Learning Journal

I’m not sure if Michael Howard’s “I Believe” speech worked very well – the name of Saatchi is always something of a PR disaster in itself, since everyone knows he’s paid to lie. Also, Michael Howard is in many ways not quite ‘Michael Howard Luther King’. But if you replace select words, it might perhaps make something of a point about education, especially in FE. Of course, sometimes it doesn’t at all.


· I believe it is natural for students to want to learn to improve their present and their future
· I believe it is the duty of every teacher to serve the students by removing the obstacles in the way of these ambitions
· I believe students are most likely to be happy when they are masters of their own learning, when they are not nannied or over-governed
· I believe that the students should be big. That the college should be small (this one doesn’t make much sense. Whoops)
· I believe red tape, bureaucracy, regulations, inspectorates, commissions, quangos, 'czars', 'units' and 'targets' came to help and protect us, but now we need protection from them. Armies of interferers don't contribute to student happiness
· I believe that students must have every opportunity to fulfil their potential
· I believe there is no freedom without responsibility. It is our duty to look after those who cannot help themselves
· I believe in equality of opportunity. Injustice makes us angry
· I believe every parent wants their child to have a better education than they had
· I believe every student wants security for their parents in their old age (I’d dispute this one)
· I do not believe that one student’s poverty is caused by another's wealth (of course it might, a surfeit of riches is made primarily by removing wages from the worker’s pocket!)
· I do not believe that one student’s ignorance is caused by another's knowledge and education (unless the teacher, for an easier life, concentrates on the smart)
· I do not believe that one student’s sickness is made worse by another's health (?)
· I believe the British students are only happy when they are free (whereas the foreign ones can pay through the nose)
· I believe that Britain should defend her freedom at any time, against all comers, however mighty (I wish the education system had done this. Ha!)
· I believe that by good fortune, hard work, natural talent and rich diversity, these islands are home to a great people of students with a noble past and exciting future
I am happy to be their servant (teacher).


Obviously, this list was meant to be a set of mostly rather undeniable truisms that would sway the voter, but unfortunately any political party can say the same thing, no matter what they plan to do later.
As an educational set of I Believes, it raises some salient points. The learners SHOULD be interested in improvement by education, and the teachers should be making sure this happens. Controlling learning and the curriculum by direct political means is interfering with teachers, the question is whether you think this is a good thing. Students must have opportunity, they must be given better education than the previous generation. This is all true.
I might also add that I believe that teachers are educators, not instructors. I feel this sums up a lot. Learners are there to learn, not to have facts wrestled relentlessly into their struggling heads. Unfortunately, this will require allowing the students much more control over educational interactions, and I feel that in our current social and political climate the majority would be very unhappy to trust students. Students seem to often be little more than the sum of their outcomes, which is absolutely the wrong way to do anything.
Now all that remains are to come up with six pledges, such as “Your child: stronger, longer, softer”. Wouldn’t that be a lark!

It seems that there's quite a lot of work to do this semester - a considerable amount more, I would have to say, than the previous one.
Being as it is halfterm I've had some time to start to figure things out, however. I can develop an IT package on the theme of child psychology and use it in lessons, as my A2 psychology classroom features an electronic whiteboard. The only downside could be the rash of stealings of projectors that could strike at any moment and leave me sans pretty pictures.
I'll be sure to print off my slides and make OHPs, if possible.
I am as yet not entirely decided as to what to do for a curriculum research area. I am very interested in the concept of 'employability', the effect of local business on colleges, the place and use and esteem of vocational qualifications, and how this informs a wider debate on participation in FE and HE. My biggest concern is the 'factory' metaphor for education, whereby it's seen as just a machine for taking in and retaining students (and perhaps spitting out the most absoluteliest bad seeds) and attempting to net the highest number of 'funding units' to keep everything running smoothly - an the battle is entirely conducted in terms of intake. But once the students are in there, surely you must actually do something worthwhile with them? Being in a college and getting £30 a week in EMA isn't the solution for all problems. There have to be much bigger changes, and it's mindboggling that anyone could ever think that jamming kids into the system is somehow a cure.
So it's time to hit the books and figure out a way of tackling some aspect of these issues for a project. Or I could cop out and do student support in a dry and uninterested manner to make my reflective practice portfolio either. How much do we have to do for that 'bad boy'? If the portfolio was a shank of beef, not even a whole tub of Bisto instant gravy would be enough to wet it satsifactorily! I think it's the portfolio which concerns me most. I'll have to find a way to make the units in this interesting as well, because it would be very easy to take a surface learning approach and tick the boxes perfunctorily rather than, ahem, critically engage with the subject matter.

Oh, shan’t you bear witness to my pain?
Yesterday’s teaching was challenging, as always, but more than usual. In essence I am saying that usually teaching is challenging, but this time it was more than usually challenging – i.e. that it was more challenging than usual.
If you want me to spell it out for you anymore there will be trouble.
The AS lesson in the morning was quite fantastic. The A2 lesson in the afternoon was not so.

My question: what be this difference?

The AS lesson was good as I had learned everything beforehand and was most authoritative on the issue at hand. I had planned all sorts of activities for the students to get on with (not that all of them did, so I have started to use the comments box on their EMA sheets to note down any major failures of attention or character as a ruse to keep them on their toes, striking in them the worry that their perhaps ill-deserved £30 won’t arrive if they just sit their through the lesson thinking of sweet, sweet cash). The students became receptive to the taught matter by being chased, weakened, and exhausted by the amount of things – and even repetitions – they had to undergo, ending up being able to answer the questions perfectly.
My A2 lesson was different. Instead of covering one bite-sized topic that could give me leeway for my own interpretations within the lesson, and time for doubling back as in a small ‘spiral curriculum’ to check learning and the linking of it to new problems, I had to punt the rackety old class boat through the stinking hedges of a learning swamp – a swamp in which sense and nonsense both decay together in unholy matrimony. Everywhere were dry facts to be chewed on, like a mass of dried tobacco leaves, and swallowed into an uneasy, sickly stomach. There was less for them to do, and more for them to consume. And, let me tell you, the human appendix don’t work any more for a reason. We’re not supposed to be ruminating animals.
Link this difficulty also to the strange dissection of the college day into three-hour mornings and two-hour afternoons. How am I supposed to do the same with an afternoon lesson when it contains so much less time!
The students did not take kindly to the work on long-term deprivation that they had to do, I imagine precisely because they were asked to work things out and answer questions quite a lot. And also because some of them hadn’t bothered to come in the previous two weeks and didn’t understand what was going on. And just wanted to take a booklet about all of this, go home, and leave it in a drawer and not look at it. I do sympathise with that feeling.
Evidently, I must militate against any future lessons that become too much hard work for the students, and find some way to make the masses of research, that are mandatory, interesting as well. Perhaps a brain drug that gives photographic memory is being developed. Or perhaps we could trade with the students – teach them things they can comprehend the importance of if we are going to make it important to remember facts upon facts, especially if these facts are wildly contradictory research findings about whether divorce or discord are better (the answer? Both, none, or either). Heaven forbid that we teachers are asked to teach syllabi that include facts both interesting and relevant.

My most critical incident this week has been trying to use a less than satisfactory textbook to plan lessons from. And by ‘plan lessons from’, I mean learn the stuff myself beforehand and then figure out how to teach it to others.
For my AS psychology lessons I have a wealth of material – two textbooks, two support books, and also it is quite well covered on the internet if I want to find anything extra. But for A2 psychology I have one textbook (written by Christine Brain!) and it is very, very bad indeed.
I have heard the phrase ‘fundamental disconnect’ before, and although it is a rather stupid phrase with overtones of either a psychotherapist or a management guru, it serves well enough to describe this A2 textbook. Every topic is broken down into a million fragments of facts and has to be painfully reconstituted. If it were pottery, not even the Time Team could put it back together.
For example, the section on long-term deprivation and privation is laid out with the effects of long-term deprivation by death, which is then compared with divorce, then family re-ordering, then the effects of long-term deprivation, then the effects of privation, then a discussion of privation, then case studies of privation. It’s an Eton Mess of psychology, and perhaps fit only for Boris Johnson, although he’d probably just complain about the lack of mention of English psychologists.
This concerns me. My mother is a secondary school teacher and has all sorts of help from the many textbooks and even CDs that she has at hand. She has pre-prepared schemes of work, exercises, even example lesson plans. I would eat my fist for such goodies!
In an unhappy muddle, I talked to my mentor. Why, she find Brain useless too, and prefers others books – colourful, thoughtfully written, packed with exercises and examples – and now I am going to photocopy bits out of them and use them to plan the lesson. And learn the topic. And also to provide useful exercises and examples.
The lesson is – go for the textbooks that makes it easiest!
In a related note, the teachers support pack that I use for AS apparently costs almost £70 when it is nothing more than pages of dull questions based around unamusing fictional examples – such as ‘Warthogs School for Witches’ – that serve to beat the knowledge into the heads of the students with the cudgel of imaginationlessness. How lucrative. I gotta get me some of that action.