Tag Archives: Teachers

They said “Change the Title! It’s too controversial”

…and I said “No thanks.”

There’s something addictive about writing your truth, especially when you know you’re cutting through façades people like to hold onto. My article was titled:

Warning - Exam Season Turns Good Teachers into Bullies

It was published with Schools Improvement Net in the run up to GCSEs, A Levels or whatever exams schools make students do this time of year. It was written to ask this question:

why

You know what? The responses were overwhelmingly positive! Like this from Jill Berry who’s really well known and respected in the UK Teacher community…

Jill

Here’s another raw response from a teacher…
Sarah

It turned out to actually NOT be controversial at all! Now I really wish I’d known as a student how up for question our current schooling system is. Why is this such a hushed topic? Why do teachers feel such a need to present us with a unified front?

Was it all positive? ALL!

OK, except this one…anon2

…she’d teach dancing? No one’s gonna stop people teaching. Good teachers have students who go out into the world and say to other people; “Go and learn with this teacher!”

What if we just stop pretending that THIS is reality…
cartoon

The ‘dancer’ my critic talks about is my little cousin. Her experience provides the case study in my article “Exam Season Turns Good Teachers into Bullies” here… Continue reading →

Teacher’s Hating on Students: What Would You Say?

So I’m finding Teacher blogs totally fascinating because, for the first time, I’m hearing teachers voice the kinds of things they’d never say to students and not even utter inside their own school for fear of being labelled by management and spat out.

Let’s take, for example, this reply to a UK teacher’s post about curiosity…

“As a teacher, I increasingly encounter INcurious children: even in the pre-school years - kids who do NOT respond, emotionally or otherwise, to “Have you ever wondered… ?” or any such stimulus. The answer [if any] will be one of two things:

/1/ “No”: the sort of “No” whose dull delivery makes clear that the speaker does not even imagine, or even wish to be able to imagine, wanting to know anything that s/he doesn’t know or believe already or

/2/ worse, a reply that’s a sheer guess EXPRESSED IN TERMS OF BORED CERTAINTY (example: “Oh, kittens purr because there’s a battery inside.”) - once the boredly certain guesser delivers his/her pronouncement, s/he REFUSES to be tempted to seek further. (“I SAID they purr because there’s a battery inside, so that’s why they do it!”)

kittens

Suggestions, please?“

What shall we do with this guys? We can always push the hate, anger and frustration right back! It’ll escalate things but, seen as the whole situation is pretty daft anyway, what’s harm’s more nonsense gonna do?

Or we can pick up advice from improv and say; OK, I acknowledge your truth and I’ll add this…
Here’s my attempt at some student to teacher improv via audio. How did I do?

 

For a limited time (until I improve this page) here’s the audio transcript…

Continue reading →