They’ve started showing the “Become a teacher, it’s great” adverts again. I have always wondered what the budget for those was – it has to run into the tens of thousands of pounds I would have thought. The one I saw tonight was of the science lesson where the children, who are around the age of 13 or 14 are designing space ships using toy cars, clay and drinking straws, before putting them into a wind tunnel. The students are really enjoying themselves, or at least appear to be, although presumably the lesson is actually longer than the 45 seconds that we see.
There are others, like the one about planets in the playground where students mimic the orbits of the planets in our solar system and have a super time. Does anyone actually believe that lessons run like this? What do the children actually learn that they will be able to recall in an exam? Do these lessons just happen or have other lessons been used to set the activity up?
Within the science curriculum the students do have to learn about how “forces are interactions between objects and can affect their shape and motion”, which mean that the aerodynamics are relevant. They also have to learn about “astronomy and space science provide insight into the nature and observed motions of the sun, moon, stars, planets and other celestial bodies”, the playground lesson with the planets is also relevant.
The trouble is that these lessons are extraordinary or as Ofsted might put it, “outstanding”. You can’t teach every lesson in this way, because at some point the students will have to sit and answer some questions, like they would in exams. To have a lesson as “outstanding” would mean that it stands out from the crowd. If every lesson was of a similar ilk, no lesson would stand out, hence there would be no outstanding lessons.
There’s also the fact that all the student appear to be engaged, totally focused on the task set and not distracted in any way. “Accidents” are laughed at (I’m remembering when a student breaks a necklace and the beads go all over the place) and everyone knows exactly what they are supposed to do.
Teaching doesn’t work like this, so why do the government mislead potential teachers?
I have performed lesson along similar lines with mathematical concepts and have encountered the following problems:
· The students are incapable of listening to instructions.
· The students find what they regard as being a better way of performing the task, when in fact the task has been designed quite specifically to show certain things.
· The class moan that the groups they’ve been put in contain people they don’t get on with or doesn’t contain their mates.
Activities like the ones seen on the teaching adverts are brilliant, don’t get me wrong, but they take ages to set up (usually more than one lesson) and then are ruined or at least hindered by those who can’t help but mess about. I realise that the art of the teacher is to engage all of the students, but sometimes it’s nigh on impossible – just look at Jamie Oliver’s Dream School series on Channel 4 at the moment.
What the adverts fail to point out is that every day a teacher will spend around 90% of their time with 10% of their students – the ones who can’t behave for whatever reason, whether “medical”, “dietary” or whatever. The other 10% of the time has to be divided between the 90% who actually are trying to get something out of school.
I would never encourage anyone to become a teacher now. The pay is fine, but the working conditions are dreadful for various reasons that I’ll go into at another time. Most days are spent wondering what the point of your teaching existence is and getting more and more tired after increasing numbers of sleep deprived nights. The trouble is that once you’re in for a while, it seems very difficult to escape.
The holidays are alright though.
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