Reflecting On Privilege In Education

Yesterday I attended the fantastic researchED 2013 conference at Dulwich College. I've been past there a few times round the South Circular (usually being towed to the Fiat specialists in Catford...), but this was my first time inside. The setting was beautiful, the conference very well organised and smoothly run - no complaints whatsoever on that front. But being inside somewhere open only to the truly privileged made my skin itch a bit.

It started when I pulled into the car park, my battered, bird-shit-covered, bumper-stickered Punto nose to tail with enormous SUVs and Jaguars. I was promptly turned round and sent back round the corner to the conference delegates' parking space, on a building site. My tyres were caked in mud and my shoes still have Dulwich College hardcore embedded in the soles. In the meantime, the car parks inside were entirely empty. There may have been a logical reason for this (gate wardens on duty only until lunchtime, perhaps), but it definitely felt like the riff-raff were being separated out. Paul, even more left-wing than I am, was grumbling under his breath for a good 15 minutes.

Then, the Master of the College referred, in his opening speech, to the sixth-formers helping with registration as "servants". I bristled at this. We often ask students to help us out with events. But we call them "ambassadors" - we place them in a position of respect and responsibility, not servitude. In the hall there were pictures of former headteachers - all men, naturally. Then again, it is a boys' school, and you'd never see a male headteacher's painting on the wall of a girls' independent school. Our walls are covered with pictures of students. It felt as though our two institutions had very different opinions of the worth of their students.

Then I saw a couple of posters in the student café, protesting the abolition of the Educational Maintenance Allowance. I wondered how many students at Dulwich College were even eligible for EMA. When EMA was offered, getting on for one-third of our full-time students were eligible, most of which were entitled to the full amount of £30 per week.I remember very few of my students not being either EMA or ALG (adult learning grant) recipients. For the non-UK readers, EMA was basically paid because otherwise low-income students would have been unable to afford the bus fare to college, and in some cases eat. The government has now abolished it, and instead raised the participation age to "motivate" hungry students to come to college.

Now, I consider myself middle-class. My father was a teacher, and my mother, the daughter of a country GP (so pretty much high society for Shropshire), was a radiographer. Paul's father was a bank manager, and his mother is still a teacher. I attended a comprehensive school until I was 16, then won a scholarship (and the benefit of a government-assisted place) to an independent school for the sixth form. This step undoubtedly gave me a massive boost in getting to Cambridge, and well - they don't come much more privileged than a Cambridge graduate. And as both of us are teachers, that makes our family middle-class, despite the fact we can only afford to rent a one-bedroom flat.

The most frequently-asked question of me by my students is "Why didn't you become a doctor?". The second most frequently-asked question is "Why do you want to teach here if you went to Cambridge?" And I get that one from students and staff alike. For students, I turn it back to them - "Why wouldn't I? I think you deserve to be taught by highly qualified teachers, don't you?" For staff, it's been harder, but I think my response will be a shorter version of this post. I think I have a talent for teaching - the thanks, the little gifts, the continued contact with my students over the years suggests so. I cannot bear the thought of restricting that talent to the most privileged - they do not need my help. They can buy tuition, their children can have more personalised teaching, they can do amazing things (through the school) to pad out their personal statements so they're a shoo-in for the elite universities, and with the pedigree they have, they will walk into highly-paid city jobs when they graduate.

For most of my students, the four and a half hours in a class of 20 with me is the only tuition they can afford. And so I give my time outside of this willingly with no expectation of reimbursement (though a chocolate bar to share during a long session is always appreciated). Students at independent schools have access to a plethora of teachers, many of whom have Oxbridge degrees, not to mention highly literate parents - they have an advantage when writing coursework, personal statements and the like. Many of my students are the only members of their family who can speak English (making parents' evening really interesting!). They can't ask their mum or dad to look over their personal statement, or proof-read an essay. So I do that too.

I teach in FE because it's the best job in the world. I love the diversity of the students I teach and their ideas and experiences. I teach in FE because they have never asked me to apply for a job via hand-written letter, as one independent school did. I suspected if the quality of my handwriting and the choice of pen and paper used was an important consideration in an applicant, then the headteacher and I would not have got on, and so I decided not to go through with the application. I teach in FE because I far prefer being called "Julia" than "Mrs Anderson" (though a plaintive "Miii-iiiss" seems to haunt female teachers everywhere). I teach in FE because, through a combination of my brain-power and money from the government, paid through taxes, I was able to get a place at a top school and then the best university in the country. What sort of person am I if I was able to enjoy that privilege at little cost to myself, only to not pay society back by helping others to enjoy an excellent education?

I also teach in FE because I don't imagine the likes of Dulwich College would appoint me with blue hair, facial piercing and tattoos up my arms, but that is probably another issue entirely.

So What Can We Teach?

A couple of stories (along with comments from some of the louder and more obnoxious members of the Edublogosphere) have popped up over the past few days. Most relevant to my own teaching is on the subject of SRE lessons, which will now include aspects of respect and intolerance of violence against women. Relevant to Paul is the introduction of an A-level in Creative Writing.

Where these two seemingly divergent subjects meet is in the overwhelming criticism of both SRE and creative writing, namely that teachers are woefully underqualified to teach both of them. Apparently our relationships are train-wrecks by and large, and we shouldn't be giving advice to students on their relationships. And the only people who will be able to teach Creative Writing will be those who have been successful writers in their own right. I'll address this one first.

"Only successful authors can teach Creative Writing effectively"

Fortunately, Paul is a successful writer and editor and would be able to rock that A-level teaching. But do all teachers of creative subjects need to be accomplished in that field? The actual creation is not the majority of the qualification - in Art I spent a lot of time learning ratios, perspective, techniques, history of various movements. In Music (I didn't do any qualifications save for my AB exams) there was a formula for composing music, which I was supposed to demonstrate in my Grade V theory exam. I would imagine in Creative Writing there are similar theories and formulae that can be used to help students write creatively.

But surely this is extended to the supposedly non-creative subjects. Do I need to be a successful biologist in order to teach A-level Biology? I most certainly am not. I'm not even a biologist, though I have a masters in Biosystematics. I'm a geologist and I have one published paper. I don't have a PhD - I failed to do that twice. No, I need a good understanding of the subject matter and an ability to pass that understanding to my students. I can do that without a PhD, long publication record, grant applications and the other characteristics of successful scientists.

"Teachers are the last people who should be advising on relationships. Look at us!"

My marriage is not perfect. Many people close to us know we've had some trials and tribulations. My family's story would be rejected by sitcom writers for being too outrageous and unbelievable. But despite all that (or maybe because?) I still deal one-to-one with a large number of students with boyfriend/girlfriend problems, family issues and so on. I'm now certified to give out condoms to students under our borough's C-Card scheme. In Biology classes I discuss IVF, contraception, STIs, abortion and drug use - sometimes it's even relevant to the specification. Why shouldn't I take the opportunity to discuss relationships with the students too?

There have been some concerns that certain supposedly controversial issues such as homosexuality would be difficult to teach about in SRE if one's religious beliefs state that it's a sin. Well, the same colleagues who would have issues also have serious problems with evolution and an old Earth, but no one has suggested (apart from me) that they shouldn't be teaching Biology... If these colleagues can teach a topic they think is inaccurate and wrong, then they can jolly well teach about the full range of human relationships.

Given a framework, regardless of our experience in the world of relationships, we can raise discussion points. We can ask the right questions. We can get students to reflect on their own relationships and those they see around them. I'm not a role model - I have tattoos, blue hair and am contemplating a nose ring (hey, it's MY midlife crisis, right?). I drink and occasionally smoke. I eat poorly. I still have to teach students about the importance of healthy eating and the dangers of lung cancer. No one has suggested that, because I'm overweight, I shouldn't be teaching students about a balanced diet. So why should private relationship woes prevent a teacher from teaching about positive relationships and respect for each other?

Right. Time for caffeine. I don't usually write before my first cup of the day. It probably shows.

Management

Our department is in a precarious position at the moment. Our manager left suddenly (rumours abound about why, but it is no secret that a lot of the figures for our area were found to be completely inaccurate) and we have an interim manager from another department. She is amazing, and I am enjoying the sensation of having a supportive, empowering manager. The other CL in the department is also on extended leave, so I am assuming some of his responsibilities. I'm realising that, while I am not quite the longest-serving lecturer, I am now the most senior non-managerial lecturer.

Questions were being asked about the department's future, and the Director responsible for our department (among others) asked my manager if I was interested in becoming the permanent manager. The short answer is no. The slightly longer answer is hell no. And this is why:

• I am a teacher. Teaching is what I do. Any managerial position will take more teaching hours away from me than I am comfortable with.
  
• We are short of staff. We need more full-time lecturers. And we need more competent full-time lecturers. I have supported students with AS and A2 Chemistry, and AS Physics, in addition to my normal teaching duties. Losing half my teaching hours to management would be disastrous.
  
• I left the private sector to get away from days spent peering at an Excel spreadsheet. I certainly don't want to return to that.
  
• The £10k extra a year is not worth the hassle.
  
• I am unlikely to find myself with a supportive, empowering manager further up the scale, and this will bother me, perhaps to the point of a relapse into the anxiety and depression that has been so paralysing in the past.
  
• I'm an aggressive, passionate, sweary mama-bear, and I will do battle for my students to the detriment of my own position. That is not a particularly desirable managerial trait.
  
• I do not wish to rise from the ranks and become the manager of my own colleagues. I have no desire to manage my PGCE mentor, or the A-level Coordinator, or the head lab technician.
  
• Timetabling seems to be worthy of its own special level of hell, and I would quite like to not have my summers taken up with it.

Finally, when discussing this with Paul, we drew some comparisons between college management and "Game Of Thrones" (which we have finally watched, after months of being told to by my students). Management is a game of thrones, thrusting staff into the line of sight of the Directors, requiring people to play politically or risk being removed from their post. As Cersei Lannister says, "When you play the game of thrones you win, or you die". I have no desire to play the game of thrones. I am, apparently, Ned Stark - best left to be Lord Lady of Winterfell My Lab, and to try to avoid being called to King's Landing for as long as possible, in case I lose my head...

Newtown

I was at my College's staff Christmas party when Paul showed me the awful news of the mass-shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. We've both watched the coverage of this with horror and deep sadness. There is much to criticise of the things said (the media's continued demonisation of all with mental illness, the continued worshipping of guns in the name of the Second Amendment, and their assertion that only a parent could possibly imagine the grief felt by those caught up in it), but most of those are for another post, another person, another day perhaps.

For now, I want to pay tribute to the teachers, our brothers and sisters in education, whose actions saved the lives of their classes and without whose bravery the loss of life could have been even more terrible. This is apparently going to be the front page of the Independent on Sunday:

Under the photo, the caption reads:

As the shooting started, teacher Vicki Soto, just 27, hid her 16 pupils in the cupboard, and when the gunman came into her room, she told him the class was in the gym. He murdered her, then turned his gun on himself. The children survived.

Three other teachers were also killed while trying to protect their students.

Five and a half years ago, during another massacre at a US educational establishment, Virginia Tech, Liviu Librescu died barricading the door to his classroom and allowing his students to escape. 16 years ago, just four months after the Dunblane disaster, Lisa Potts suffered terrible injuries to her arms defending nursery school children (even younger than those at Sandy Hook) from a machete attack. In Mexico, Martha Rivera Alanis kept her children safe during a shoot-out a block from their primary school, getting them to sing songs while they kept out of the line of fire.

Numerous teachers have surely done the same in their time. In the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, the Executive Director of Gun Owners of America has said teachers should be armed - I have not seen a single teacher saying they agree with this. Teachers with guns would not help in the slightest. Where would we put them? In our desks, locked away? It would take too long to access it. On our person? That just tells a shooter to take out the teacher first and then the students. And where would we fit in the training needed to be able to shoot to kill someone who was trying to kill us? Members of the Armed Forces spend months - years even - being trained to do so.

To suggest that, had the teachers had guns the tragedy could have been avoided, is to lay the blame for this at the feet of the teachers. Yet another thing that is apparently teachers' fault. As with the examples above, and no doubt many more, teachers have shown again and again that when the lives of their students are threatened, they will step in to defend them, to buy them time, to let them escape, to give their lives for the youngsters they love.

We have not had a major incident at my College. We have a lock-down procedure, which will override the computers in each classroom with a warning. We have to lock the doors, switch off the lights and hide away from doors and windows. The doors in our new building can only be opened from the outside with a staff pass and my lab is the furthest point from the main entrance.

My thoughts are with the families and colleagues of all those killed yesterday. I can hardly imagine something like this happening here, on my campus, but I only hope that, if that terrible day comes, I can muster some of the courage of the brave men and women who have put themselves between their students and an attacker.

Past And Present

One of the things most likely to get me into Mama Bear-mode is criticism of modern A-levels that suggests that students are getting worthless qualifications. I frequently find myself having to remember that it is frowned upon in polite society to punch the lights out of ignorant wankers telling you that your students are stupid and that teachers are failing them. With the proposed end of January A-level exams, the opportunity presents itself for idiots to weigh in with their opinions.

I imagine the Daily Fail has been saying exams are getting easier since exams were invented, but it certainly seems that this has escalated in recent years. I've mentioned before that I acquired my past exam papers, and I had a fantastic opportunity to do a small test with my A2 students a few weeks ago. We had just finished looking at photosynthesis, so I copied a question from my 1997 Central Concepts paper.

A cell suspension of a species of Chlorella, an alga, was supplied with carbon dioxide, initially at a concentration of 3%. This was then reduced to 1% after 100 seconds, and then to 0.03% after a further 200 seconds. The levels of RuBP and GP (PGA) present were determined at intervals.


(a) With reference to the figure, state the effect on:
(i) the concentraion of GP when the carbon dioxide concentration is reduced from 3% to 1%. [1]
(ii) the concentraion of GP when the carbon dioxide concentration is reduced from 1% to 0.03%. [2]
(iii) the concentration of RuBP when the carbon dioxide concentration is reduced from 1% to 0.03%. [3]

(b) Explain the observed change in the concentration of RuBP during the 100 seconds immediately after the carbon dioxide concentration was reduced to 0.03%. [4]

(c) State the evidence provided by the figure which indicates that the concentration of carbon dioxide may not be a limiting factor. [3]

Then I gave my students one of the Edexcel questions from June 2012, with a remarkably similar graph.

An investigation was carried out into the effect of reducing the carbon dioxide available for photosynthesis. Cells of a unicellular alga were suspended in a solution containing 1.0% carbon dioxide. After 250 seconds, the carbon dioxide in the solution was reduced to 0.003%. The cells were illuminated with a bright light and some were removed at regular time intervals for 500 seconds. The concentrations of ribulose bisphosphate (RuBP) and glycerate 3-phosphate (GP) in the cells were measured.

(i) Suggest two reasons why a suspension of cells of a unicellular alga, in a solution, is more suitable for this investigation than using leaves. [2]
(ii) Suggest why it would be advisable to illuminate the cells at a high light intensity during this investigation. [3]
(iii) The graph below shows the results of the investigation.


Describe and suggest an explanation for the changes in the concentrations of RuBP and GP shown in the graph. [6]

So, which paper do you think the students found easy? Why, that would be the 1997 paper. The majority of the questions involved very little mastery of the subject knowledge. I imagine a numerate non-scientist could do quite well on the 1997 paper, just reading off the graph. The A2s preferred the clarity of the graph in the 2012 paper, but I think much of that can be attributed to it having been reduced from A4 to A5 and scanned.

The "suggest" questions in the 2012 paper involve students applying their existing subject knowledge to an unfamiliar experiment. The final six-mark question is a QWC question, meaning students are not only assessed on their biological knowledge, but their ability to present it clearly and logically. My A2s hate QWC questions, and they really hate "suggest" questions; because they have to show an excellent command of the subject, rather than being able to pick up marks for stating the bleeding obvious.

Sure, this is only one example. But I bet colleagues in other subjects can show where the exams are indeed more rigorous, demanding more detailed subject knowledge, a greater degree of critical thinking, and the ability to apply all of this to new situations. Gove and Co have spent so long chipping away at the exams my students sit, telling them their coursework is nothing more than teacher-sanctioned cheating, that they don't work hard because they know they can always resit their exams, and that modular exams are too easy. They claim to want more rigorous exams, but as Paul said, in the spirit of Inigo Montoya, they keep using that word; we do not think it means what they think it means.

So here's a multiple-choice question to the Department for Education. How should students be assessed in the academic pathway before leaving school or college?

(A) A combination of practical and written exams and coursework, enabling students to demonstrate complex subject knowledge and application, with opportunities to resit units, reflecting the way that pretty much every university degree, and indeed every assessment they will face in life, is set up.

(B) A single terminal exam in each subject, requiring students to memorise facts, definitions and explanations, with no resit opportunities.

Option B seems to be what Gove wants. But I don't think it's what any student or any teacher wants.

Up The Creek

One of my little darlings managed to transmit a rhinovirus to me this week, so while my immune response takes care of it, and the Golgi apparatus in my nasal epithelia work overtime to produce how much?! mucus, there are some thoughts based on news in the past week or so.


A bastarding rhinovirus, currently making me feel like arse
GCSEs
Paul was affected quite badly by the AQA GCSE English scandal - he looked at the grades his students got, and what they could have got had the grade boundaries not been screwed, and at least two of them could have got a C. No mean feat for a class of students every school in the borough decided it couldn't or wouldn't teach. He's been following it more than I have - I don't teach GCSE, and haven't for over two years. It's all he teaches.

So, having fallen into that dangerous 10pm sofa snooze last night, I was woken by Paul saying "GCSEs are gone". News was carefully passed on to tame right-wing newspapers leaked that Gove would be replacing GCSEs with O-Level style exams in 2015. The Grauniad picked up the story when it could. Some of the chatter on Twitter last night offered further details, that it would be graded 1-6, with 7 being a fail. Paul pointed out that wasn't Gove recreating O-Levels - he's bringing in Scottish Standard Grades. Recreating his own childhood north of the border perhaps?

There will apparently be a consultation. I suggest everyone who has ever been to, has any children at, plans to send any children to, or feels like employing anyone who has ever been to a school in England, Wales and Northern Ireland at some point, submits their responses to this consultation. Too many people are confusing rote learning with rigour, and the two couldn't be further apart.

A-Levels
Every year, I and my students get a good bashing from the media and pretty much everyone not involved in teaching, to say that exams are getting too easy, and that we are sending idiots off to their universities unable to do the basics. The sensible response of universities to any perceived grade inflation would surely be to raise the offer level? After all, when I went to Cambridge I had to get AAA. Earlier generations had to get AAB, and now students are routinely asked for A*AA to get into Natural Sciences at Cambridge. Seems like a logical and rational choice if one feels that an A grade isn't a true representation of a clever and able individual.

So the Torygraph proclaiming that students are accepted onto degree places with E grades simply makes me wonder whose fault it is that universities are getting students unable to cope with the basics of their subject. Some of my students with D and E grades did get into university - however, with my blessing they've mostly gone to do foundation courses that will give them a further chance to get that grounding, and they'll be better graduates at the end of it. Let's face it, when the shitty syllabus from Edexcel waffles on about plant stanols at the expense of the ornithine cycle, there's not a lot I can do to give the students that grounding is there?

Teaching
I love teaching, I do. Being in the lab or classroom is where I feel most alive, and I really enjoy my work when students have those "I get it" moments. By and large, I agree wholeheartedly with this article about being a teacher. I also have no desire to go up into management. Anything taking me away from my students is bad (though I am happy to have a couple of hours remission to coordinate our HND course).

That said, I did object a little to this paragraph:

I'm very fortunate to be teaching English. If I was a geography teacher I might need pupils to have understood Oxbow lakes, if I were a maths teacher I might need them to know about surds but as an English teacher I want them to understand more than using English devices to generate rapport: I get to give them the opportunity to be a better human being.

Now, English teachers get a rather rosy treatment in Hollywood, what with Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers, Dead Poets Society and so on. But English teachers absolutely do not have the monopoly on being inspirational teachers, giving students the chance to be "better human beings" or getting their charges climbing on the desk shouting "O Captain! My Captain!" (though my lab technician would be furious if she found footprints on the benches!).

We all think we teach the best subject in the world. Otherwise we wouldn't be teaching it. But with Gove doing everything in his power to utterly destroy the education sector and the lives of the young people passing through it we could do with a little less point-scoring and a little more presenting a united front.

Let The Student-Bashing Begin

Tomorrow is A-level results day. I've been here twice before. In 2010 I wrote a letter to my students. In 2011 I whacked out a statistical analysis of exam command words and concluded that my students were dealing with tougher exams than I had to pass.

I nearly came to blows with an industry scientist a couple of months ago when he told me that the students I and my colleagues were "turning out" were utterly incapable of doing anything for themselves. He maintained that the most important thing was for them to know facts, not to be able to apply their knowledge. To which I respectfully say bullshit.

It doesn't stop the traditional right-wing press student-bashing festivities, which coincide with the traditional right-wing press "sexy A-levels fruity girl jumping" photos. Exams are getting easier every year, say the papers. Something must be done, they squawk. So exam boards were asked to "fix" the results, to ensure that the number of top grades was limited. Ofqual have now instructed exam boards to stall the pass rate.

Gove already has a weird idea that true understanding of a subject involves being able to parrot off facts and figures. To paraphrase Einstein, if we measure a fish's ability to climb a tree, it will spend its life thinking it's stupid. When we are teaching deep understanding of a subject, an exam testing whether a student can reel off the resting blood glucose concentration of a healthy adult is no use whatsoever.

For the past two weeks we've watched world records being smashed in the Olympic Games. Rebecca Adlington's bronze medal time for the 400m freestyle was faster than her gold medal time four years earlier.


Men's 100m times have been steadily increasing, as this analysis in the New York Times shows. Many teachers on Twitter have wondered whether this means the 100m dash or the 400m freestyle are getting easier. I wouldn't be so naive as to say that athletics and exams are absolutely comparable, but is it not possible that students are doing a better job of passing the targets that have been set for them? Are students cleverer but the exams aren't keeping up?

One thing is for sure, the people who are being blamed for this are those who are least able to change the system - the students. Telling them on results day that the exams they've studied so hard for are worthless and far too easy serves no purpose but to make them feel wretched.

The newspapers won't listen to me - there'll be claims all over the place that exams are easier than ever. One wonders if they'll ever figure out that if exams get harder they'll have a smaller pool of fruity blonde girls jumping up and down to photograph. My students might listen to me though - so I'll say this to them: fuck what the newspapers say, I know you worked your socks off.

Good luck to students and their teachers tomorrow. Nil illegitimi carborundum.

An Unqualified Teacher

On Friday, it was announced that academies would be allowed to employ unqualified teachers, that is, teachers without Qualified Teacher Status. This is not a post on whether I think this is a good idea or not. This is a post about how appalled I am by some of the vitriol directed towards unqualified teachers.

I got my PGCE (also known as DTLLS) in 2011. Under Institute for Learning regulations, I have five years from when I first began teaching (September 2009) to gain QTLS. However, perhaps influenced by a campaign by my union, UCU, it is no longer compulsory to be a member of the IfL. Which means it is no longer compulsory to have QTLS to teach in FE.

As a result, I have not yet applied for QTLS. And the advice from the head of teacher training at the College is basically "Don't bother, it'll be gone in a year". So, according to the DfE, I'm an unqualified teacher.

A horrible hashtag has sprouted up on Twitter: #noQTSnoTeacher. The suggestion that a lack of QTS makes someone not a teacher has been made. The kneejerk response from the qualified teachers online has been to go all-out to insult those of us who teach without QTS - namely the FE and independent sectors (though I accept that many independent schools will have their own requirements).

I'm used to being looked down upon by friends who lecture in universities - though my title is "lecturer", they think that I and my colleagues are just jealous of the prestige of a university teaching job. What I'm not used to, is being looked down upon by friends in the secondary sector. We both teach GCSE and A-level. We both have to teach BTEC L2 and L3 to students who The Powers That Be have deemed non-academic. We both have surly teenagers to cope with. We both have pastoral roles to fulfil too. Where my role is different is that I have Access and HND students where secondary teachers have KS3, but is there any reason why I couldn't teach upper school science?

One year after completing my PGCE I have taught for three years - double the length of time that a teacher completing their NQT year has. I have been rated good or outstanding in every single observation I have ever had. The suggestion that I'm not a real teacher is deeply upsetting. I am a real teacher, damnit. My husband is a real teacher too, and he hasn't even started his PGCE. But he got 18 of the worst-behaved students in the borough to show up to their GCSE English exam. He made a difference.

Michael Gove is doing his best to dismantle the teaching profession, and if segments of the profession start attacking each other, then the policies don't need to do very much at all for him to be successful. If we want to stop Gove, then we need to figure out how to ask for what we want without slagging off our allies and fellow teachers. Teachers - qualified and unqualified, state and independent, secondary and FE - need to value what we all bring to the classroom.

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

Unmonitored Account

Dear Ms Anderson

Thank you for your correspondence to the Secretary of State expressing disagreement with his decision to support the Exemplar New Business Academy Free School project with its links to the Everyday Champions Church. I hope you will appreciate the Secretary of State for Education receives a vast amount of correspondence and is unable to reply to each one personally. It is for this reason I have been asked to reply.

I'll bet he does. Probably all of it from teachers like me wondering what the fuck he thinks he's playing at. Still, I'm miffed that the DfE couldn't even manage a form letter pretending to be Govey.

No Free School is allowed to teach creationism. The Free School application guidance published by the Department now specifically says creationism, intelligent design and similar ideas cannot be taught as valid scientific theories.

Which is all well and good, except that you have organisations like the abominable Truth In Science, who have been sneaking their resources into state-funded schools for quite some time. You say they will not be able to teach creationism, but you have not said that they have to say that evolutionary theory is the best explanation for the diversity of life on Earth. This leaves them with plenty of opportunities to criticise evolutionary biology.

Furthermore, the funding agreements for all Free Schools state that divine creation should not be taught as an 'evidence-based view or theory' (a scientific theory) in any lesson: so if a school did do this they would be putting their funding at risk. We are confident that the Free School project you mention will follow the rules, having explored these questions robustly with them at interview.

See above. This is not a strict enough definition - it still allows the teaching of what is a non-existent controversy by making out that it is critical thinking. Are you familiar with the Wedge Document?

Prior to entering into a funding agreement, the Academy Trust is required to carry out a consultation about their plans to open a Free School. Consultations can be run in a number of ways including surveys, the launch of a simple website, meetings of key individuals and open public meetings.

How many scientifically literate members of the Trust are involved with each consultation? Are any of them experts in science?

Academy Trusts also need to demonstrate that they have considered the views of their stakeholders. Most do this by publishing a report setting out the key findings of their consultation.

You could have done a lot for your transparency by suggesting where it might be possible to find these reports. You know, so we could see the key findings and assess for ourselves whether a rigorous consultation has been carried out.

Every application approved has had to demonstrate that the new school will provide a broad and balanced curriculum. Free Schools are subject to Ofsted inspections in the same way as all other state schools, and the government has powers to intervene in a school where there is significant cause for concern.

And in the same way that we invested in two dozen new waste bins, put up displays of student work and told the more "challenging" individuals to not bother showing up for a week, so any school can game the system when Ofsted come around. Unless the teacher themselves is unaware that the people who've just walked into their lesson are from Ofsted, one can always pull out of the bag what should be happening in a lesson.

Please be assured that the Department will be working with the project mentioned over the coming months to ensure that the assurances they have provided us with are honoured.

You don't actually know which project I'm referring to, do you? This is your standard response to every single letter querying the possible teaching of creationism in state-funded schools.

As part of our commitment to improving the service we provide to our customers, we are interested in hearing your views and would welcome your comments via our website at: www.education.gov.uk/pcusurvey

I'm more annoyed than I should be that you missed out the full stop at the end of that sentence.

Yours sincerely

Guy Manly
Public Communications Unit
www.education.gov.uk

Come on now. "Guy Manly"? That's a made up name. Like Bloke Personage, or Dude Chaps. I'm suspicious that the publicity lot are involved with this - it implies this is more making Govey look good than ensuring the policy is enforced rigorously. I am not reassured.

Gove And Mullen

Politicians in the UK (and perhaps elsewhere in the world) have an annoying habit of pretending to leak stories to the press, when in actual fact it has been carefully planned and directed to certain media outlets. Late last night the Daily Fail (please don't feel obliged to click on the link - it will only give them advertising revenue) "broke" the exclusive that our favourite Pob look-a-like, Michael Gove, plans to scrap GCSEs by 2016 and replace them with a two-tier system of O-levels and CSEs, like we had before 1988.

I think this is a monumentally bad idea. He is simply pandering to an elitist bunch of old farts who look back on the 1950s and 1960s as a Golden Age of Education. The GCSE system is not perfect by any means - we could always stand to improve on it, and given proper consultation I would be in favour of this move, but going back to a set of qualifications that were deemed unfit for purpose in the 1980s seems a little antediluvian, to say the least. He's also planning to get rid of the National Curriculum (opening the door for all sorts of pseudoscience and creationist bollocks to be taught in the name of science), and to replace the three big exam boards in England with a single one (the least bad idea of the lot, but Gove will not find it easy to destroy three big companies like Edexcel, AQA and OCR).


How many teachers are feeling today...
There have been some quite excellent posts expressing the overwhelming teacher opinion on this all, including the Grauniad, and the FT. The latter has the advantage of data, showing clearly who the most adversely affected will be.

And then there's this article from the Torygraph. According to Peter Mullen (do check out his Wikipedia page - he's one of the worst ambassadors for Christianity I can think of), we are useless, illiterate, ignorant, airport novel-reading, rock gig-attending, anti-elitist, "overpaid, unionised thugs".

How demotivating. For me and for my students. The students are in the middle of exams at the moment - many in the College are part-way through their GCSEs. They've just been told that their exams are meaningless. Paul and I saw a number of tweets this morning from students wondering if they should even bother to go in and sit the rest of their GCSEs. It was very sad to see.

I also saw tweets from other teachers, saying this had reinforced their decisions to leave teaching, or was likely to result in them leaving in the next few years. It will probably reduce the number of people applying to become teachers. Why would they, when a distinctly un-Christian priest who can't keep from breaking the odd Commandment is telling them they're shit?

I am not a shit, useless teacher (though on bad days full of BTEC I sometimes feel that way). I look after my kids, even the kids who are older than me. I teach them to be enthusiastic about biology, to develop their inquisitive skills, to be able to apply their deep subject knowledge to new and interesting situations. I give them a well-tuned bullshit detector and the ability to do Harvard referencing in their sleep. I cuss, I speak sarcastically, I tell dirty jokes. Hell, I've baked them all flapjacks for every single A-level exam, because I know that for some of them it's the only meal they're going to get all day.


Flapjacks, cooked to the recipe I posted yesterday.
So, as pissed off as I am, and as hurt by the words, I know that I, and the vast majority of teachers, do not fit in with Mullen's attack. I do not recognise the people he is criticising. I just wish that this sort of attack didn't demotivate and sadden.

But if Mullen wants to put his money where his mouth is, I'd be more than happy to go head-to-head with him sitting a load of GCSE exams. I'll take on Gove too. I'd like to see these arseholes demonstrate their supposed superiority. And if they decline, well, fuck them.

Microteaches #7: I Thought Half-Term Was A Holiday?

Half-term was last week. I thought I'd have a bit of a break, some time to lie in. Didn't happen. We had an action-packed few days celebrating my birthday, and there were builders in renovating the flats upstairs, which consisted of drilling and hammering very loudly from 8am. There was a frisson of excitement as they managed to drop a heating pipe through our ceiling on my birthday itself, and that of course was it - it was impossible to relax when wondering if any more hardware was going to pitch itself into our flat. I'm so tired that I feel like Steve.


Pissing me off massively during half-term was the article in the Indy stating "Female teachers accused of giving boys lower marks". The paper itself is available here. Sadly I don't understand enough of the statistical metrics, and indeed didn't have much time to read in detail, to be able to comment much beyond the executive summary. But the basic gist seemed to be that boys assume that their work will be marked lower by female teachers so they don't try as hard. Girls assume their work will be marked higher by male teachers so they try harder. And while female teachers confirm the boys' beliefs by marking girls more leniently, the male teachers mark boys more leniently.

So what is going on there? I don't feel that I do mark boys' work more harshly. I sometimes think I do the exact opposite. Male colleagues of mine are exceptionally hard on the boys, and on many occasions I've had blazing rows with them to try to save my boys' places on courses. If anything I allow boys more leniency than girls to compensate for my colleagues. I am but a single data point though. And to be fair, my style of teaching mostly involves revealing increments of cleavage in return for coursework.


Professional Pob impersonator and all-round fucking moron Michael Gove has delivered another slap in the face to teachers by saying "If you [teachers] love your job then there is, I think, absolutely nothing to complain about in making sure you have more of a chance to do it well" (from Huffington Post). This is in the context of expecting us to stay longer during the day and take shorter holidays.

Well, Govey, this week went as follows. On each morning I've been in at 8am - this is the earliest I am allowed to enter the premises. If I could go in at 7:30am I would. On Monday I left at 6:30pm when the college shut. On Tuesday I left at 8:45pm, yesterday at 7:45pm and this evening I ducked out early at 7pm. Tomorrow is a training day so I might get to leave at 5pm. Twelve-hour days are nothing unusual. On Tuesday and Wednesday I had to sit down at my laptop when I got home and work for another three hours. During half-term most of us went into work on at least one day of our holiday, and I will have three days taken out of my Easter break for revision purposes. So I would like very much to know what more Gove would like me to do.

This term is all about coursework, and my A2s are starting to complain that they're not doing fieldwork. They were the ones who moaned like buggery about having to do so, and now they're having to live with doing lab-based research projects. It's going to be an absolute disaster. The AS students are doing better, and some of the more interesting topics I've seen are on ageing, cirrhosis of the liver, Kawasaki disease, conservation of gorillas, testicular cancer and equine colic. We're going on a trip next week, so if you hear that a constituent college of the University of London out in Surrey has burnt to the ground, you'll know that was my lot. I predict it will be a matter of minutes after the coach pulls out of our car park before the strains of "Stop the bus I want a wee-wee" are heard...

FML.

Strike Three! And Being A Versatile Teacher

I'm on strike today as a member of UCU. My husband decided he couldn't walk past his colleagues on the picket line today, and so despite being on a fixed-term contract and therefore not likely to be able to benefit from union membership, he signed up for UNISON. We stood side by side on the picket line this morning outside college, and I think my students were highly amused to see me there. My hope is that they've seen that, having spent the week explaining why I'm striking, I'm not all mouth and no trousers.

I've been plagued by a black dog for a few days. In my previous jobs I'd have found it impossible to do any work, and would have been mindlessly surfing the net. That isn't an option anymore. Everyone's experience is different, and some find teaching makes it worse, but it's been a life-saver for me. I have to walk into that laboratory and teach, and I have to deal with the students, and I have to get them comfortable enough with the topics that they can cope with the exams and advance to university.

Coming out of the funk, I decided I would call the black dog Fenton. Mainly because when Paul and I see it running wild in my mind, we both sit there and cry "Oh Jesus Christ!"...


I got pissed off with the BBC News - in a story on MPs anger as science proposals are 'rejected', there was the following quote:

A survey published by the Wellcome Trust on Tuesday found too many newly qualified science teachers lacked the specialist knowledge they needed to teach the subject effectively.

The research showed that half of trainee science teachers are in fact biologists, who often struggle to pick up chemistry and physics knowledge during their one-year post-graduate teacher training courses.

I've looked at the Wellcome Trust press release, and I fail to see where they say that us biologists struggle with physics and chemistry knowledge. Seems like crap journalism to me.

I'm unimpressed with the accusation levelled at biologists. Mainly because, in my department, I am by far the most versatile of the teachers. Sure, I teach A-Level Biology, and the BTEC Level 3 Physiology, Genetics and Plant Sciences units. But I also have to teach units at level 3 (KS5, sixth form, or 11-12th grade for the colonials) on law, media studies, politics, philosophy and psychology. At level 2 (KS4, 9-10th grade), I regularly teach chemistry and physics. And I do a damn good job.

I've been tutoring AS Chemistry - my inorganic chemistry is a bit rusty, but my organic and physical chemistry is pretty fresh still. I've also started tutoring AS Physics to the same student - one of my biologists who is really struggling. I can't remember much of my quantum physics, and I rather suspect it has changed a bit in the 13 years since I studied it. However, projectiles and viscosity don't change very much, and in the space of two hours I achieved more than a colleague had in six weeks. I'm pretty sure I am just one of a large number of biology teachers who are very happy with chemistry and physics. Maybe there are biologists who shy away from maths. There are certainly physicists who find biology repulsive and respond viscerally to the thought of teaching it - every physics teacher I work with is like that. But I also know physicists who love to teach the other subjects too.


Maybe I'm lucky because I did Natural Sciences. I got to study aspects of all the sciences, and to develop a holistic view of the subject. I've done more chemistry and mathematics than pure biologists. In doing HPS as a second year subject, I learnt about philosophy, and some of the more interesting "How Science Works" bits of the course. The stress v strain and viscosity calculations I did in geophysics are beyond anything the A2 physicists have to do. Yes, at the moment I'm bragging. Because teachers are degraded and reviled at the moment, and now the BBC is trying to say biology teachers in particular are rubbish.

I'm one of many science teachers comfortable teaching any aspect of science. As Taylor Mali says, the miracle is education - I'm just the worker.

Microteaches #6: What Day Is It?

I don't remember being so tired coming into the first half-term of the year before. I've had to be reminded several times this week what day it is. As I went into college on Monday to do some marking, Tuesday felt like Saturday. Today felt like a weird hybrid of Saturday and Sunday. And now half-term is nearly over. Meh.


So here's some of the stuff I've been favouriting (watch the English teacher I'm married to cringing at the imaginary word...) on Twitter and in my feeds.

There's an uplifting report on women's progress in STEM, reported in the Huffington Post. I'm not overly impressed by the image used to illustrate it - blue liquid in a graduated test tube, being held by a beautifully manicured finger that is no doubt wholly impractical for the majority of scientific lab work.

However, the positive aspect of the HuffPo article is tempered by a LinkedIn study reported in Jezebel that one in five professional women have never had a professional mentor, let alone a female one. Might I still be in academia if I had? Maybe. I know that the day one female professor came to find me, told me she could see I was suffering from depression and that she was taking me for a coffee and a damn good chat was one of the brightest moments of my whole dismal experience in St Louis.

I don't have to enforce a uniform, thank FSM. I know muggins would end up being the one volunteered to tell the girls their skirts were so short one could see what they'd had for breakfast. According to the Torygraph, schools are increasingly banning skirts in favour of trousers to ensure girls don't look like ladies of negotiable affection and incur the interest of prospective rapists. Yeah, right, because no schoolgirl wearing trousers has ever been raped. I remember there being quite a to-do about whether we got to wear trousers at school. My mum, as the wife of one of the deputy heads, went up against the headmaster's wife, and won - trousers became part of the uniform. Didn't stop my chemistry teacher writing up on the board at the start of the lesson:

Sure, dress your lower limbs in pants;
Yours are the legs, my sweeting.
You look divine as you advance...
Have you seen yourself retreating?
Turns out a large number of the young people caught rioting in August were in receipt of free school meals and/or on the special educational needs register. And yet we're facing the deepest education cuts since the 1950s. Something doesn't quite add up - probably the budget-holder at the Department for Education.

Some oddly familiar psychadelic images from science textbooks have been dug up. Is it any wonder all us biology teachers are a bit weird?

Creationism continues to loom, though I am heartened that the OCR A-level Biology specification quotes Theodosius Dobzhansky (I want to move exam boards for A-level). There is a call for more stringent guidelines on teaching creationism. There may be reason for optimism in the face of Muslim opinion on evolution - this is something I'm following closely, as I'm very much hoping to write up my PGCE research as a paper.


Finally, Kevin Zelnio has issued a call to arms on evolutionary biology and viral marketing - the last thing we want is for creationist websites to be the top hits on Google!

Microteaches #5: Back In The Jug Agane

I'm determined to bash something out for the blog before teaching starts tomorrow. I couldn't think of anything suitably moving. I felt envious of The Learning Spy's department - his colleagues seemed a lot keener to embrace new technologies and to genuinely improve learning. Whereas I'm the only one in mine who knows what a QR code is. That's going to be an uphill struggle. I want to use them to put links to websites, facts and trivia, exam tips and videos around the labs for students to seek out. As an incentive I might even put the answers to the first AS Biology test up there.


For all the newness and shininess of a brand new building and lab, there are still snags. The skylight in the forensics lab is amazing and it's so bright and clean-looking in there. However, it's impossible to see the IWB. So I'm crippled in there, forced to resort to regular whiteboard and pens until they figure out how to put a horizontal blind across.

But I'm still really looking forward to teaching again. I met the new AS groups last week, and can't wait to get to know them properly. Each year I have relied on the ease and joy of teaching the A2 class to cancel out any bad bits. I've not seen many of the incoming A2 class yet, and as it's a class fed in from the two AS classes last year, there are still some students I've never taught before. They've got some big shoes to fill, as the classes of 2010 and 2011 were brilliant. They'll probably manage it.

This year I am less prepared than I have ever been for classes in terms of formal paperwork. Of my five hours' teaching tomorrow, two hours are going to be nothing more than getting to know the groups and handing out the assignment sheets. I have a practical to do with one group of students after that, then there are still some induction activities going on. Broadband conked out today for a bit, so I haven't done as much work as I wanted to. The good news is, lesson plans are overrated, and I can demonstrate that I have planned my lessons (the lab technicians looked at my requests for this week like I'd just given them each £500).

So the Year 1 forensic science students will be learning about the scientific method and the nature of science. There are some awesome ideas about it, many of which focus on evolution, so we can talk about what a theory really is. The Year 2 applied science students will be hacking away at a kidney later in the week, but they will be nervous about having a unit on plant sciences to study later in the year. Maybe they'll take a bit of notice if I give them some of the important questions that plant science may be able to answer. They might also get put off animal sciences when we do the physiology of the nervous system and muscle contraction, which I intend to demonstrate thus:


The AS students will be asked to help with @teachingofsci's exit questionnaire, to which I have assigned a shorter URL of bit.ly/physicsQ, as they'll never remember the full URL. We had a lot of students take physics this year - enough for two groups at long last - so we might not have so many non-physicists, but it's worth a go.

I'm looking for CPD. I'm going to see if I can extract some money to go to the ASE 2012 conference (hey, they'd have paid for me to go to Las Vegas for SVP, so they'd better pay for me to go to Liverpool!). I'm going to try to be more involved in the two blog carnivals I love most: Scientiae and the Accretionary Wedge. This is of course if the management lay off the Trial By Ordeal daily meeting regime of the past fortnight. I'll be taking Tom Bennett's School Bullshit Bingo card into the next meeting with me. The phrase "sharing best practice" is like fingernails down a blackboard. I have no problem with the action it signifies, but the phrase sucks.

See you in October, I guess...

London Riots

Unless you've been in a hole for the past few days you have probably read about the riots kicking off in areas of London. For the first two days it was largely limited to the north London borough of Haringey, but last night it spread south and west, and to cities elsewhere in the country. Late last night, we heard Ealing got it. There were rumours that Hounslow was about to erupt, but apart from some knob burning a moped in the Asda car park, our borough stayed quiet and peaceful (yes, that was me calling for Hounslow to show how "chilled and friendly" we were).

But it was clear that Ealing needed some help. The pictures on the BBC show similar situations around the capital. The Metro had an unusually thorough coverage of the events.


Via Twitter, and the hashtags #cleanupealing and #ealingcleanup, a plan was formed at around 2am this morning. We met at 10am at the horse statue (that may have been my suggestion), and there were representatives from Ealing Council, including Cllr Keith Townsend:


It was heartening to see how many people showed up to help - we estimate nearly 100 people assembled first thing:


It turned out most of Ealing Broadway and Haven Green was still a crime scene, so we were asked if we could walk along to West Ealing and see if any of the small business owners needed any help. Unfortunately, the seriously hit shops were having to wait for SOCO to get there, and the less affected shops had already cleaned up by the time we arrived. I hope our presence was at least a boost to those poor people whose livelihoods are in tatters today.

Paul and I stopped in and chatted to the guys at Ouch, who'd had their window smashed. They were lucky, some of the lads were in yesterday and drove the van up in front of the shop front to prevent looting. A tattoo parlour is an unusual choice - most of the businesses hit were small electrical goods, jewellers and pawnbrokers. Pure greed, nothing more.


By 11:15am we had nothing further to do. Maybe others found as crime scenes were opened up that they were able to help. Paul and I left once some of the volunteers started demanding a physical presence to go up against the rioters. Having spoken to some of the business owners today, I do not believe any of them would wish us to form a human shield around their shops. And I'm not happy with vigilantism in any form. If further shops get hit I will help to clean up, but I am no good to them with my head caved in.

There are knee-jerk reactions all around, and the most distressing for me are that, a) all teenagers are evil incarnate, and b) this is all the fault of teachers. I have seen too many tweets, comments and updates saying that this is a symptom of an education system that puts kids down and tells them they're worthless. I wholly reject that assertion. The overwhelming majority of young people in London were not rioting and looting last night. And teachers are not bloody miracle-workers. I see my students for four hours per week - that is not long enough to rescue them, nor is it long enough to cause the seriously huge chips the rioters have on their shoulders. There is audio on BBC News 24 from two girls who are hoping there'll be more riots, and that it's fine because they're going after the rich people.

Yes, all these rich people, who have built up their family business, and whose livelihood depends on their stock turnover. These rich people who work as shop assistants in shops that were looted - don't you just hate the massive salaries of shop staff? And what about these loaded people who live in luxury one-bed flats above shops, who have now lost absolutely everything they own as it's been burnt out to a hollow shell? When this counts as "rich people" who "deserve it", then it is clear that there is a particularly fucked up attitude that no teacher can overcome.

I am hopeful that none of my kids were involved. I genuinely believe that I teach lovely young men and women, who have the support of family, friends and their community. If this turns out not to be the case, then I will be so utterly disappointed; and of course, any student of mine who has been involved will find the wrath of the criminal justice system the least of their worries once I get hold of them.

Why I Like Coursework

My dear husband, upon reading the title of this post, will with some justification wonder if I have finally gone completely insane. He dealt with an extremely stressed little lecturer around mid-May. He helped me eat the bribery chocolates some of the little dears gave me when I allowed them to breach my internal deadline. He received the plaintive text message pleas for tequila as I sat in a classroom with four kids until nearly 5:30pm on a Friday afternoon. He soothed me as I cried big girly tears of frustration because I could not get my A2s to even show up to class, let alone bring their completed reports with them. But for all that, I still sent off my A-level coursework two days before the Edexcel deadline. Go me.

This is triggered by a post in the Torygraph by Katharine Birbalsingh, saying teachers are being put under pressure to cheat, marking non-existent coursework as students haven't handed it in, and telling them what to write. On the former, I am pleased to say I had the full backing of my manager to send off the 27 pieces of submitted coursework, and the three that didn't bother could bugger off (well, he said "Good luck to them", but the sentiment was definitely the same). On the latter, they get some ideas for suggested topics, coupled with me saying "Please, do something more interesting than sodding stem cell research or cardiovascular disease - there's a whole syllabus you could write about!" (after all, reading through 15 drafts on CVD is not my idea of a fun Easter holiday), although many of them come up with amazing topics on their own, and they brainstorm what the mark scheme means to make sure they include everything needed for maximum marks.

My colleague and I have often discussed swapping exam boards, from Edexcel, who require a 1,500-word report at AS and a 3,000-word report at A2, to OCR, who require assessed practicals and write-ups. Whichever board we go with, the non-exam component is 20% of the total grade. Coursework is hard on students from ESOL backgrounds - some of them have literally only been in the country for 6 months when they are forced to compose a well-structured literature review, and they may still be having issues conjugating verbs. They undoubtedly lose marks for communication when some of their sentences are grammatically incorrect, and I am unable to help them with that.

However, I would be sad to lose the valuable skills that coursework at advanced level brings. After all, the last paper-based exam I had was in 2002 (I don't count class tests in the US or the numerous typing speed tests that I had when working as a PA). I had a viva for my MRes in 2003. However, I have lost count of the number of reports I have had to submit for deadlines, whether it is coursework for my PGCE, course evaluations at the end of the teaching year, statistical summaries when I worked in industry, and even press releases and position statements. Clearly, as far as transferable skills go, coursework-writing is a pretty good one. I'm sure when I first started applying for secretarial work, I cited my MRes and MSci dissertations as evidence that I could work to deadlines.

But at A-level I am not just prepping them for transferable skills. They are doing biology because they want to go into the sciences, whether life, physical, environmental, medical or social. And that means they have to be able to deal with scientific literature. By the time they've finished with their coursework they have learned how to:

• Write in the third person passive tense using formal, technical language
  
• Construct a proper citation and full reference using the Harvard Referencing System (Neil's Toolbox is awesome)
  
• Use Google Scholar to find useful references by subject
  
• Request, or ask me to request, the PDFs of journal articles on Twitter using #icanhazpdf
  
• Read a scientific paper - first the abstract, then the introduction, diagrams and conclusion, then the whole lot if it's useful
  
• Condense the 5,000 words that they realise they could easily have written about the subject down to at most 2,000 words
  
• Evaluate whether sources are reliable and consider possible biases
  
• Formulate their own means of explaining and summarising key research because they know if I don't catch them plagiarising then Edexcel will

In the article in the Torygraph, there are commenters calling for a return to final exams and a removal of coursework components. Perhaps there is some merit at GCSE, although I would have thought everything I have said about transferable skills still applies. And if done properly, then coursework involves synthesis and evaluation, and that looks an awful lot like Bloom's Taxonomy to me. Don't we want to encourage higher order thinking? I'm a lot happier seeing a student apply their knowledge of a process, structure or relationship to a new situation, than I am seeing them parrot off a definition in an exam. At A2, the sheer number of open-ended "suggest" questions in the exam papers help with this, but I still think coursework is more effective in this. Of course, this relies on teachers and lecturers having the support of their managers to do this, and I am fortunate that my manager is one of the supportive ones. For the teachers who are under pressure to get sometimes 60-120 kids through GCSE English every year, I appreciate it may be a very different story. Data, perhaps, in support of the notion that one solution cannot be applied across the board, eh, Govey?

My Summer Holidays

It's as much a sign of the summer holidays as the back-to-school sales push, the ice cream van's relentless jingle and the onset of torrential rain. I refer, of course, to the annual bitch and whine about the length of the summer holidays. Do a Google News search for "school holidays", and there are calls for companies to not respond to increased demand by upping the price of limited commodities (i.e. flights and hotel rooms) and a ritual demonisation of all schoolchildren and their pathological inability (one would think) to avoid hoax calls, vandalism and anti-social behaviour.

Thanks to The Edudicator, I have now seen what the Right Wing think, courtesy of the Torygraph and the Daily Fail. If you suffer from low blood pressure, I highly recommend clicking on the "worst rated" comments list, for a load of barely literate blustering that will result in you putting your fist through the computer screen.

The Torygraph is an interesting one. The general consensus among teachers is that the students are absolutely bloody knackered by the end of the academic year. This is confirmed by a comment piece in the Grauniad by school-leaver Sara Abbasi, entitled "Please, Mr Gove, leave our summer break alone!". We can sit and discuss the historical reasons for the long summer holiday, that is, needing children to help with the harvest, and how we don't need children in the fields with a sickle for the best part of August anymore (though that would be fun to watch), but she highlights the very modern need for a long holiday.

After mid-June, the kids start to get antsy. They are over-tired. The classrooms are often very hot. Tempers flare up. And good luck trying to get them to do homework. For most of the college year, my AS biology class notched up over 92% attendance and 98% punctuality. When they came back for the "Intro to A2" sessions, attendance dropped to 77%. In the midst of the observations from teachers, the Torygraph suggests that shorter holidays are better for the students, and quotes a study in American Sociological Review.


There you go, a graph that purports to show that children from high-income families do more learning over the summer holidays than their low-income counterparts, and therefore do better in school and get into university. It's approximately what the paper says too, but I've had a pint of Pimms and lemonade, rendering my paper-summarisation magic power greatly reduced. And oh, what a noble cause, for teachers to gallantly sacrifice themselves for the good of the low social classes.

But it seems that this is a classic case of confusing correlation and causation. When I cover this with my AS students (hopefully at a time when I have more than 90% attendance!), we analyse data to see if there is a direct relationship between two variables, or if there is some other factor that has not been considered. And the glaringly obvious omission is parental interest in their children's education. Higher-income families tend to involve parents with a more advanced level of education. People who have a more advanced level of education tend to be keener on education for their children. Are there exceptions to this? Undoubtedly. When I was younger, even on my father's teacher salary, we were very poor, living in the much more expensive Home Counties on one income. But I progressed, and I probably did more summer study than my classmates. Because there wasn't much money we were more resourceful. I used books my father had used and kept. He was able to borrow a computer from the school during the holidays, and I learned to programme in BASIC (and more, I'll have you know, than the 10 PRINT "HELLO", 20 GOTO 10). We went to the local library and borrowed books, and unless I am very much mistaken, the library is still free for children at least.

So in a move that smacks more of recent Labour educational policies, Govey would like to use teachers as substitute parents, making up for the deficiencies of people who don't give a rat's arse about their children's education. Because bollocks to things costing money, there is plenty of free access to learning - it all comes down to parental attitude. And this is in addition to parents whining on all the articles I've quoted, who seem to think it's grossly unfair that they should have to deal with their children for such a long period of time. Clearly this is a horrid surprise that the educational establishment has thrown at parents, and not the status quo for many decades, if not centuries.

Of course, there are those who will claim that teachers do naff all, race the kids out of the door at 3:30pm and swan around on these long 20-week holidays. For 40 weeks of the year, I work from 8am to 6pm, and often until 8pm or 9pm. That doesn't include the work I take home to mark. Someone with a regular office job, working 9am to 5pm with half an hour's lunch break works out at 1,800 hours per year. I can clock up at least 2,000. Maybe there are lawyers and doctors who work longer hours. However, consider that as a lecturer in FE, I am never going to earn more than £35,000, tops. So I've earned that holiday. I spent the first week packing away notes and folders. My holiday ends on 15th August as I go back to prepare for the new college year. My Easter holiday is eaten into each year with revision classes. I don't begrudge these. But expecting me to babysit the children of parents who didn't consider that kids need looking after, and the children of parents who don't give a shit about them, when I've spent 10 hours a day for the entire academic year giving these poor little sods the best education I can, is taking the piss.

I think I need another Pimms.

Making A Goddamn Difference

On Thursday I went on strike for the second time this year. Last Sunday, our "favourite" Education Secretary appeared on the Andrew Marr Show to talk about how he felt that:

"Taking industrial action... will actually mean that the respect in which teachers should be held will be taken back a little bit."

Who is he kidding? Gove doesn't respect teachers - he thinks we are glorified babysitters (in the next breath almost he urged parents to go into schools and do our jobs while we were on strike), we're all greedy and only care about money (because we were striking for our pensions), and we have cushy holidays.

Well, as has been done many times, let me calculate what my salary would be worth as a babysitter. Let's go with an hourly rate of £5.93, the National Minimum Wage. Not including the admin and induction weeks (and assume I don't get paid for enrolment duties), let's stick with a 36-week year. This year I taught nine A2s and 15 AS students for 4.5 hours a week. I taught 16 BTEC level 3 year 2s and 13 BTEC level 3 year 1s for 4.0 hours a week. I taught 18 BTEC level 2s for 3.0 hours a week, and eight of them for 1.0 hours a week. That's 286 student-hours a week. Multiply 286 by 36 weeks by £5.93 and that's an annual salary of £61,055.28. Thank you very much - I'll throw in all my admin, school trips and enrolment duties for free. That's more than twice my salary, Gove, you bastard.

But I digress. So at the end of a shitty week where it has seemed that the entire world is against teachers and everything they do, it made my year to have a message from a student to say thank you for everything that I'd done, and that he wanted me to be the first to know he'd got an offer from a university - a jolly good one at that. Where colleagues gave up, I persevered, nagged, bribed and cajoled, and I am so fucking proud of this young man. I'm not ashamed to say I cried a bit on the phone telling my dad (a retired physics teacher) a couple of hours ago.

And I've felt the tears streaming down my cheeks watching this for the past couple of days (yes, I'm a big girl's blouse), but it is one of the most powerful and moving tributes to educators that I have ever heard:


This week - this year - I made a goddamn difference. Now what about you, Govey?

Anthropogenic Global Warming In The Classroom

It is never a good sign when the first thing I read in the morning gets me angry. According to the Grauniad late last night:

Climate change should not be included in the national curriculum, the government adviser in charge of overhauling the school syllabus in England has said.

This is the big old review of education that Pob Michael Gove has been banging on about since January. The Grauniad have interviewed Tim Oates of Cambridge Assessment, who is one of the "experts" involved in the review.

Tim Oates is not a teacher. He may not even be a scientist.

Now, undoubtedly he has spent a considerable amount of time in curriculum development. But curriculum development is not teaching, nor is it science. He says:

"We have believed that we need to keep the national curriculum up to date with topical issues, but oxidation and gravity don't date [...] We are not taking it back 100 years; we are taking it back to the core stuff. The curriculum has become narrowly instrumentalist."

Oh what a worthy ideal. Although I'm not sure how more curriculum reforms fit in with his concerns at the end of last year that schools were being overwhelmed by a constantly changing curriculum.

I rather bombastically claimed on Twitter this morning that climate change was the second most important topic I taught in biology after evolution. After a day of arguing with my AS students (now starting on A2 biology) about why they bloody well should learn about climate change, my views have not changed. I teach evolution because it is the grand unifying theory of biological sciences: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution". The would-be doctors and pharmacologists will need to deal with evolution on a daily basis. Evolution explains our anatomy and physiology, the diversity of the human species, the diversity of life on earth.

Climate change is important for a different reason. There is a very real rise in global temperatures. Preliminary (and non-peer-reviewed) data correlate with three other major studies. If temperatures continue to rise, then so will sea levels. My students are going to have an awful lot of data presented to them demonstrating global warming. They will probably see more data and more evidence for anthropogenic global warming (AGW) than they will for the Calvin cycle. Yet they will be far more accepting of the latter. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project is just one of those pieces of evidence:


If I am lucky, then I will not live to see the full horrors of AGW. But my students, a decade and a half younger than I, may well do. They may have to make some very difficult decisions, the likes of which I can only imagine. Some of them flippantly suggested that all we needed to do was to "make everyone only have one child" (wouldn't mind seeing a few years down the line if they stick with that). Some of them wailed that there was no point in them turning off the lights in their house when China was still belching loads of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (a fair comment, but if all of us took that view we'd be even more screwed than we are at the moment). I'll be trying to address all of this over the next few weeks.

I tried to show them why we should study ecology. I played them Carl Sagan reading "Pale Blue Dot". I thought some of them might understand the need to conserve the Earth, and indeed to preserve our existence. But they giggled through it.


My students, and indeed all of us, need to be scientifically literate about climate change. The AS students are beyond the scope of the National Curriculum per se. But scientific literacy should permeate the National Curriculum. There is sometimes a tendency to treat the sciences in school as a feeder subject for medical students. There is certainly a lot of emphasis on human medical issues and concerns.

Is the curriculum bloated? Yes. So let's get rid of the forensic science component of science courses. It's only there because some policy wonk figured it would get more people to do science if they thought they could be the next CSI superstar. Let's rip out the diet-health-BMI wankfest at A-level. Getting me to tell a bunch of 18-year-olds that they shouldn't eat their favourite Big Daddy Box Meals is a waste of everyone's time. You want to focus on facts? Let's teach real science then - and that includes the carbon cycle, the greenhouse effect, and the effect of temperature on organism growth rates. How can you possibly teach these three and skirt around global warming??

It isn't just the causes of or evidence for AGW we are teaching. It's the understanding that sometimes scientists disagree. We discuss it when looking at evolution. Sometimes scientists see different data and draw the same conclusions. Sometimes they see the same data and draw different conclusions. They may agree to disagree, or they may engage in bitter and public spats. Knowing that this is going to happen, and knowing that does not make the subject any less valid, is an important aspect of science, and one that is perhaps more fundamental than "oxidation and gravity".

We should be teaching biology as the study of life, for the purpose of better understanding the world in which we live. A good grounding for scientific study at university is but a bonus.

In Which I Discuss The Edexcel Biology Cockup

It was laughable really. It was the very first exam of the exam season. 31 of my finest piled into the hall. I didn't really get a good read through of the paper other than to smile inwardly at the knowledge that all my students should have been able to do all the questions, that I had predicted the "usual suspects" correctly for my private tutee, and that there should be a nice sprinkling of A grades come 18th August.

As an invigilator, I had to stay to the end of the other exams that morning, and was unable to catch up with any of my students until 3:15pm. The sole A2 student sitting the exam had spotted it, as had one of my colleagues' class. We both sat down and flicked through the paper, attempted the question, realised within about 20 seconds that there was a definite error. I e-mailed the exams officer.

At 3:30pm I sent the following tweet:


Nothing from anyone else. Not a peep. It was odd. January 2010 had taught us that students get quickly and amusingly angry if they think their exam is a pile of poo.

The next day I followed up via Twitter:


Fortunately the exams officer phoned me early, asked me if I was sure, and then said she would phone and ask them why they had not checked it (anyone who knows our exams officer would know that has been heavily censored). Edexcel confirmed to her that they had noticed it, there was an emergency moderation meeting happening later on the 17th, and that we were advised to apply for special consideration in case our kiddlywinks needed it (which we did).

It was really odd though - no one picked up on this. No journalists, no students complaining. It wasn't until Wednesday 8th June when I noticed the BBC had the story. I guess eventually it became big enough news. I felt rotten, because the question was such a gift. Here, crappily scanned and annotated (and I would argue, in line with Edexcel's copyright notice that says "the material on this site may only be reproduced for personal, non-commercial use" - I have fewer blog readers than students and no adverts on here), is the question:


Those of you who still remember your GCSE and A-level biology will be able to work out exactly what went wrong here. This is what the complementary strand should be:


And this is what the options were:


These sorts of questions are gifts for teachers and students alike. If you remember that C pairs with G, and A pairs with T except in RNA when it pairs with U, then you can do one of those questions in about 5 seconds. Because it's DNA you're asked for, you can immediately exclude options B and C as they contain U. Look at the remaining options, and because your RNA sequence starts with C, you know it must be option A. Except it isn't. My lot were pretty well drilled in this sort of question. They knew it was almost bound to come up, and they knew it was a good thing if it did. So it was a real kicker that it was one of the nice questions that was stuffed up.

However, my kids also have the sense to know when they've done it right, and when they know the answers given are wrong. I reckon they spent maybe two minutes struggling before carrying on. I have absolutely no sympathy for the student on the BBC article on the exam who said:

"For the first 15 minutes I looked at that question when I should have spent one minute on it"

I'd have no sympathy if he was one of mine - there's no excuse for spending 15 minutes on a MCQ one-mark question at the expense of the rest of the paper. Had this been a bigger issue, like the Maths and Business papers (and as I type more and more exams are materialising with huge errors), then students would have reasonably spent much more time on it.

Edexcel, conspicuously silent, appeared to have issued a statement to the media saying something along the lines of:

"Weeeeell, it's only one mark out of 425 so it's no big deal." (may not be actual words)

The BBC reported it as:

"The exam board said the question was worth one mark out of a possible 425"

The Grauniad said:

"Edexcel, which set the paper, said the question was worth one mark out of a possible 425"

Well, when you put it like that it's rather miniscule isn't it? Except that 425 is the total number of raw marks available for an entire A-level in biology. For the Unit 1 paper concerned, the marks are out of 80. Small fry compared to the Maths and Business papers, but enough to trouble a student. One mark could make the difference between an A and a B. It could also, at the other end of the scale, make the difference between being able to squeeze through to A2 and being forced to stop at AS.

I am invigilating my A2 biologists resitting (yes, all of them, and they've promised me they're really working this time) Unit 4 on Monday. I have only nine of them, so hopefully I will have an opportunity to work through the questions myself. As has been mentioned, for this set of A2 students, there are no second chances - these guys have got to get to university this year or face the hike in tuition fees that their successors are stuck with.

What should the exam boards be doing? Clearly checking more papers. It seems there is an unprecedented number of duff papers this year. This is the sort of thing that university undergrads could be paid to do, or even, you know, the teachers. The Independent suggested that MCQs should have an option for "none of the above", although that doesn't work if it's a worked question like the others. Just get some people in with decent subject knowledge to actually do the questions, not just flick through for proofreading.

And don't try to spin it by saying it's one mark out of 425. Because it's not and you know it.