Excellent article, I thought, interested in others' views. Not much chance of implementation of her ideas, I suppose.
Quiet, class, or it's handcuffs
Times - April 26, 2005
Libby Purves
With school discipline rapidly worsening, we will need to use extreme measures in the classroom
4 comments:
Completely agree. Great article.
Bad kids. Bad.
Mmm, not so sure you can dismiss it with "these teachers are just crap and it's all their fault" - though I'm sure many teachers in British schools are indeed crap (certainly, on anecdotal evidence, their training seems pathetic).
I've had a couple of teachers (inexperienced, yes - incompetent, absolutely not) tell me of shocking and unacceptable behaviour in class, of being completely unable to achieve even basic levels of discipline in the class.
It doesn't seem implausible to me that behavioural problems in the classroom in many schools have reached a point where for the majority of teachers*, the majority of the time, it is simply impossible to do any educating.
And if that's the case, a zero tolerance policy as described in the article may well be the extreme measure required.
Don't you think?
J
* perhaps not for the very best, but how many of them are there?
Wembley, while I see where you're coming from, your argument seems to boil down to 'my school was disciplined 20 odd years ago' so there's no excuse for any other school to have problems. It's the Tebbit 'on yer bike' philosophy applied to education.
You take issue with the phrase 'a centralised, sterile imposition of targets' and mount a convincing defence of said targets. But I'm not convinced that Libby Purves would disagree with you. I think the key words are 'centralised' and 'sterile' - the complaint (oft repeated) that the targets have been imposed in isolation from what 'the reality on the ground.' Her complaint seems not to be 'targets are inherently bad', rather that reaching those targets is dependent on solving the discipline problems in schools. Perhaps this is debatable, but the rest of the article is about discipline and behaviour. You can believe in targets and still prefer kids not to use sexually abusive language to their teachers.
Of course there are crap teachers, but there are also crap parents and a general absence of meaningful sanctions. It is easier for 'good' teachers to command respect if the culture of the school and the kids' homelife sees school as something to BE respected. Much harder if the parents have brought the kids up to see any attempt to exercise authority as some kind of infringement of their rights. Oh and in my son's class they had a real problem when bad behaviour was exacerbated by inexperienced teaching. Order was restored by (an admitedly milder) version of a zero tolerance policy so whoever is at fault I do think it works.
Where I do wholeheartedly agree with Wemb is on salaries. You have to pay a fortune to get the best possible chairman for BP (or whatever) - otherwise you can't attreact the top flight candidates. But somehow this logic never applies to somewhat vital things like teaching or nursing.
Anyway, I'm sure those of us with kids will all be watching Classroom Chaos tomorrow. Channel 5 have been really good with this stuff recently. Their 'So You Think You Can Teach' programme overcame the shallow celeb format to give a real insight into what it's like to spend all day with a bunch of 8 year olds. (Tiring, mainly.)
Saw this article on teachers' voting intentions. Quite interesting (in the light of Classroom Chaos and the Purves article) that teachers' main concerns are discipline and interference. I was surprised that there weren't so many complaints about salaries.
http://education.independent.co.uk/schools/story.jsp?story=633582
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