Learning Journal

Stevie Wonder is excellent.
Mmm. I have a generally positive experience to report this time, although it is studded with challenge and etc. First off, the microteaching was smashing. I really wanted to have some more time to do the subject justice, and to allow a longer gestation period (more than half a second) after each question for multiple times. It would have been lovely to see the concepts and understandings grow as I went through the material. But in ten minutes you sometimes have to just plough through it. And the session did not just provide some experience of teaching, it also showed how many different ways there are to teach and construct lessons. It seems that I definitely prefer a more process-and-development concept of education and the curriculum in general, implying a constructivist / constructionist theory of knowledge - and the conflicts with this and established practice will be discussed later.
My college placement has been continuing well, with seven observations all done and another pebble of assessment being lifted off of my bouldersome burden. It was somewhat troubling when, at the end of one lesson as the students gleefully toddled out, the teacher turned to me and said, "When you take this class next week, I'll need you to cover cognitive-development in four sessions". The sheer scale of what I need to do is pretty heartstopping. But, I'm being given all the support a trainee teacher could expect, along with a back-breakingly massive amount of resources, teacher help packs and so on. The EdExcel curriculum is very much content based, with clear aims and objectives ("understand two assumptions of cognitive psychology") that lead on to similarly phrased exam questions. In this sense, it's much easier, as I'm being told exactly what to teach and being given plenty of ways how by the literature. At the same time, though, this is pretty much against my own convictions, so it seems up to me to do things differently. All the other teachers have mentioned to me how long they've been working, how tired they are, how they just amass handouts and videos around themselves so they can do lessons without any thought or planning - and how they're looking forward to 'new input' to 'shake things up' (perhaps the first shake should be to get out of such an utterly defined curriculum). The major challenge for me will not be to follow EdExcel's path - a toothless chimp with irritable bowel syndrome could do that - but to find ways to foster some learning development in the students as they receive the tiny smartbombs of knowledge dictated by the content and laser-directed by aims.
P.T.O
Summerhill school is interesting, isn't it? I've been reading a little about Bowles and Gintis' Schooling in Capitalist America and thinking about Summerhill in the same way. Although the idea of a 'correspondence' between mandatory schooling and capitalist society structuring consciousness is too simple an explanation, endorsement of certain beliefs and behaviours are definitely part of normal curricula. Summerhill uses a democratic structure - the problem being that this structure is not present in our 'democracies', where decisions and the information used to make decisions are much more controlled. I wonder how the students who come out of the school deal with the world outside, when it is so fundamentally different and their voice counts so much less. Do they come out thinking that they should be active in transforming politics and society somehow to become democratic, or do they believe that the world is somehow sick and democracy will not or can not work? I guess that I am concerned that another Leo Strauss will appear somewhere, having diagnosed all problems as emanating from the values of liberal society and seeking to remedy them with the potent myths of the state and the leader.