State School Boy
May
27
2013

A small rant: Prefects and Brands

Right, so quite a bit has been happening.

Firstly, the year tens were able to apply to be prefects. This was a process riddled with problems because of various different roles that they have introduced into the prefect system.

There are 10 general prefects but on top of that there are 10 specialised prefects who take on duties in certain area of the school, for example community (maybe litter picking?), teaching and learning (putting up displays), events (they will be organising the prom, the year book and other Americanisations) and Sport prefects (I think their creativity ran out a bit here and they decided to create a role that no one really understands).

There are two senior prefects as well as a head boy and a head girl in year twelve. The whole system of having people apply for different roles left people feeling disappointed about only getting a general prefect role, despite this still being really great considering that 71 people applied for 20 spots. Anyway, the prefects will begin their duties in the next half term as the current year 11 prefects leave after their exams.

Talking of exams, I’m doing my maths and biology GCSEs next week. I have been revising a lot, but even with only two GCSEs, it seems like a lot of work. I’m not sure how I’m going to manage next year when I’ll have millions of exams back to back.

Amidst all these exams (5 in total) we have a languages controlled assessment which counts towards 15% of our grade, although less important, we still have to memorise six paragraphs in our chosen language whilst revising for our other exams. The annoying thing is that these controlled assessments can be at any time, but they decided to schedule it in the midst of all our other exams and revision.

The stress (although a lot less than what we will face in a years time) has been getting to people with one girl being taken into hospital for ‘stress induced trauma’ (sounds very dramatic).

I’ll keep you informed about how these exams go and what people think about them.

Another thing I wanted to talk about was the school’s brand. Brand is a funny thing when it comes to a school. In my view schools shouldn’t have a brand, but with parents thinking that the school affects the child’s grades/achievement/potential ect. more than ever, schools, especially ones which don’t have exactly a great reputation, have resorted to tactics such as advertising on busses and handing out leaflets at other schools open evenings (I know right!!).

While our school hasn’t done anything so stupid and money wasting, it has invested in incredibly expensive banners to tie to the school gates boasting of our recent ‘good’ Ofsted. This comes at a time when the art department has no gluesticks.

In a more general note, the need to make everything into a ‘brand’ or ‘campaign’ is seeping through to school life. Apparently, Ofsted said that we need to ‘refine’ if we want to ‘excel’. This bullshit (no one, not even the teachers know what this means) is being preached to us through assemblies and what I like to think of as propaganda (posters everywhere ordering us to refine to excel). WE ARE A SCHOOL NOT A COMPANY. Yes we have targets and we have customers (parents it seems) but we are not government - we do not preach bullshit to our citizens.

Also, ‘Empowering Student voices week’, it’s very empowering apparently even though nothing actually happened. Or ‘50 days to make a difference’ to what? It sounds like a political campaign.

What is one of the ‘bad’ kids suddenly decided to turn their life around, take care in their school work and get the grades? Well how do they refine to excel? What sorcery is this?

The thing is that Ofsted is so full of bullshit, you can’t really take anything it says seriously, let alone create logos, tag lines and posters based on their ridiculous recommendations that might as well be in ancient greek.

Teachers, let me give you a piece of advice, to improve a school, teach better. Don’t create stupid phrases and brands to give to your students, get better teachers. 

Infact, I’m going to go as far as to say that all students are the same (unless you’re in a private school in which case all the kids are white, middle to upper class and have no real bearing on the world as it is). It’s not the students that make a school better - you can’t get the students to refine and excel and therefore improve the school. It’s all down to the teachers, and not the senior staff. No, it’s the teachers who are really on the front line, battling to get the syllabus down the kids throats every single day. If they inspire and connect with the kids, then it’s a job well done, an outstanding school and excelling (as well as of course refining) students.

Ultimately, no one apart from the head teacher is taking this whole refining thing seriously. Why? because it’s ridiculous that a school’s energy is going towards trying to create a brand out of getting the students to walk instead of run in the corridors instead of actually getting the teaching to a really high quality.

If the teaching’s good the rest will come.

posted 3 weeks ago

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Apr
17
2013

This is it (again)

Everything has taken off.

At the begining of year ten, and consistently throughout, I have been told that this year is serious, full of hardwork, GCSE courses ect. But only now, two thirds into the year has this started to happen.

Sure, we have had a few English controlled assessments, and a couple in Spanish, but on the whole, it seems we have just been going through the normal lessons, albeit at a slightly faster pace. Now however, we seem to have controlled assessments in everything: history, science, citizenship, as well as english and spanish that I previously mentioned. This is on top of my looming maths exam which, I am told, I am taking at the end of this (school) year.

So the pressure is definitely now on.

I’ll give you a quick summary of the different subjects and what I’m thinking about them at the moment.

History was going well. I’m not saying it still isn’t but I am feeling quite a bit less confident about it now we have started our coursework. In history, we have to analyse sources to write an essay about a topic set by the exam board. This year, we have ‘Women in industry during the first and second world wars’.

To write an essay about this relatively broad topic, we pick five sources out of some our teacher has given us, or sources we find ourselves. Then, for each of these sources, we write what we can infer from the source (ie if it’s a propaganda poster asking women to sign up to work, you can infer that the government were in need of workers, probably to make weapons), but we also have to evaluate a sources usefulness. Over half our essay is about the sources’ reliability which, although I see the need for it in history, can become a little tedious.

In citizenship, the coursework specification has changed. Before, you were able to pick an issue affecting society that interested you, and campaign against it. Now, we have only two topics to choose from - young people in the media and young people in prisons. Maybe you are brimming with interest about these two subjects, but I find it frustrating that we are bound to these topics, it makes it harder as issues you don’t feel strongly about, you understand less. Of course GCSEs were never really about the engagement, more about the future prospects.

In science we are doing our Biology controlled assessment. This consists of us planning, completing, analysing and evaluating an experiment into a certain topic, this years topic being exercise recovery times (…fascinating). Having successfully conducted my experiment into how a runner’s speed affects the recovery time if their heart, I now am charged with analysing my data in controlled conditions. This consists mainly of drawing graphs and talking about them.

But this is just the beginning of biology… We received today a white A4 sheet of paper detailing a total of five exams that we have to take towards the end of this year. These were three exams for biology (modules 1-3, 4-6, and 7) and two maths exams (calculator and, you guessed it, non-calculator). Receiving that bit of paper was a bit of a shock, a realised how little time I have until these exams and how unprepared I seem to be at the moment.

But not matter, I’m sure that everything will go just fine when the time comes.

In drama we have been doing mock modules studying different practitioners and texts (Brecht, Stanislasvki, Blood Brothers ect), but this week we got s visit from the exam board. A hawk like 60 something women with cold stony eyes and overdone makeup cowered over us as we tried to conduct a normal lesson. Although we didn’t know who she was, the stress was evident on the teachers faces throughout the hour: this was a big deal.

That’s what has really gotten through to me with all of these assessments and exams. This is it. Time to really buckle down and get the grades.

It feels a bit sad really, realising that these are what will feel like some of my final free days. For the school, this is make or break, this next year or so. If they don’t get the results, they’ve failed themselves, but most of all, they’ve failed us.

Wish me luck, I think I’m going to need it!

Also, due to these pesky GCSE things, these blogs might get a little rarer. Don’t worry - I will keep posting them however slowly.

posted 2 months ago

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Mar
02
2013

Why we should challenge the leadership. And OFSTED.

OFSTED came. We did well, but not too well. We got a good, but it’s not official. All we’ve been told is that we’re not outstanding but the school is ‘pleased with the result’. Good. That was a bit of a thing for the teachers but not really for anyone else. 

I did hear, however, that at least one of the inspectors came into the school with a bias view against us. This is the conversation that I have been told took place.

OFSTED: What do you think of behaviour in the school?

Kid: There are some problems, but it doesn’t really affect me.

OFSTED: Ok, what about the fact that your school has an extremely high exclusion rate?

Kid: Well maybe that means that my school is quite strict.

OFSTED: No no, don’t twist the facts.

That is totally inappropriate. Firstly, it seems this inspector had an answer he or she wanted to hear, and secondly, OFSTED should try to be welcoming and friendly to kids, not berate them and tell them they’re wrong.

Anyway, on to the main topic of my post, and that’s complaints.

I think that the top people in schools don’t get challenged enough. If I was unhappy about something, I might talk about it with one or two teachers I trust, but never to a member of the senior leadership team. Why not? Because it’s quite scary. It takes a lot of courage to challenge the decision of someone who you are at the mercy of. But as a result of this, the school’s management have a distorted picture of what people think and what is going on.

An example of this is the lunches. The school recently moved lunch time later to 1:30 when it is normally 12:30 or 12:45 in other schools. When (I am told) a group of parents raised this, the reply was that no one was hungry. This is totally untrue. All the kids get really hungry in the lesson before lunch and the teachers are annoyed because they have to teach a room full of kids who are concentrating much more on their rumbling bellies than the Berlin Blockade, or Osmosis in cells.

But they don’t know this. No one has thought to say to the people at the top ‘Hey! What are you doing? This is way too late!’. In fact, only a select few teachers who have earned the kids trust can be entrusted with the information that no one likes the new lunch time.

The answer is to challenge teachers more. Make it the normal thing to tell a senior teacher what you think about the latest change. But the school should do more to allow that too happen. A school suggestion box is a start, but what about encouraging students to come and tell them what the kids really, truthfully think about the school and any changes. The problem is you get loads of kids saying ‘I don’t like how you’ve made detentions on a Thursday instead of Wednesday, or even I don’t like the consequence system. Unless there is a genuine problem that can be realistically changed, then maybe complaining isnt the right thing.

Even so though, if your problem will never be changed in a million years, it can be helpful for the school to know that there are people who think that something is bad, or a change is really good. One problem I’ve had when telling people about things I think is that ‘I haven’t had any other people saying this to me’ even if I’m saying that the whole school is behind me.

So please, voice your concerns, and voice your praise. Increased communication is always the answer.*

See you next time :)

*Some would argue that one of the reasons that Apple have been so successful is they have a ridiculous number of meetings. With everyone. Communication is the key.

posted 3 months ago

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Feb
09
2013

I wasn’t late miss, I was early for tomorrow

Yesterday ministateschoolboy was late to school. To be fair on him, it was snowing so everything took a bit longer. He arrived, well before the start of lessons at 8:30, to find the gates barred shut and his name on the late list.
This is because of a new attempt by the school to reduce lateness - the school gate now closes at 8:25 instead of 8:30 as usual. This, they hope, will encourage people to arrive earlier and not be late, despite the inevitable increase in lateness this will cause at first. The key problem they are trying to address here is that kids hang around and go really slowly between coming in the gate and going to their first lesson. This extra five minutes, the teachers hope, will give those kids an incentive to get in the gate with enough time to dawdle to their lessons and not be late for the 8:30 start time.
MiniStateSchoolBoy then had to wait in a long line with other latecomers, wasting even more time. If he had been allowed straight through he would have been at his lesson before the 8:30 start time, and the teacher could have started. These new procedures actually cause more disruption to lessons than they prevent!
So he finally arrived in a lesson, the teacher grumbling away at the class, sent into disarray by this ‘latecomer’. 
There are some very simple ways to prevent this problem, without totally destroying the precious new system of the school leadership team. To start with,  having to wait in a long line of offenders simply increases the students minutes late (something meticulously recorded and looked over at my school). What if their minutes late were recorded at the time of arrival, not hours later after a tedious wait. This could be simply achieved by having more than one staff member attempting to achieve the huge task of writing a number on a price of paper.
Another easy way of reducing disruption to lessons is to put tutor time/registration at the beginning of the day. This way, you could give students a 20 minute buffer period so they don’t miss any lesson time at the beginning of the day. Then you could give a much smaller sanction for being late to tutor and it wouldn’t be such a big deal as no lesson time would be being missed or disrupted.
Overall, I don’t think that this extra five minutes will do anything. Since it was introduced, lateness has gone up overall, not down. The kids who are causing all the problem, don’t do it because they can’t get up five minutes earlier to have a chat in the morning, they will dawdle even slower because the boundaries of lessons don’t seem to effect them, and they want to let everyone know that by arriving 5 minute after everyone else. In a nutshell, this changes nothing.
In other news, the preparations for the school production are well underway with only a few days left until the big night.
This March, my year will be doing work experience and it’s ended up being a bit of a fiasco. With incredibly short notice, and only 30 places, it’s my next post. 
Until then, good day.

posted 4 months ago

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Jan
16
2013

PEEZ and some Romeo and Juliet spoilers

As promised, here is a post about the PEEZ. Language analysis. Point, Evidence, Explanation and Zoom are what our lovely acronym stands for. To put that in a bit of context, here is a model answer using the PEEZ taken from an essay of mine on Romeo and Juliet:

Point/Evidence - The word ‘saint’ in act 2 scene 2 portrays a pureness and honesty, furthering Juliets appearance as an innocent yet intelligent force in the play.

Explanation - This religious imagery shows the two opposite personalities bound together in love, again referring to the two opposite themes of the play, love and hate.

Zoom - But a ‘Saint’ is something you would only see after death foreshadowing the couples tragic deaths.

(I’ve chopped and changed it from the original to keep it short.)

Over our time here we’ve had many acronyms for analysing text, PEEA, PEES, PEEW ect. and they all seem to basically be the same. The question then is not what the exact formula is, but whether we should have one at all.

Whether I think it’s good or not, I will admit to jumping through hoops, writing things I don’t 100% believe in, following the bland, uninteresting formula to get the grades and be done with it. ‘Woah!’ I hear you cry, writing things you don’t believe in? In my mind, it’s all the same.

What I mean is this. Shakespeare didn’t intend the vast majority of the stuff I’m writing and the audience will never pick up that the word ‘saint’ indicates their tragic deaths, so why write it? Because the reference to foreshadowing ticks an examiners box. So what if I don’t really think that the audience will notice the connection I’ve drawn? This is eloquently explained but this rather humorous image.
http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/the_2de74d_2130342.jpg

This is why I refer to analysing text as bullshitting, I happen to be a rather good bullshitter, but there is no truth in it whatsoever. It is simply drawing unwanted connection between things (Shakespeare’s use of Iambic Pentameter shows how little control the characters have over their fate, let alone their own words) and reading too far into the lines. Way too far.

There will be some who disagree with me. They will say that even if they were unintended, these references are important and do have an effect on the audience/reader (however small that effect may be). That us fair enough, they can have their opinion and I can have mine.

The main point, I guess is that I am enjoying English and like analysing plays and books. I do find it interesting whether or not I believe in everything I write.

In other news, some parents have launched a campaign to get the school dinners to shape up in terms of healthiness.

I shall keep you posted, but for now, goodbye.

posted 5 months ago

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Dec
09
2012

Coal

Once a year Santa comes to give presents to the good children, and coal lumps to the naughty children. (An interesting answer to where this coal for naughty children idea originated can be found here.) Also once a year, teachers inform children’s parents whether or not their little miss precious has been naughty or nice this year.

I was fortunate enough to have to face this afternoon of slight awkwardness last week when about 50 teachers congregated in the hall to deliver judgement on year 10. These meetings are awkward. It may be because it is the sudden meeting of two, mostly separate worlds, where the sole attention is you. You, the student, are put in a horrible situation of being talked about, by two or more people who you know very well, as if you weren’t there.

This is obviously not always the case. You are usually acknowledged, and probably asked a few questions, but it still feels you are spectating a conversation about yourself.

On the other hand, it is only one night a year your parents meet with all your teachers, so it is just about manageable. But it is still quite a weird invention. It requires a vast quantity of organisation.

‘If we mess up where the teachers sit, they get angry; if we don’t tell the site staff like a year in advance, they get angry; if we don’t provide refreshments, the teachers get angry; if the day is clashing with something else, everyone gets angry’ (ect.)

one of the organisers was telling me.

I admit, parents evenings are probably quite useful for the parents and the the teachers. Parents get to learn about what courses their child is doing, when exams are going to be and all that kind of stuff, and how their kid is doing in each class. If they haven’t done well, its coal in their stockings, if they have, they are treated with Santa’s finest.

Also, happy Chanukah for those celebrating, and a good winter break even if you don’t celebrate Christmas.

Oh and next post, as promised about language analysis and PEEZ!

posted 6 months ago

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Nov
29
2012

It’s a double, roll again.

Our school canteen has a monopoly.

It can effectively charge what it likes and have low quality products, and we can’t do anything about it. We will buy their dinners no matter what because, well, we want lunch, and we’re not allowed out into ‘the free market’.

Of course, the school dinner provider is required to do certain things, for example keep the basic meals cheap, only £1.90 (minus VAT) for a main meal, 2 veg and a pudding. Reasonable right? Think again, that 30p dessert you’ve got there will cost more if you want custard. Ketchup costs 10p (20p if you want to smother your chips). Want naan bread with that curry? Another 20p.

Then we move onto drinks, biscuits, and any other optional extras that they aren’t required to keep the price down with. Take an oasis fruit drink, about the same size as a bottle of coke, and £1.20. Maybe a bit steep, but not that bad I hear you think. But remember this is all without VAT, with an extra 20% that price climbs to almost £1.50.

You don’t hear the students complaining much, but there is also a very popular range of popcorn, crisps, chocolate bars and other nice, yet unhealthy snacks that students feast on regularly. I’ve seen teachers spontaneously combust when they see the crap students are having for lunch. A packet of crisps and two doughnuts.

Now lets talk about quality. The food is not bad. Sometimes.

You can get quite a nice meal at our canteen, but don’t expect a 5 star cuisine, and if you come on a Thursday, prepare to go hungry or face the courgette thing - something you can’t expect students to stomach.

I’m exaggerating. But seriously. Is this a flawed system where we let profit driven companies take control of the future generations life source?

If we had two companies controlling competing dinner stalls, they would be forced to drive the price down and the quality up. In many schools this isn’t practical because of space, but just a few years ago my school had to separate canteens on different floors. These could have easily been split and forced to compete to take away the monopoly that our school canteen system has become.

In other news, the school council* has started to organise a massive survey of all the students, cleverly named ‘student voice’. The first step of this was that they came around during tutor time and we filled out cards asking what we would like changed around the school.

When it was my turn, I gave up trying to campaign for any real, big change to the school like the uniform or school start and settled for ‘Please don’t have the TVs in the canteen set to Sky news. The BBC news will be perfectly sufficient, and doesn’t have any adverts’. (Am I right in thinking that it’s illegal to target students while in school with adverts?) I guess I felt that I had campaigned and petitioned against the uniform changes before they came in, there’s no way they’re going to change it back now because of some survey that makes the students think they can change their education. They can’t.

All they can do is to change aesthetic things. Nothing real. Nothing that affects anything else. Although, uniform is an aesthetic thing I suppose, except uniform is something that affects the students directly and is also something that some people will judge the school on.

I’ll see what happens with this student voice thing and see if the students do have any control over their education.

I realise that I’ve been very pessimistic and depressing. So here’s some other cool stuff going on around school that I will hopefully be posting on in the future.

We performed an extremely bloody Shakespeare play as part of the Shakespeare for schools festival in a London theatre and the rehearsals for the next production are well underway.

The music department is getting people together for some kind of a Christmas concert. For me this means meeting a group of giggly year seven girls who play some pretty good rock songs and seeing if we could trade some people to get a couple of small bands started up, hopefully in time for this concert.

We have started the Romeo and Juliet module in English and it is surprisingly fun.

We have taken the first writing assessment in languages and although it went well for me, many people in my class are having to retake it.

Life in general continues to progress.

Next post - Why I’ve changed my views on analysing text.

And I leave you with this,

Someone messaged me recently saying in the face of horrid changes to education, is this the time to restart some kind of student union. I agree, this might be a good idea, it would give students real power to group together and affect the system that they themselves are passing through. We shall see - watch this space.


*I say school council, but they were not voted for by students therefore they do not represent students. It is simply a system of prefects, their name carefully disguised to give the feeling of fairness and democracy.

posted 6 months ago

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Oct
25
2012

Controlled Assessments

Yet another parasite is feeding off my life, but this one lurks in halls and silent classrooms. Yes, today I am talking about controlled assessments (for those who didn’t read the title).

One of the recent governments (could be this one, could be the last one, not too sure) decided that instead of trusting kids to go away and write essays at home, they would have to do everything under exam conditions. There is a reasonably large debate as to whether this system is too harsh or the previous to soft which will probably never be resolved as it is impossible for everyone to be satisfied, but I would like to point out a few flaws, and annoyances of mine with the current system. I am not suggesting a new system, and I’m not claiming that any previous or future systems were/will be any better, but this current system really annoys me.

Ok, lets start with the task of memorising your piece. In the assessment you only get a small space on a sheet of ‘planning space’ which you can bring in to the exam. It varies, but in languages, you are only allowed to write 40 words on the sheet. So what happens is that you draft what you’re going to write in class with all the resources you need, and you then have the arduous task of memorising your piece to rewrite in the actual assessment (with the aid of your planning sheet). In english, you are expected to write a minimum of 600 words for each assessment and this is a huge amount to remember.

For some children, this feat of memory is almost impossible and I feel the system is hugely unfair on these kids, especially as some of the hardest hit are those with special needs.

Some say that the controlled assessment system can allow children to cheat (which they also said about the previous coursework and I’m sure future systems to come), but I think that this is not a problem. Is it such a problem if children were able to look up information on the internet (under the coursework system)? We live in the modern age when actually, in a job, the internet will probably be used to look up information and facts. It’s not so much a question of cheating but a question of using resources to their full extent. On the other hand I do think that copy and pasting isn’t the way forward. As they say, it’s a fine line.

Now, because of these complaints that the system is too easy and too easy to cheat, as well as Gove’s mad logic, we are going to be faced with a system where most grades will be determined by one, three hour exam at the end of two years’ learning. Where is the sense in this?!* What about the kids who find exams hard? Surely this is just disadvantaging them.

Anyway, back to controlled assessments. The point is, they’re a massive pain, especially the memory bit. It is horrible knowing that you’ve worked really hard on a draft piece and you’re really proud of it but you then don’t do it justice in your actual assessment because you find it hard to remember your piece.

Ahh well. Lets just hope the even madder system about to be introduced by the government gets replaced with something better after the next election.

In other news, our school performed at the shakespeare for schools festival which was really good, and also, well, HALF TERM! Finally…

Right, that’s it for today, but I know it’s been quite a large gap between posts and I will try to post more regularly.

‘Til next time, good bye.

*I’ve been told the putting ?! together like that is bad grammar but I still think it adds a desired effect. What do you think?!

posted 7 months ago

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Oct
01
2012

Socks

It seems that the whole uniform thing gets less strict as you move up the school. It makes sense. As a young year seven, they try to mould you into the model student, but now in year ten, I never tuck in my shirt and almost never get picked up on it. But miniStateSchoolBoy seems to have had a different experience.

He has been repeatedly checked to make sure he is wearing the right coloured socks. You can’t even see his socks unless he pulls up his trousers so why bother just for the sake of it? I find it quite saddening that this is going on - no one really cares what colour socks someone wears, especially when they aren’t even showing. I guess you might get flashes of sock occasionally, but that is besides the point.

The other thing is the difference in treatment different years are getting. As I said, I don’t tuck in my shirt, my tie is too loose (although I don’t wear it stupidly short like some) and I NEVER… EVER wear the correct colour socks. It’s like the teachers know we’re a lost cause so they’ve just given up on the whole uniform thing with us. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realise that actually, in my year, hardly anyone ever gets stopped for even blatant breaking of the uniform rules.

So this campaign to get socks black seems to be limited to only one year. But the fact that they are monstrously subjected to this torture of a check shows that the teachers think this year will be different. That they will concentrate on uniform in the newest year in the hope that they will conform.

Well here’s my message to students and teachers alike:

We will never give up. Everyday we will wear bright socks, as a very small, but very important rebellion against stupidity.

Everytime miniSSB says that another teacher that has checked his socks, my respect for them drops through the floor. How can I respect someone who thinks that sock colour will effect obedience? I never wear the right socks yet I’m told that I’m Exceptional by the school computer (which tallies up attendance, merits, punctuality etc.)

It is stupid, pointless, a waste of teacher’s time, and the taxpayer’s money.

It’s not even such a big deal, but it’s just another thing that makes me think, is this what our school has come to. I mean, this blog is a bit of a moan, but I hope I give the impression that actually, it’s quite a good school which I enjoy going to. Things like this though, they make me think again about the school.

Some say it is a sign of improvement. I say it’s a sign of disgrace.

PS I would like to point out that it’s not all teachers who think the whole uniform thing is so great. Many I’ve spoken to think it’s a massive waste of teaching time. All I’m saying is that not all teachers have lost sanity.

posted 8 months ago

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Sep
23
2012

I know it’s a Sunday, but I wanted to tell you about my lessons

Ok. Two weeks in.

Lessons are mostly good. History teacher’s nice, and we’ve got a new teacher for science which is great. In Science we are going through Physics 2, which is about all things radiation. That’s electromagnetic radiation like radio waves and X-rays (this is how we learnt the order http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjOGNVH3D4Y), but also the greenhouse effect, and ozone.

History is also good, the topic is the ending of WW1 and how that may have led to WW2, as well as the cold war and a few other bits and pieces. The point being that that is really interesting (despite constantly calling the ‘League of Nations’ the ‘League of Legends’ which is a well known computer game). We have a really nice teacher for English, and although learning about complex sentences can never really be interesting, she makes it reasonably fun. (Actually, we are writing a piece of coursework in English called Adverts I loathe. Go Compare anyone? Go Despair…)

Spanish is ok, but because we no longer have to pick a language*, the class is very mixed ability without all the abilities of the school taking Spanish (or whatever language) meaning there will be sets. But the teacher is quite good at setting work that can be done by everybody to different standards so it’s not really that bad.

Maths is not so good. We’ve got a new teacher who the kids don’t really listen to. It’s nothing major, just a constant level of chatting which he doesn’t do much about. I don’t mind as I can hear him fine and I am learning. But there are some kids who get drawn into conversations who actually are perfectly good but don’t have a very long attention span if there is stuff going on other than the lesson. I mean, most of the kids are nice, but the teacher hasn’t shown them that he’s going to stop them from talking. But it’s not totally his fault either, if he wasn’t new it wouldn’t be a problem. The irony is that some kids who complain** about him are the ones who are most chatty.

Overall, I try to get everything important down in my book. That way, even if it’s not stuck in my brain, I’ve got a great revision guide when it comes to my exams.

So there you go, a post on the actual lessons. There is a couple of lessons I missed out but I will revisit them in coming posts. Plus more updates about how some of the head teachers changes are actually working out in the next post. For now though, bye!

*Weirdly this gives us one less choice rather than one more because if we want to get the Ebac, that’s two of our choices gone with humanities and languages rather than the language not counting as one of our three.

**They say that he’s not very good - no real reason, but I know that what they are really saying is that they don’t learn. Who’s fault is that? It’s not his job to get you to listen to him. Well, actually is probably is… On the other hand, he’s here to teach not to tell people to shut up - what do you people think? Should teachers teach or should they also be responsible for discipline? The answer is probably a mixture, but it’s an interesting debate - Anyway. He can’t do much about a student who is determined to talk. Sending them out just for talking (repeatedly) would be to harsh. Then what else can you do. You can put them in detention, but with the number of people talking, how would you pick individual ringleader out? I can from within, but it is much harder if everyone stops whenever you come near.

posted 8 months ago

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