That glass ceiling! Part 2

[var123]

Continuing the discussion about artificial limits placed on G&T children, and the resulting impact on their health and happiness (not to mention futures).

Do they really matter less because they have a perceived "advantage"?!

original thread here:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/gifted_and_talented/2507232-The-glass-ceiling-for-very-able-children?

another difference from the 80s to today - the teachers had to have done at least 2 years at university in that subject (plus have a degree) before they could get a teaching diploma and stand in front of us in the classroom. That meant that you never had a teacher learning the subject just in front of the children she or he is teaching.

I know that's the SLT fault, not the teachers but it does make a difference to be taught by someone who really knows their stuff and who liked the subject enough to do it at university.

Bobo, for somewhat arcane reasons, I learned the past tense in French before the present, indeed before I had any other knowledge of the language at all. I still speak and read French pretty well, even though I only took it for 4 years and had an anything-but-carefully-constructed foundation.

I cannot quite understand why a thread that started off with the fact that schools did not sufficiently extend and accelerate the able actually ADVOCATING following a text book step by step, without deviation.

We have a Maths textbook on trial at the moment. It has decided on its own method for 'units' covering the new curriculum. 4 experienced teachers yesterday ransacked the 3 terms' worth of our year's textbook, the year below and the year above (so 9 textbooks) to even start to cover the range of differentiation (in terms of content, explanation and exercises) needed for a week of lessons on the properties and perimeter of 2D shapes - and we have no pupils who have specific learning needs in Maths in this year group, so the range of abilities that we need to cover is significantly narrower than usual.

Then we gave up and spent 10 minutes with the actual curriculum document plus a useful tool that we subscribe to that breaks the objectives it contains down into steps (forwards and backwards, so differentiation and support). Yes, we used a couple of the textbook pages for exercises, but web pages that we all had bookmarked yielded a much richer and more diverse set of activities to meet the same objectives. And then we were done - 5 lessons that were all differentiated from our lowest achievers to our most able learners, and the exercises to support or extend each step, taking about 20-30 minutes in all.

A textbook LOOKS like a panacea. But it's not.

DG2016 - I once idly wondered why they didn't do that. I thought maybe it was to deter schools from selecting against SEN or behavioural issues. Then i realised that its because the system relies on the parents in the independent sector paying twice. The way you describe, your annual bill would be reduced by £6k, and the country cannot afford to pay for the education of all the kids whose parents take them out of the state system.

"That meant that you never had a teacher learning the subject just in front of the children she or he is teaching."

The history teacher in my previous story also taught Music. And Biology. I don't know whether he was qualified in any, or none...

A lot of the basic skills that university teachers say their students are missing or have gaps in are best built up in very much the same way as reading and writing are taught through phonics: a build up in logical sequence. We deplore teachers who mess around with the reading schemes so that DC have to guess rather than decode. Huge swathes of school education responds best to logical build up.

teacher - to learn a past tense (which one - passé compose, passé simple, imparfait, plus-que-parfait?) before the present is madness.

Yes, 500,000 of us save the government about £6k a year each by paying fees, However there are some people who think those 500,000 are such wonderful children (they aren't, they are just normal children) that the state system would hugely benefit if our children were within it.

A big recent state school change is that London schools do better in exam grades than out of London schools. That is partly because immigrants work harder, also because Teach First clever graduates want to work in London schools where their friends and parties are not Hull or rural Northumberland and probably money too - more money given and more variety of schools in London compared to state schools in the NE where I am from.

"That meant that you never had a teacher learning the subject just in front of the children she or he is teaching."

Does that happen now?

Another important thing to remember about the undergraduates with gaps in their knowledge is that when I went to university, only about 2% did. It would be more for most of you, but nothing like the % that go now. So there is bound to be a broader range of ability. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is up for debate.............

Bertrand - yes. I know that just from my teacher friends complaining about it, but you'll find references to it everywhere.

Oh, and I think you must have been very lucky ^and very talented var- certainly none of my contemporaries could speak their MFLs with any degree of fluency. It's something th British have always been famous for.....

There are good textbooks, I had wonderful Maths A level textbooks from which I could teach myself what the teachers did n't. A good textbook is much faster for mastering the basics than being diverted onto the internet with all the time wasting that can entail or trying when revising to make order out of random bits of paper that were never properly organised when they made sense (or is the latter just my family).

"Bertrand - yes. I know that just from my teacher friends complaining about it, but you'll find references to it everywhere."

I think I might need a bit more evidence than that........

But you don't need a textbook for logical build-up.

Schools don't just 'make up the curriculum as they go along'. there is the national curriculum, which individual schools use as the basis for their schemes of work, which do exactly the structured build-up that you describe.

However, as the schools know their pupils, and the range of their abilities, the schemes of work flex to meet those different needs. Some children may need something taught just once to know, retain and be able to use it. Others will need tiny, tiny steps, with lots of repetition (if you have ever taught a very low ability child to read an analogue clock, you will know how tiny those steps can be). Some schemes of work will be relatively 'linear', others may need to be more 'spiral,', coming back again and again to the same concept or material at slowly increasing complexity or depth. Some will be built out of the teaching equivalent of the smallest lego bricks, others of much swifter large leaps. None of it is 'randowm' or 'illogical', but it WILL be different.

For example, one way that history can be taught is 'backwards' - extending a young child's historical understanding slowly from 'yesterday' to 'when grandad was alive', backwards in slow steps. Another way is forwards. A third is thematically, studying a single theme across a longer period. Another is to study and compare the same period in different places. All are pedagogically valid, logical approaches - but there can be a choice between them.

When I went to university, only 7% went and of the 300 in my maths class on day 1, only 30 were left by the end four years later (the other specialised elsewhere) and only 2 got 1st class honours.
So 1 in 15 of the top 7% got first class honours. So, 0.5% of the population got 1st class honours.

Now its what - 50%(?) who go to university, and something like a fifth of them get first class honours. So, 10% of the population get a first.

That means that "teach first" actually contains people who wouldn't have even been able to go to university in the 80s and none of them have a teaching diploma.

Actually, it says it all that Teach First makes an improvement on results when you realise that they are all are below the minimum acceptable standard back in the 80s.

Bobo, as it happens, imparfait followed by passe compose. (Sorry, no accents using this keyboard)

I agree it wasn't sensible. I skipped Y7 entirely, and arrived at my secondary school in year 8. I came from a standard state primary (the one with the frozen toilets and the thrown blackboard rubbers) and almost everyone else had come from a prep and done French since the age of 7.

I started in the lowest set, was in the top set by the end of Y8, took O-level at the end of Y10 and A/O French with Texts at the end of Y11 (that was when i learned the passe simple, in a much more logical progression), getting As in both - and as I say, both speak and read French well even now, despite the lack of foundations....

BertrandRussell - the evidence is everywhere. just do a bit of googling. Look on the TES forum for example. I am sure you will find it quickly enough if you look.

teacher a couple of points arising from your last post:

• you're assuming that all teachers are competent, that all teacher roles are filled with qualified people (when in reality there is a crisis in recruitment in science and maths), and that all students are taught by a teacher who is qualified in the subject. Unqualified or supply teachers may not have the time, inclination or skill to create quality resources in the way you describe.

• there's a reason to approaching a syllabus in a particular order. If all teachers or schools make it up as they go along, children who change classes or schools risk developing significant gaps in their education.

The advantage of having text books - even if teachers only dip into them (as is the case in my children's schools) is that students have an accessible resource if there are gaps or inconsistencies in teaching.

I can think of one piece of thought leadership that I saw published online, written by a HT, that spent sometime explaining how other HTs should be flexible in their thinking when recruiting and actually described how easy it is to get a teacher from one subject to do an entirely different one.

Blimey - even teacher references the practice a few posts ago!

" If all teachers or schools make it up as they go along, children who change classes or schools risk developing significant gaps in their education."

No, because all state schools follow the national curriculum (actually, academies don't need to, but the vast majority do - we don't for History, because we have taken an alternative, but stiill valid, pedagogical approach in terms of the order in which we teach the prescribed content - free schools are a bit less of a known quantity)

All schools, IME, have schemes of work.

the difficulty with textbooks is not about 'coverage of the syllabus', which i agree that they can provide, but in a proper degree of differentiation, and in the reflection that not every child needs particular material presented in the same way in order to make the best progress for them.

var - buit that is from the 1980s, your 'golden age'. Not now.

Apologies, that was wrt "Blimey - even teacher references the practice a few posts ago!"

To clarify: this teacher taught Music, History and Biology in the same school, to CSE and O-level, in the 1980s ... so it was probably not suprising that he didn't manage to teach the correct History syllabus. All his O-klevel history students had failed for some years, btw, but that was normal. DB passed 8 O-levels from that school. That was 1/3 of the total from his entire year group, and his 8 As were all but 1 of the A grades from the year.

1980s the golden age? Methinks not.

"Unqualified or supply teachers may not have the time, inclination or skill to create quality resources in the way you describe."

I don't think that saying that textbooks are needed because unqualified and supply teachers may not be able to teach without them is exactly a RECOMMENDATION, really, would you? More an acknowledgement that they are better than nothing, but a lot worse than a qualified teacher.

another difference from the 80s to today - the teachers had to have done at least 2 years at university in that subject (plus have a degree) before they could get a teaching diploma and stand in front of us in the classroom. That meant that you never had a teacher learning the subject just in front of the children she or he is teaching.

Simply not true. My mother was a Maths teacher with a degree in Maths. She taught Chemistry and Physics to GCSE in her well-regarded state school in the mid to late eighties. Fortunately for her, I had recently done/was studying A Levels in those subjects at the time because the subject had changed by a vast amount since she was at school and had last studied it (some time in the early 60s). She relied quite heavily on the stuff I passed on to her from my own studies. I helped her quite a bit with the practical side of Chemistry in particular (what kinds of experiments to do for particular sections of the curriculum etc). I'm sure there were many teachers in similar positions who had to research stuff alone or with help from friends/family/textbooks in order to be able to teach it.

The teachers taught, they did not skim. We learned and passed exams, which involved memorising formulae etc (I did 3 separate sciences).

Exactly as DS and DD are now, though their sciences are arranged slightly differently.

If we read a book in English, then step 1 was to read the book from cover to cover.

Ditto for DS and DD today.

When i went onto university afterwards no one said that we weren't familiar with the basics.

My children aren't at this stage yet. From my DB's school in the 1980s, he was the only pupil to go on to university. Many left at 16 with few if any qualifications. DB might have been familiar with the basics, but many of his peer group were essentially familiar with very little else.

By the time, I'd been learning a language for 3 years, I could speak it and write it and I was very familiar with the various types of verbs -re, -ir, -er. My homework would be to memorise some more vocab or read a passage in French and answer the questions in French. My teachers always marked my work and gave some brief feedback.

Exactly ass DS and DD are today. DS is doing 2 languages to GCSE, DD will do 2 languages for 2 years but s unlikely to choose a second as a GCSE option.

YUR 1980s education may have been good. Mine was too. Your DC's current education may not be quite as you would like it, whereas I am very happy with DD's and DS's, as it is certainly a VAST improvement on my DB's comprehensive education in the 1980s and is very close indeed to my DH's private school one (he was at a middling publcschool, mine was perhaps a bit different because it was one of those 'academic hot house' types)