Three Little Birds

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!

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

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!

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

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

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

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.