The Old Grey Owl

On the back of the recent suggestions about banning mobile phones in schools, I had a discussion with some of my Year 8 students. In the middle of the discussion I noticed one student wearing what looked like a Fitbit. In days of yore, I would have automatically assumed that they were simply wearing a watch, but those gadgets have gone the way of the propelling pencil or the C90 walkman. No-one seems to do watches anymore. To make sure, I asked and was surprised when about fifteen kids put up their hands to show that they did have a fitbit.

The discussion turned to speculation about what the next technological development would be. One student suggested the Brain Bit. At the beginning of every lesson, each student would be issued with a device worn on the wrist just like the fitbit. Instead of monitoring physical indicators like heart rate, steps, calories burned up etc, it would monitor brain activity. Every ten minutes it would silently display a one- word summary of the wearer’s brain activity during the last ten -minute slot. All of the summaries would be sent automatically to a screen on the teacher’s computer, so that they had instant access to the inner most recesses of each student’s internal life.

Possible judgements could be: Reflective. Deviant. Lazy. Vacant. Criminal. Genius. Methodical. Speculative. Daydreaming. Creative. Oppositional. Logical. Socialist.

Each episode of display would give the student the opportunity to self-correct, reinforce or modify their brain behaviour in the next ten -minute slot.

Thankfully, my IT skills are as poorly developed as my sense of entrepreneurial endeavour, otherwise I would be diligently planning world domination on the back of this idea. It’s only a matter of time before some visionary foists this on us.

The End of Civilization as We Know It – School and the mobile phone

A few years ago, when “Challenging “ schools were up to their necks in PIXL- inspired ingenious fixes to seemingly intractable underperformance in league tables, I had to deliver the IGCSE English qualification to those forty Year 11 kids who were amusingly labelled, “The key marginals”. This was when Michael Gove, having totally misunderstood the nature of the IGCSE because it was the qualification of preference of public schools great and small, was encouraging Bash Street Kids Comprehensives across the land to aspire to high academic standards and enter their feral kids for the IGCSE instead. (When he actually got round to reading some of the specifications and talking to a few people, it became clear why public schools chose to do it. It was much easier. Academic standards my arse, as Jim Royle used to say. More of this in the next edition of Gove’s Greatest Gaffes.)

I had attended the PIXL course, “How to deliver the IGCSE in ten minutes from start to finish” and was working my way through it with said forty key marginals in the Exam Hall. One of the coursework assignments we did (Yes, that’s right, Govey recommended doing coursework. As I said, he hadn’t bothered to do his homework.) was based on a ghastly article on the Mail Online about the iniquitous evil of mobile phones in schools, which suggested that up and down the country school students were viewing porn in the classroom and physically assaulting teachers who dared to challenge them. It produced great written responses from most of the students, once they had got their heads around the fact that the journalist in question seemed to be writing about a school system that only existed in her tabloid imagination. As one of the kids said, scratching his head in bewilderment, “Why didn’t the school just have rules about mobiles in the classroom and enforce them?” That was the system he was used to and, I suspect, the vast majority of students across the country as well.

The fact is that most schools have perfectly sensible and workable rules regarding mobiles and it really isn’t a big problem. Banning them belongs to the same school of over the top Senior Management madness as Corridors of Silence and Zero Tolerance. They are part of modern life and they aren’t going to go away. Teach students how to use them appropriately and get over it. Last week, just as this story broke , I had just had two fantastic lessons with Year 8 that absolutely depended on all of the kids using their mobiles for research. Be the adult in the room.

Gove’s Greatest Gaffes

Number 2. Introducing the e-Bacc

Coming in at number 2 is this, one of many incarnations of that curious phenomenon, the return to Michael Gove’s School Days. Many of Michael’s deepest instincts reside in his certainty that things used to be better in the golden age, before trendy lefty liberals dumbed it all down with stuff like, umm, Media Studies, and GNVQs in Peace Studies that were worth four GCSEs in the league tables. This was a brazen attempt to make everyone take Geography and Languages and the like, rather than noddy left wing subjects like Drama and Art. Although National College of School Leadership lickspittle clones cracked the whip and proudly boasted of how they had forced through these changes on their students and staff, many school leadership teams showed much more backbone and resisted, preferring to stick instead to a curriculum that was right for their children. Oh, the irony. The forces of darkness, who in their Thatcherite guise loudly trumpeted their commitment to “choice”, would not tolerate thick working class kids choosing “easy” subjects. Choice is all well and good, as long as the right things are chosen. A bit like the will of the people.

The Old Grey Owl

I used to work at a boys’ school in South London with a good friend who one day was tasked with giving the leaving speech at the end of the Sumer Term to the Headteacher who was retiring after ten years or so of service. The Head, Arthur Bland (names have been changed to protect the innocent), had been supremely ineffective for the entire period of his tenure. The speech provoked gasps of shock and then admiration as it started with the immortal lines, “I think we all owe you a profound debt of gratitude for your singular achievement over the last ten years, an achievement so radical, so revolutionary, that it is unlikely to be either understood or emulated. You have made absolutely no difference. You bravely ignored the temptation to introduce radical change and you left us all alone to get on with our jobs. And we have been much the better for it.”

Truth to tell, Arthur was not following a deliberate philosophy of Zen-like inaction. He was just lazy and clueless. But his example holds an important lesson for us all: Beware the new Senior Leader desperate to Make Their Mark.

And now my confession. Reader, I was that guy. And I’m sorry. If I were to be knocked over by a bus tomorrow and rushed to hospital, the consultant who opened me up to perform emergency life-saving surgery would find curiously engraved on my heart the legend, “ Sorry about VAK.” If it all got too much, and a neatly folded pile of clothes were to be discovered on Brighton beach, days after my disappearance, the letter left next to the pile would read, “And I’m really sorry about making you do that Brain Gymn.”

Honestly, although the memory makes me go all hot and flushed, it seemed like a Good Idea at the Time. Everyone was doing it, not just me. And I had to do something, obviously. I was new, external and in post. And everyone was looking at me, waiting for me to bugger it all up. I had a career to build and a mortgage to pay. I had to do something. Anything.

And, of course, the same thing has carried on relentlessly. It’s going on now. Its going on in your school. A new, thrusting young firebrand leader somewhere is ruthlessly implementing some mad scheme, convinced that not to do so would be failing the kids. Or at least making you and the rest of the staff feel that. And they still keep coming: E-Bacc, Assessment without levels, Mastery assessment, the Knowledge curriculum, Literature exams without books, silence in corridors, lining up in fire drill positions every day, triple marking, PIXL madness. Dear Lord, spare us.

A new Hippocratic oath is needed for Education: Do No Harm.

Gove’s Greatest Gaffes

There have been countless utterly hopeless Secretaries of State for Education since the original swivel- eyed, mouth- foaming loon, Sir Keith Joseph at the back end of the Seventies. The queue from the current incumbent, Damian “Simple” Hinds, stretches back to the crack of doom. But the unchallenged Daddy of all of these charlatans has to be Michael Gove.

The charge sheet against him is long and weighty. On the principle that History teaches us what mistakes to avoid in the future, it’s useful and instructive to remind ourselves of Gove’s most heinous crimes. Coming in at Number one is this little beauty:

Singlehandedly sucking the last atom of joy out of teaching English, and more important, learning English.

Picture the scene. Early September and I’m teaching a beautiful Year 7 class, uniforms still pressed and pristine, faces eager, books unblemished, new and full of the promise of the future within their grasp. I’m teaching a hoary old classic, getting them to do some extended writing (after some exploratory group talk, of course) about their old primary school. The kids love, in the middle of this Brave New World, to give themselves up to a bit of comforting nostalgia.

I’m trying to establish a class agreement about some useful criteria to extend the depth and quality of their writing. “So”, I say breezily, “what kind of things might you include to make this piece of writing better?”

A forest of hands go up, the kids leaning on one elbow, almost bursting. I turn to one girl and ask, “Yes, what do you think?”

She hesitates for a moment and composes herself. Finally, she tentatively gives her answer, dredging up all she had learned back in her old school in the run up to the tests. “Err…….., a fronted adverbial, Sir?”

Something inside rolled over at that moment and died quietly.

The Old Grey Owl

The Brain-Bit

First – an apology. Or rather, AN APOLOGY.