No marks for maths - and no sharpeners either
A few interesting education-related tidbits in the news this week:
The Telegraph reports that more able students are being discouraged in maths by teachers who can’t - well, who can’t do maths. After providing several examples of such howlers, the author comments:
Kurt Vonnegut has a story about a perfectly egalitarian Utopia in which all the fast runners have weights chained to their ankles and fast thinkers have to wear headphones that send a regular buzz through their brains to sabotage all coherent thought.
Under the guise of numeracy, our schools are tending to hold back the hot young mathematicians and lock them up with a numerical ball and chain so that everyone else can catch up. And buzz their brains, every so often, with manifest absurdities.
Philip Beadle writes in the Guardian of the absurdity of expecting effective individualised learning plans within a school system:
Assessing students’ learning styles, keeping the data and using it to plan lessons is, like the rest of the cod-psychological tosh on the web, a bucketful of nonsense. You cannot take a snapshot of someone’s preferences on one day and use it to plan their whole future, as their responses are dictated by mood. Tomorrow, perhaps, I may be feeling more entrepreneurial, more kinesthetic, more political, less intuitive. My answers, and consequently my profile, will be different.
The notion of personalised learning has excited many in the education world. It strikes the Department for Education and Skills as a way forward. It worries me. No teacher in the world has the time or technical ability to plan a lesson that is differentiated 30 ways. And you can have all the data in the world on a class: it doesn’t mean you will be able to teach them.
Finally there’s the news that a primary school has banned pencil sharpeners after some children smashed them to remove the blades.
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max says he used to smash pencil sharpeners to get the blades out. And he had the ball and chain attached to his brain.
Look what a fine upstanding character he is now. See, it’s character building
Pencil sharpener blades unscrew anyway don’t they? So why would they then think about giving them metal ones?
And I heart Kurt Vonnegut.
Maybe they’ll ban screwdrivers too.
I remember that story, didn’t realise it was Vonnegut. Depressingly accurate