What I Wish I Could Say About School

'I have a discovered a place where I can be a person as much as I want and learn however and whenever suits me. My opinions are valued and people always ask my views as well as the views of the students who are cleverer than me, or better at working. When I go to a lesson I go to learn and to contribute to the learning of those around me. If I do not feel like learning I go somewhere else and do whatever I need to do to enjoy myself. Sometimes I visit the library, which is open at all times and where I can sit and read for a whole day if I want to, with no-one disturbing me.

'We wear what we want to. This means that we are always - or mostly - comfortable with what we are wearing, and we can feel happy and proud of ourselves for doing what we want to do. In winter this is especially good, and in summer too, because it means that if we are cold, we can put on a sweater that will keep us warm, and if we are too hot we can take it off. I can be whoever I want to be in my own clothes - but mostly of course I choose to be myself.

'I know all the teachers by name. We don't call them miss and sir. We call them by their first names and they know all of ours, because in a small class you learn quickly, and this makes it easier to think of them as friends, who you can ask for help and suggest things to and argue with. I love my teachers. They don't just stick to one subject - of course I have an English teacher, and a music teacher, and a textiles teacher, but the English teacher plays the guitar and so do a lot of people in my class and one day they all brought their instruments in and started playing. All subjects link to one another in some way and the teachers are always willing to answer an interesting question.

'When it snows we are allowed to go outside and play. When it's warm and sunny, lessons are held outside and we go for walks as we're being taught, and the science teacher will ask us about trees or birds and the English and music teachers will make up songs together.

'We do not have a marking system. If we did there would be children who did badly, and ones who did well, and we would hate each other. We are always allowed to speak back because how else are we supposed to make conversation?'

The Dreaded Word: Homework

No matter how great you are at keeping calm, getting things done and not worrying, I can almost guarantee that you will at some point in your life become stressed by homework. Whether you are a student, a teacher, a parent - anyone who has to deal with homework, basically, is going to feel anxious about it at least once.

I personally am very good at organising my homework so that it does not build up and is complete and handed in on time, and I cope with stress extremely well most of the time. However, I think you cannot blame me for feeling a little bit stressed when I am sitting at a computer on a Tuesday night, using the hour I have between coming home from photography club and going out again to my knitting group to try to work out how to do the questions in my maths homework that has been set that day to be given in the day after. And somehow, please tell me if this is a false impression, but I regularly feel that I might be missing out on something when I get up at 7.00, spend the day at school then come home, do homework for the rest of the afternoon and evening, eat dinner, and go to bed. My weekends of course are often much the same, with extra homework to make up for the lack of school.

Homework of course is extremely important - six hours a day of work are obviously not enough, and I have nothing else to do in the evenings. I mean, why would anyone want to spend their time playing the piano, or even such a thing as the ukulele? And no-one does anything like knitting or crocheting or rag-rugging or beadwork, or any kind of sewing. I personally would much rather sit behind a desk for another couple of hours, or even in front of the computer making sure I improve my I.C.T. level for food technology.

I honestly think there are better things we could be doing.

SATs

What is it with SATs? We are approaching these again and all the teachers (and some students) are beginning to go crazy. But this time, no-one has reminded us that they are only a test of the school. Everyone kept saying that in year 6 (in their contradictory way: Don't worry, they're only a test of the school! Revise, revise, revise!) but this year, nobody has mentioned it. Which is stupid. They ARE a test of the school. But they are being used to work out which sets we should be in. How is this fair? 

I was talking to two friends today who totally agreed with me. My parents of course are on my side in this matter... My science teacher, thankfully, has not only told us to revise in science, but in English and maths as well. Not thankfully because I think this amount of revision is necessary - well of course not! They are supposed to be a test of the school as the school is, not as it is when all the kids have been half-killed by stress - but because all the teachers seem to want you to do extremely well in their particular subject, even though people are always saying that you can't be good at everything. Well of course the teachers don't want you to be good at everything: just in their subject. My dad keeps going on about this and I have agreed with him because I have partly understood what he was saying and because he has pretty correct ideas on the subject of what-is-wrong-with-school. Now I fully understand what he's getting at.

A girl at my new school recently moved to Wales; she had lived there before and moved here at the start of year 7, just after doing her SATs. She told us that that year the SATs had been abolished in Wales, so she wouldn't have to do them. Good for Wales...

 

Learning French in English

I am a good writer (sometimes) and do well in English, but when a teacher asks me to name something that should be included in descriptive writing, or tells me to use a simile, or scribbles 'Good complex sentence!' in the margin of my exercise book, I am simply at a loss for what it all means. I learned all these things once, when I hated grammar, and now I know what they are so well it is almost as if I have forgotten them - it is certain that I rarely think of them when writing.

It's like learning French. Instead of learning it like all the French kids must have learnt it - slowly, from birth, with others speaking it all around them - we learn it through lists of words and what-it-means-in-English and past participles and present, perfect, imperfect, future, conditional and imperative tenses, not to mention the present subjunctive. All of these, our teachers assure us, we have encountered in our own language of English. 

But have we?

Well of course we have, but not knowingly. These tenses are things we only begin to learn about when we start learning another language; we have never been taught about them in our own. And now the question arises: if we don't need to know what they are in English, do we really need to know in French?

And now the question arises: do we all really sit sifting through books for metaphors and alliteration, or do we just... read?

  

The Great Monotoniser

The other day I was talking to my mom about UNIFORM.  She was lucky enough to have never had to wear one, and she supports me thoroughly in my debate over the subject. School uniform is completely overrated. Hasn't anybody ever thought that if there was no uniform, so many fewer people would get told off for not wearing it?

As we were listing the good and bad points of school uniform (mostly bad. Good only for the sake of denying them) my mom brought up the 'good' reason that many pro-uniform debaters give - that it prevents children from feeling unequal to other children because they cannot afford 'fashionable' clothes. She does not agree with this opinion and neither do I. I said, "What about my old school?" At my old school, we had to wear blazers and ties and tuck in our shirts. There was constant pressure from the teachers to look respectable and wear our uniforms correctly; there was also a constant, bigger, pressure from fellow students to wear it wrongly. Shirts had to be untucked, ties short and loose, and top buttons undone. I once had a girl in a higher year come up to me and actually bend down to shove my socks all the way to my ankles, because it was how everyone else wore them.  

By wearing your own clothes you begin to develop your own sense of style. At my current school the uniform is fairly open to interpretation, and you can wear any kind of socks - blue, pink, spotty, stripy - and any kind of skirt as long as it's black. I have a black skirt which I love and wore all the time last year, when I was being home-schooled, and occasionally I wear it to school. Now I hardly ever wear it at home: it feels like I am wearing my uniform.

School uniform is not, never has been, and never can be 'the great equaliser'. All it does is create monotony. You're unique, they say... Now dress the same.       

I am unique, the same as the rest of you

School is a place of contradictions.

It tells you not to worry about exams whilst stressing that they are one of the most important things in your life if you want to succeed.

It asks you to write a surprising story, but wants to see a plan first.

It balances its curriculum by putting academic achievement on both sides of the scales.

It uses your scores in SATs to judge you even though they are supposed to be a judge of the school.

It tells us that we are unique while making sure we are all dressed the same...

Children need to be free to have fun and learn in the way we want to learn. Children need to be free to be children. Children need to be free to be free.