difficult to excel in. The range of grades should take account of both.

The difficulty with English texts in general is that they do differ in terms of what you can do with them to demonstrate your skills. You can have something like A Town Like Alice which hasn't got much to offer in my view. Of Mice And Men has quite a bit, I'd argue, while remaining accessible (and short), which is probably why it is such a favourite. But it does the nation and its love of literature no favours to have a nation of people who've all read the same five books...

noble Yes, that is the point indeed!

The problem was that with the abandonment of the GCE/ CSE split into GCSE, all abilities were catered for under 1 exam.
When the GCSE was first introduced, it was quite common for many students to gain grades D-G - these tended to be the CSE type of student.

When targets and league tables became the focus rather than quality of learning and materials used, the boards ( who are a business, let's not forget, touting for business!) started to include texts that were easier for less able students and also set questions that were easier.

The whole value of GCSEs have been eroded over the years. When I began teaching, the minimum qualification required for teacher training colleges was 5 O levels, or a degree for a PGCE course.
5 O levels was the entry point for many professions and replaced the former School Certificate.

It seems almost laughable now that 5 Cs at GCSE would qualify anyone for anything but this only goes to show how their value has decreased over the years, not because humans are becoming more intelligent, or teachers are doing a marvellous job compared to previous generations of teachers, but because the exams have been dumbed down.

IHeartKingThistle - you've got a real cheek saying people on this thread who know what they are talking about are being ignored... Most of the people posting on this thread appear to be teachers and you are roundly trying to ignore EACH OTHER for either not knowing enough about secondary school English teaching, or being too old...

Which is not an edifying experience for non-teachers, I have to say - who are reading this thread and paying attention to it...

Lazy D-G grades are still very common, yes even on OMAM.

"making GCSE less accessible to the bottom sets is the entire point of this reform"

I feel a bit uncomfortable with this statement. I wouldn't say it's the entire point, although the closed book aspect (which I think really is wrong) will certainly have that effect.

But there are people out there, teachers included, who believe that changes to education starting from Reception could make academic stuff much more accessible to bottom sets, basically by raising the standard of those sets. For example by ensuring they can all read at a level that allows them to access the secondary curriculum, and can at least have a stab at writing a grammatically correct and coherent answer to an essay question. There's more to it than that, of course, but that's the idea.

Gove believes in market forces, so I think he is hoping that parents and also secondary schools will put pressure on primary schools to up their game in this regard: to look at research and at what other schools are doing. He may well be wrong about the success of this strategy, but I think that's the idea. Combined of course with raising the expectations for Sats.

The big problem of course is what will happen to the kids who have to take these exams without the benefit of improved standards lower down.

And that's not to mention the refusal of teachers to give credence to other teachers who don't like "Of Mice & Men" and give their reasons for this. One thing you can't say about our Education Secretary is that he doesn't know anything about English literature, so I can only conclude that it is a perfectly acceptable opinion to think OM&M is a bit insubstantial...

Interesting opinion, kesstrel, that GCSE changes are designed to improve primary school teaching...

Where has this obsession with bottom sets appeared from?

It's discriminatory, elitist and everything that modern education should not be.

Making the compulsory study of Eng lit useful to broaden minds and souls should be the point of it, that's still the point, surely?

I think it would broaden our minds far more if the reading list was wider and concerned more with genre than author.

I think the education system should be reformed, regularly, but not just because some Tory has a bright spark idea that he can't follow through.

A review every 10 years where everything reshuffles enough to make a difference would be very progressive IMO. At the moment there's a lot of tweaking that just wastes teachers precious time.

I see the bottom sets debate came from Noblegiraffe.

The bottom sets can be engaged in the literature curriculum if it were wider, less tediously analytical. The painful analysis if text becomes useless to most after a certain point. Let's just get people reading or listening instead of hitting them over the head with set books.

Kestrel, when these reforms were first announced, the proposal was that the bottom 25% shouldn't take the new GCSEs at all, and instead simply get some sort of school-leavers certificate.

I haven't heard anything recently about what to do with the bottom 25%, but from looking at the sample assessment material for Maths, and from what English teachers are saying here, it is certainly clear that they are not being explicitly catered for as they are currently.

Whether not catering for them will mean that they simply up their game and are then able to access more difficult material will be interesting to see. Gove has said before that every school can be above average if only they try hard enough.

unrealhousewife - are you not just arguing for the bottom sets not to have to take exams??? Then they could read lots of books and not have to be analytical about them.

That's not really an education system for all is it Noble?

It's simply a way to always have a lower class. There will always be a bottom 25 percent of everything. The point is you aim for equality by using a curriculum that works for everyone.

Yes there should be more practical skills taught but everyone should be taught them too, even the boffins.

I wish... I have one ds who is good at most things - picks up on academic concepts incredibly quickly, loves practical skills. My other ds has needed huge amounts of help at home to develop basic practical skills and spatial perception. Have I had much help from school on that? No - those skills, apparently, a child picks up through play and doesn't need to be taught... Children who need to be taught what other children pick up through "play" are not catered for in the mainstream school system. They need huge lots of outside help. Children who find academic work easy are also not well catered for, because hours are spent at school breaking down skills for other children that the academic children worked out for themselves through their version of "play." I therefore have one ds who is simultaneously challenged and patronised at school, and another ds who is never fully stretched in any direction. The education "system" will never cater perfectly for everyone.

Rabbit I have found that some schools cope very well with different needs and learning styles. It is possible but the English lit curriculum doesn't fully fulfill the wider purpose.

It's ok that children aren't good at everything but they need to learn the widest range of skills up to 14 at least. The trouble is Education doesn't get taken seriously until gcse so many slip through the net.

unrealhousewife - Practical skills that don't come naturally to someone need one-to-one tuition. Such children don't learn by watching then doing, they need a very hand-on-hand approach for anything physical, particularly if they have additional issues such as hypermobility and low muscle tone, which mean their bodies don't even work in quite the same way as anybody else's. Schools do not and cannot provide that level of attention and expertise. If a child can't learn something in a big group with everyone else, then the school doesn't tend to cater very well for them: it needs a critical mass of children with the same sorts of issues. Also, schools do not tend to take very seriously the "problem" of some children not being very good at sport, or art, or design technology, because reading, writing and basic maths are considered more important, things which children who are poor at sport, art or practical skills often do well at. If you are not going to put as much effort into one thing as another, then of course you are going to end up with a hierarchy of skills, with the academic ones put at the top of the pile, because those are the skills that a greater number of people have difficulty with.

Mind you, as an increasing number of children appear to be having difficulty with practical skills, taking those skills for granted might have to change, unless we continue to develop machines to do all that for us, resulting in a total over supply of human beings...

Noble, that's interesting, I didn't know that. Did the same apply to English Language? I must say, it makes sense to me in some ways - but it would also ideally mean addressing the reading of literature in years 7-9 more, as Housewife suggests above. It's this same problem of early specialisation that we so often encounter here; if all kids were doing English in years 12 and 13 we could save the intensive textual analysis till then, when they would be more mature and better able to do it.

I dont think there's any question of the kids themselves upping their game; it has to be done via the curriculum and the teaching. Also, to be fair to him, I don't think that's what Gove actually said. It's important not to confuse the idea of "the average" on the inevitable bell curve (which can go up or down) with the average currently being achieved.