The Third Republic - solidarity comrades!

[StaffAssociationRepresentative]

You are most welcome to this school staff support thread to get us through stressful times. Baiters and bashers can jog on somewhere else.

If you are not staff and just have a general education query please start your own thread.

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-ABBA - anti bashers and baiting association
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Other requirements for staff room entry include the ability to find the staff room, the ability to find a clean mug in the staff room, knowledge of the photocopier codes and the ability to sniff out where the toffee vodka is hidden.

I have done loads of primary liaison in my subject (science) and I am continually battling against the low expectations of year 7 students.
Part of the problem is that there are always lots of misconceptions in the actual science knowledge and facts in primary (this is improving) which means the teachers give low expectations of independent work and study skills for some reason. Because they have been miss-taught a few concepts it is too easy for expectations of ability to dramatically lower and teachers start spoon feeding.
I am always hugely impressed by the ability of year 7s to absorb difficult subjects and their resilience. And we waste it in year 7 just because they have a few things backwards.
I personally think we should teach the really hard concepts in science in year 7 before puberty scrambles their brains. Get structure of the atom, covalent bonding, electricity and radioactivity in there in year 7. They can do it!

Rant over

Sorry if that did not make sense.

Yes, I can absolutely see that, especially outside the Maths / English focus (a real weakness in primary, though the new Ofsted framework should help accountability across the curriculum).

As a similar instance, a different secondary Maths teacher was ranting about how pupils' Maths knowledge had gone down, not up, because they didn't know about mode, median and mean. Again, it's because that just isn't in the post-2014 curriculum, but that lack had coloured their whole view of the Maths 'level' of incoming Y6s.

I think it's easy to. do a snapshot assessment of "ability" in a subject on factual recall. Personally I think all teachers should do a year 6 teacher shadow every few years

I find there's low expectations in some areas of maths and not others. Eg we aren't prepared for how good they are at number work, but they know vv little algebra, geometry and stats beyond bar charts. Even then there are ingrained misconceptions like "you add a zero to times by 10". I don't blame primary for teaching that to get them to pass SATS, we do the same at GCSE. Also there is a lot of lost learning over the summer. Our feeders did admit that post SATS maths and English took a back seat. Again I completely understand why.

I find our low abilities surprisingly low and the disadvantage gap really shows. It's the middle band of students who would really benefit from something after sats to keep them going.

Disclaimer not every student or primary school fits this pattern before I get slated!

Interesting about year 6 maths. I have a top set year 7 and I do think that our syllabus is boring for them - they've covered most of it already. However, our bottom set really struggle with the same topics. My dc is in year 6 and I've been watching him learning the formula for a linear sequence in the past few weeks.

One thing I found they are weaker on is mixed number arithmetic, but it made it more fun to teach, as some of them were flummoxed for the first time. Mean from a frequency table as well.

I like doing numeracy ninjas at the start of a lesson - it gives me a chance to get my thoughts in order, they like the routine of it, and it keeps their mental arithmetic skills ticking over.

Dreaming I agree. Our bottom sets struggle with the real basics. I often wonder how much they did know at primary and have lost, and how much they just don't really know.

I'd love to get more manipulatives involved with our low prior attainers to really try and secure their understanding. We trialled a different scheme of work this year for them but no chance to really see if it has worked with lockdown.

I've worked at the same primary school for ever a long time. The vibe in the staff room is definitely swayed by the SLT and the head's ethos.

My first ht was a vicar. All very staid.

2nd - a lady. A bit more joking, but still v polite.

3rd - one of the HT's whose answer to badly behaved children was to invite them in for a cuppa and a hug and a story.* For her we were there to make every second of their time in school amazing, caring and wonderful. Absolutely no negative thoughts or rants allowed. We amalgamated from the school next door with the 2nd HT to the one run by the 3rd. She got a bit of a shock, as did the rest of their staff, as to how much banter and hilarity (with a bit of bad language thrown in) occured at lunchtime and breaktime.

4th HT - fella. Can be one of the ones mid rant and swear some days!

• On one particularly memborable occasion when one of the boys who struggled to behave and control his anger, he was heard to be bellowing 'Where's my fucking cup of tea?' when the new HT had taken over and he didn't get the same reaction to trashing his classroom and hurting his friends.

Herc I went on one of Complete Maths's free courses last year on Mastery and came away quite inspired. It required a whole school approach though, pretty much from 4 - 18 which is difficult if you have multiple feeder schools. Ultimately it felt like too much of a step change, although I would have loved to give it a go.

Saw Maths No Problem! at one of our local primary schools and loved it, the independence and the multiple interpretations and the language used by children. They have work books and they "journal" at the end of the lesson. SoW had long blocks on number, 20 lessons on fractions, 15 on decimals, 8 on percentages etc.

Here's a quote from DS about his maths (Y7)
"Why do we need to know how to do this? What's the point? I can get the answers by Google". How do you get round that mindset??!
DD is totally different, is not keen on maths, has dyscalculia like me, but finds ways around a problem, we have found our own short cuts and use fingers and images in our heads but she is determined to get to the answer without giving up. Even so, she is still in the bottom Y9 set and is disheartened by that, as she says everyone's behaviour is poor and it's hard to listen.
(I had the exact same pre my own GCSE. I was listening hard and working hard, practising at home, and understanding it, perhaps not quite as quickly as the others but still getting answers correct.. and the teacher said I was struggling so put me down the bottom set with all the kids who threw stuff and swore.
Put me right off maths and I failed the GCSE. (Resat and passed btw)

I have a year 7 form group every year. I was specially chosen for this job as I'm "a bit primary school" in the words of the head. I assume the other 7 year 7 form tutors must also be a bit primary school. I've never worked out whether that was intended as a compliment or a put down, so I've stopped working about it. I just jolly my criers along, telling them jokes and helping them find their lost equipment (there's a LOT of places your PE bag could be, but why not start by looking in the changing rooms and lost property). I think they put all the ones that need a lot of attention in my form on purpose, I always end up with one who cries every day, one who is on report by week 3 in September, one who needs a 1:1 at all times except form time apparently, and a few who just like to trash my room at lunchtime. I do miss that crazy bunch. I have no idea how this year's anxious kids are coping, they were more anxious than most yeargroup before all this kicked off.

I think dis was really irritated to be expected to show every bit of working out after having spent so much time on mental maths. He kept getting zero for assignments where he got all the right answers but didn’t show working out.

In science we’ve recently rewritten all of ks3 to make it more challenging and fitted to ks4. The one thing I have had to learn is that year 7 can’t draw graphs.

There’s a particular lesson in ecosystems where predator/prey graphs are just chucked in there. They’ve got a table of results I sketch on the board which is which axis, what units, how to space etc and think I’ve done quite a thorough job until I go round the room and see what’s occurring.

For the whole of year 7 now I know if there’s a graph it’s going to take ages and I’m going to be running round the room explaining over and over

Oh and bottom set year 9’s and magnitude of numbers I’ve actually found a brilliant video with really clear explanation and worked examples. The textbook just slings it in as if all kids (or teachers) understand how to work with massive or minuscule numbers and the secret code they’re expressed in.

Haha, yes. Our new Y7 French textbook assumes loads of prior knowledge from KS2. That really is a subject that is taught so variably. Some of our kids come with a good background and others did about 5 hours after SATS.

When I used to teach y7 I definitely noticed a decline in standards through the year, despite my best efforts. They’d start with beautiful handwriting and layout and end with scrawls. I used to be very firm on capital letters, punctuation etc (English teacher!) but still, I once had a student in y9 claim NOBODY had ever told her that the pronoun I was supposed to be a capital. I knew that was rubbish anyway, but I’d taught her in y7 and knew that I’d have corrected it the first time I ever saw it!

Haha, yes. Our new Y7 French textbook assumes loads of prior knowledge from KS2. That really is a subject that is taught so variably. Some of our kids come with a good background and others did about 5 hours after SATS.

That seems an odd decision to make as KS2 have to do some MFL, but it’s not specifically French. Our local school does Spanish.

Road map day.

At least the speculating threads may stop. Well I hope.

I know, appuskidu and some do Latin, German etc. It depends on the skill sets of different groups of teachers and they don't match up and probably never will. I think it's Pearson's fault as they wrote it to get them up to speed with new GCSE skills as quickly as possible.

I think dis was really irritated to be expected to show every bit of working out after having spent so much time on mental maths. He kept getting zero for assignments where he got all the right answers but didn’t show working out.

This is such a common gripe from my students, all the way to A-level! Some of my Y7s specifically ask me how little working they can get away with for every single exercise we do. I can see how frustrating it is if they've been trained to do mental maths - that's partly why I like doing the numeracy ninjas regularly.

I used to be a real stickler for a particular way of setting work out when solving equations. Have relaxed this a bit, but I still have a "my eyes, my eyes!" moment whenever I see:

24-4=20/5=4 as an answer .

"Here's a quote from DS about his maths (Y7)
"Why do we need to know how to do this? What's the point? I can get the answers by Google". How do you get round that mindset??!"

I think that one of the answers to this is to be found in our current situation.
I've had to ban myself from looking at the most of the Coronavirus threads because people don't have the most basic understanding of exponential growth, the way statistics are presented, the concept of "statistical risk" rather than individual risk, etc etc. Many of these concepts are grounded in the GCSE maths and science syllabuses. I am tearing my hair out at how little many people have remembered or understood from their science and maths GCSEs.
So to answer your son. A good grounding in maths and science is needed to understand what is going on with respect to Coronavirus and to be able to evaluate how reasonable statements made by politicians and the media are.

"Why do we need to know how to do this? What's the point? I can get the answers by Google". How do you get round that mindset??!

A good answer to this one pinkrocker or at least one that I use frequently is “Because not every answer you find on ‘Google’ is the correct one”

X post! And what EducatingArti said!

Oh my lord have you seen the poster suggesting we teach in tents?!

Where Her?

The drumming up business for the Marquee industry. Brilliant!