I have been moved English class. Again.
Does this ring any bells? I have been at this school for less than a year and I have been in four different English and had six different teachers. And you know what? I was actually beginning to quite enjoy myself where I was. Nice class, nice teacher. I mean, she gave us muffins just before our English SATs. This was a teacher I wanted to stick with.
Oh but no, sorry...
On the last day before half-term, we entered our English classroom to find lists blu-tacked to the white-board. Class lists. The one that had my name on it said Heather/Claire at the top. I don’t know why. They were teachers. Much as I would like to be able to call my teachers by their first names rather than ‘miss’ or ‘sir’ – so much more friendly! – I knew that there was a pretty good chance no exceptions were going to be made in this case.
Pupils were coming into the classroom and there was soon a throng about the white-board. Shouts of “Who’s Heather Claire?” zinged about the room. My wonderful teacher, Miss Dyckhoff, had no answers for us. She had already explained two weeks earlier that we would be moving classes after half-term. Further than that we had no information: we were moving classes. We didn’t know why. We just were. Because we were. Because the teacher said so.
Inspecting the lists for names we knew, we realised that our new classes consisted of students from all different sets. Coming from a top set English class we were confused and perturbed: were we moving down a set? Were we not of top-set value any more? Why were we being shoved into a class with people from lower sets?
You will have to understand, now, that all these thoughts were not the results of any malicious feeling held by us towards students not in the top set. I am not in any way saying that we are better than them at all, or that we deserve better. I believe very strongly that the current setting system in schools is perverse and puts out false images that can be very damaging, especially to children in lower sets.
Our thoughts were the results of simply not knowing what was going on. We are always told that in order to learn best we are separated into classes of different ability so the slower learners can have more help and won’t slow down the faster learners. In principal this theory is very sound, and actually quite a good idea – until you realise that the higher sets consist of better-behaved quick learners, and the lower sets consist of slower learners and badly-behaved students who stop the learning completely.
I can’t speak for any of my fellow bewildered classmates, but I personally was fearing a class like my first English class: rulers and rubbers flying through the air; yelling and screaming; constant fear of death-by-airborne-sharpened-pencils. As it turned out, the listless girl I had sat next to in my very first English class was now again my classmate, fortunately sitting in the other side of the room.
So as it turned out, we were moved class so we could compete in a new and exciting Business & Enterprise project, where we will enjoy having extreme Vision, being as Competitive as possible, and having loads and loads of FUN! We are designing...a theme park.
Our new teachers are called Miss Thompson and Mrs. Vendells (or something like that). We never found out which was Heather and which was Claire. It doesn’t really matter though... miss.
Business and Enterprise.
You have like, so got to be kidding me.
A little P.S. This has happened in science as well. We’re going to move classes again when our SATs results come through.
