ready-mixed dough

Three Little Birds

2009-09-11T08:49:00.000-07:00

You may remember a post from about a year ago entitled ‘The English Teacher’. It described my experience with the absolute BEST English teacher ever, Mr. Dominic Stead. He was interesting, he was funny, he was enthusiastic, he was anti-curriculum – the greatest, coolest, loveliest, sweetest, most alternative English teacher I have ever had.

Several months ago we received the news that he had died of liver cancer.

It’s taken me so long to write this because it’s hard to know how to say it. How to give the words the fullest impact, to let you know truly how much he meant to me and everyone else who knew him, and how much sadness we felt on hearing of his death.

There was no announcement. I first heard the news by accident: standing outside science, I overhead Hannah, a girl who’d never been in his class, talking about someone having died. At first, I paid little attention – the way she spoke made it sound like the death had been a long time ago, and maybe I thought I’d heard about it before or didn’t know the person in question. Then somebody asked, “Who? Who’s dead?” This was in the morning. Throughout the day we kept hearing about it as the news circulated around the school, seeming to take impossibly long to reach all the people who had any care at all. Even by the last lesson there was still one boy in my class who didn’t know – and nobody told him because by then, it was common knowledge. It was about lunchtime when I had to give up my hope that Hannah had been misinformed.

The only official information I have is from my English teacher. This is yet another teacher from the ones I have already mentioned, and so far the most constant – she has now been my teacher for more than a year. She told us that Mr. Stead had died a few days ago from liver cancer; that hardly anyone in the school had known of his illness, except maybe his form group; and that he had moved to Brighton to be close to his children. I don’t know how long he had known he had cancer, but I remember how he often missed English lessons to go to doctor’s appointments, and how he said he’d tell us later why he was moving to Brighton – but he never did, and I always wondered about his mysterious reason. Now, maybe, I know why.

Mrs. Topf, my current English teacher, is also wonderful and interesting and friendly and openly expresses her distaste of the curriculum. If I had never met Mr. Stead I would probably call her the best English teacher I ever had: now, she’ll have to settle for second best.

Requiescat in pace.

Thank you!

2008-12-10T08:51:00.000-08:00

Oh yes, and thank you to anybody who signed my petition. I'm sure it helped. Even if it didn't, one out of the three SATs is now abolished. Hooray! If you haven't signed, please do, it's still active and there are still SATs in primary schools. The link is in the previous post about the petition because I can't be bothered to write it again.

A Bit of Moral Outrage

2008-12-10T08:16:00.000-08:00

There is not a very good reason for my absence these past few months. It is not that I haven't had anything to moan about... Well the thing is, the things I moan about were keeping me busy. Homework, etc. Also I have been working towards the piano exam which I did last week, and frantically knitting and crocheting absolutely everybody's Christmas presents. So you see I am a very busy person. And now that some more moral outrage has come along, well of course I have to talk about it.

Did I ever talk about GCSEs? I don’t think I did. Well, let me fill you in. At my school, you have to do the core subjects for GCSE: English, science, maths, I.T., R.E. and CoPE. Some of them are OCR but it doesn’t really matter. We also have to do P.E., but not as a GCSE. (I love the way they all say, ‘oh, it’s so great when you get to year 10 because you have so much choice about everything, you get to choose the subjects you want to do and you spend so much more time on everything’. Ha.) As well as these, you are allowed to pick four extra subjects which you would like to continue studying. I had a lot of trouble with this because I was going to choose art, drama, French and history but changed almost at the last minute to music, drama, French and history. I don’t regret it but I did really, really want to do art. I keep saying I wish I could drop science and do art instead...

Which, in a very roundabout way, brings me back to my original subject.

Today our (most lovely and, thankfully, also outraged) history teacher told us that because our school is a SPECIALIST BUSINESS AND ENTERPRISE school, oh wonderful isn’t that fabulous, blah blah blah, we the present year tens are the last year who will have four extra options and who will not have to take BUSINESS STUDIES. Oh joy, oh hallelujah. What wonderful news. After all, what student does not wish to be forced to take business studies rather than art, or drama, or, say... history?

And after all, what student would not wish to also take TRIPLE SCIENCE if they achieve a level 6 or 7 in year nine? Yes, that’s going to happen too. Yippee. It’s not as if it cuts into our extra subjects at all... and it’s not like we don’t already have science more than any other lesson, even those of us taking double science.

So, with triple science and business studies as compulsory subjects, how many extra choices do we have? I think you can count.

Abolish SATs!

2008-07-20T05:36:00.000-07:00

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh yes.

Please click on the link and sign my petition! Wales has done it, why can't we?

http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/abolish-sats.html

Okay so maybe it's not a link... how annoying. Just copy and paste then, or type it in. I think this is worth the tiny effort!

All Change

2008-06-16T11:21:00.001-07:00

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.

Refuse to Plan

2008-05-03T12:24:00.000-07:00

From the 12th of May, I and other students are going to Refuse to Plan in English. This means that whenever an English teacher tells us to write a plan before writing a story/poem/letter etc., we just won’t do it. But more than that, we will make it clear that we are not doing it by writing ‘Refuse to Plan’ in the space where we’re supposed to plan.

I am doing this because I think planning stories etc. is pointless and time-consuming and spoils the whole fun and beauty of writing. How many authors plan their writing – or better, how many oppose planning? I am not saying that planning is totally bad and should never be done, because in some cases it is actually quite useful. But it should be an act of choice, not a compulsory task, and we shouldn’t have to do stupid things like writing lists of words and drawing bubbles with ‘beginning middle and end’ written in them.

I know many students hate having to plan their writing in English. I do, and that’s why I’m doing something about it. I want to try and get as many students as possible Refusing to Plan from the 12th of May – you don’t have to do anything except write ‘Refuse to Plan’ in your English book whenever you’re asked to plan, and you can write or draw anything else you like; this is a campaign about free choice and imagination, and there are no restrictions except try not to make it as time-consuming as planning!

I am trying to spread the word about Refuse to Plan so if you are a school student, or if you know people who are school students, please tell other people about it so we can get as many as possible participating. You don't even have to contact me to take part; all you have to do is write 'Refuse to Plan' - it doesn't even have to be limited to exercise books, be creative - and together we can make people notice.

How to Make Bread Taste Artificial

2008-04-26T13:13:00.000-07:00

In our first food technology lesson of the term, we were told that the first thing we would be making was ‘bread shapes’. We watched as our teacher carefully weighed out ingredients and mixed them into dough. She then kneaded this dough and sternly informed us how to shape it. It then went into the grill – ‘a warm place’ – to rise.

The next week, we entered our kitchen-classroom to find the ingredients pre-measured and conveniently sorted into exact quantities. All we had to do was take the bowl and mix what was inside it.

Two weeks after that, we made flavoured bread. This time we entered the kitchen to find bowls containing, not only pre-measured, but pre-mixed and pre-kneaded ingredients. Our only task was to roll it out and add raisins.

‘Jam tarts’ consisted of another bowl of pre-measured ingredients, a minimalistic amount of strawberry jam, and a lump of lard. The week before – demonstration week – we had been led to believe that the lard was optional: lard, or something healthier. And vegetarian-friendly. But vegetarians, it seems, can eat anything. In the bowl: flour, lard. Mix.

‘Apple turnovers’ revealed, surprisingly, no bowl of ready-mixed dough – just some pre-chopped apple (in miraculously cube-shaped pieces) wallowing in some sort of apple goo and an unappealing grey block which turned out to be pastry.

It is not so very strange, then, to find that we are marked not on the quality of the food we produce, but on the way we plan – in short, writing down what our teacher has just written on the board – the way we sketch, and the way we ‘shade’ (colouring in). And our homework on how bread is made was levelled on our use of I.T.

You know how they say things always taste better when you make them yourself? Well now I know how they make things taste like they do when you buy them from supermarkets.

Why don't we talk about LGBT?

2008-04-18T09:32:00.000-07:00

Well... Why don't we? In school we are taught a great amount about heterosexual relationships, but hardly anything about homosexuality or bisexuality. In fact I don't think we're taught anything on this subject. But why not? Surely there isn't nothing to teach?

Don't scientists have anything to say on this subject? Isn't this something we should be discussing in R.E. and Student Development? Aren't there any books we could be reading in English which involve relationships other than heterosexual? Doesn't this subject have a whole fascinating and important history?

The fact that this subject is not taught in schools is an interesting one. It gives the impression that it shouldn't be taught - an impression which walks hand in hand with the impression that it is WRONG; a fatal impression to give to people who are gay/bisexual/transgendered as it can be a big cause for low self-esteem and makes you feel insecure about yourself and what you are, and of course makes you a prime target for bullying.

As well as education we need role models. We need teachers who are gay/bisexual/transgendered and are open and unafraid of what they are. We need teachers who are comfortable with the subject of and not prejudiced against LGBT. We need to be told that IT IS NOT WRONG.

The English Teacher

2008-04-01T02:51:00.000-07:00

I think that really I began thinking this way round about last September, maybe a little later than that. I've always thought that there are many things about school that are unfair, and wished I could do other things, but I never really understood quite what was wrong. Basically I just put up with it, like I'm sure many children in school do. I don't think we even realise anything is wrong - it's just the way school is. We just have to wait and count the years...

But last September I came back to school and discovered that I had been moved into another English class... Again. I had started in June and accidentally been put into the bottom set - it was called class one or something silly like that, and everyone believed I was being put into the top set. The bottom set kids were perfectly nice; they threw rubbers and rulers and screamed and asked me if I smoked. For most of the term I was stuck there, until about the last week before the summer holidays when it finally got sorted out and I was moved into a higher English class - though I'm not sure that was the top set either. I was happier in that class, and fully expected to return there the next term. But instead, I found myself sitting in a different classroom, meeting my third English teacher of the year.

He was called Mr. Stead. The rest of the class - apart from one girl who had been moved from the same class I had - had been his class since year 7, and they loved him. He was certainly the best English teacher I ever had. He showed us films like An Inconvenient Truth and took us to the library for whole lessons just to read and talk about books. He thought the curriculum was terrible. He was like a friend, really, not a teacher. But then again a friend is exactly what a teacher should be - someone you can talk to and laugh with and share your thoughts with. That's how proper teaching should be done.

I only had Mr. Stead as a teacher from September to Christmas. He said we were his best English class. None of us were sure if he was just saying that, whether he'd said it to all of his classes, but really I don't think it mattered. We all knew he was the best English teacher we were ever going to get.

I think it was on his last day that I really starting thinking. We messed around the whole lesson - putting make-up all over a boy's face, running about, laughing, talking - Mr. Stead gave the boy a note to take to his other classes - and Mr. Stead asked me if I was going to be a writer. Well of course I was. He told us that we had to fight against the curriculum to make it better for everyone. A few of us got very excited and I said, "We should protest!" We all started writing things on the board - PROTEST! big and bold in the centre; DOWN WITH CURRICULAR MONOTONY in smaller letters, lower down.

We can do it, if we work together. We can bring curricular monotony down.

What I Wish I Could Say About School

2008-03-30T00:52:00.000-07:00

'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

2008-03-27T04:28:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-17T12:33:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-16T00:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-13T08:21:00.000-07:00

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.