It's that time of year when all the fresh-faced trainee teachers begin to arrive in school. They've enrolled on a PGCE (Post-Graduate Certificate of Education) course having completed a degree and realised that the thousands of pounds they've spent on university tuition fees has given them a qualification that offers little in the way of employment prospects. Unless you want to be a teacher of course.
Before anyone says it, I do realise that employers will look beyond the subject of a qualification if the grade is good and use it as an indication to whether someone is willing to put the time and effort into learning a subject/job, but this assumes that you've got an interview in the first place, and let's be honest if an employer offering a well-paid position was to compare similar degrees in say business studies or maths with that of sociology or anthropology, who do you think would get the interview/job? That's not to say that these subjects don't have some worth in society, but perhaps not in the numbers that universities churn out.
Anyway, I digress. Our new and enthusiastic teachers turn up having had their heads filled by university lecturers course tutors with information that is generally totally outdated and impossible to use in practice; stuff like, "if the class is noisy then just put your hand in the air and they will immediately wonder what you are doing and be quiet" - not only will the blood drain out of your arm but once the class has realised that it's just a ploy to get them quiet they will probably just talk even louder, having told you exactly what they think of you.
I had a trainee teacher in with my worst class yesterday, along with someone who's thinking about becoming a teaching assistant. Now when I say that they are my worst class, that doesn't mean academically, it means behaviorally. And that's not to say that they do anything really bad, they just talk/sleep/do anything other than what they are supposed to do. I'm not too proud to admit that I really don't like teaching them as a group, and that's partly because the formulae (the correct plural of formula, by the way) used to calculate their target grades means that most should be getting B grade, which isn't going to happen, even if it does get a bit parky in hell. Most of them are nice individuals, but a combination of a really dull set of topics (you try making statistics interesting!), a very sociable bunch of kids and one or two total drop-kicks who like disrupting those with a chance of employment in the future has led to a number of unpleasant hours spent in each others' company each week.
When people are in your classroom you do try to put on a bit of a show, but it's impossible with this class. You spend most of your time asking people to turn around and stop chatting/sleeping or asking someone a question where they reply "Don't know, I didn't get it" as a default before having actually read the question until in the end I went ballistic. It's not something you do in front of guests, but I'd had enough. I didn't bother to talk to my guests after the lesson, funnily enough I wasn't in the mood. I don't imagine the PGCE student's university tutor ever mentioned that classes can be that bad, so at least the trainee now knows what to expect I suppose. I'm sure, had the university tutor been there they could have suggested different strategies.
Which reminds me of an incident a few years ago when I was mentoring a trainee teacher at another school. His tutor was coming in and had chosen what looked on paper to be a nice class to observe - set 1. They were however, the worst set 1 you could ever imagine, full of arrogant and less intelligent than they thought they were kids, who looked at staff as if they just scraped them off their shoe. Plus a few autistic/Asperger's children for good measure, whom the horrible kids made fun of. All-in-all, a grotty class. The lesson was very well planned with interactive stuff involving the computer, games and all the other artificial stuff that people plan when they are being observed. It looked great on paper until the computer crashed, Johnny went mental and the class erupted. As an observer you are supposed to do just that: observe. And since it was his crucial one, I couldn't jump in and help. By the end though, some learning had been achieved and the best was made from a bad situation.
And so came feedback time, where I allowed the tutor to go first. She was a frail old thing of around 70 (no exaggeration) and praised the planning whilst sympathising with the technology issues (as if she'd know!). And then came her bombshell: "They were quite lively" she said, "and I felt you could have dealt with that a little better. Next time, may I suggest that you sit the class down and discuss their behaviour with them and get them to come up with their own solutions as to how it could improve." I won't go into my response, suffice to say that subsequent meetings with that tutor were a little frosty.
This is what our universities are teaching young teachers - they are clueless and like Ofsted inspectors, so far removed from real life. Trainee teachers need to know what really goes on in the classroom, not some hypothetical clap-trap that worked in the 1950s when the teacher could always resort the cane if necessary.
The best advice to give to a trainee teacher nowadays: "Get out before you're in too deep".
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