How much of a lottery is what you learn in school? With most subjects the departments have a clear scheme of work and teachers follow it closely. If a pupil is absent, they should copy up or catch up.
Well… that’s how it should be anyway. Sometimes teachers may not cover the whole scheme of work in the same depth. Am I being too polite? Okay, sometimes teachers can’t be bothered. Sometimes they skip over the parts they find too boring or too difficult. Sometimes, with a particular class on a wet Friday afternoon, lesson plans are jiggled around to find something that the pupils will respond to with more enthusiasm. For once here, I’m not talking specifically of my own shortcomings. I really am generalising.
Now, depending on the subject and the way that the school arranges teaching groups and allocates teachers,
it could be that the pupils end up with the same teacher who can’t be arsed throughout the whole of key stage
3 (years 7 to 9). Or they might have different teachers each year. They might have the chance to cover a
particular learning objective in a subsequent year, or it might be that the opportunity is lost forever.
That’s the lottery of splitting up year groups, and assigning teachers to each class. If the pupil has a crap teacher, or one who can’t be bothered, they may have a chance for redemption the following year with a different teacher. Or they might be stuck with the same one.
But what of the variables that a pupil brings? It’s all very well to copy up missed work if the pupil has
missed lessons through absence, but the explanation and exercises may have been crucial to actually grasping
a point. What if the pupil is writing notes to their friends, disrupting others, or simply daydreaming when the
work is being done? Or what if they absorb and understand the lesson objectives, but have forgotten them by
the next day, or next week or next year? There simply isn’t the time to keep re-treading the same ground when
there’s too much to build on what could turn out to be very shaky foundations.
This all sounds very contemplative and serious, I know. It’s just that I’ve been sat here, marking the books of a top set, and grinding the enamel off my teeth in frustration. Earlier in the year we had a big drive to consolidate a point that, to be honest, they should have grasped by the end of their primary schooling. Obviously, some hadn’t picked up on it, and it hadn’t become second nature as anticipated. So we tackled the problem head on. We had examples and practical exercises and they wrote revision notes and referred to their notes when they did their next piece of work. I would randomly check that everyone had understood. We felt glad – they had learned a simple way to enhance their work and I was relieved that we wouldn’t have to waste any more time on it again.
So why is it, as I sit here marking books, that one of the brightest pupils has slipped out of the habit
of doing what she ought to? If that’s one of the brightest pupils, what hope have the rest got? It’s
bringing back those nightmares now of the “Groundhog Day” experience – that being the film where the
same day is repeated over and over, with every character except the lead role oblivious to the fact that
they’ve already lived this day once. But it does happen so often. It’s most noticeable when I have the
same pupils for a consecutive year. I insist they covered the point last year; even with a quick reminder
session some of them sit there with a gormless expression or with the bewildered look of somebody who’s
just been told the earth is indeed flat or that David Beckham was once a bit geeky. Oh, hang on…
Now I’m not saying that every teacher has to be a lesson delivering autobot, sticking rigidly to a government designated plan. But surely there has to be some consistency amongst teachers or the pupils all end up with variable skills and knowledge. But there also has to be acknowledgement that for whatever reason, some pupils will need time to go over the basics before they can proceed any further. Yet we have so much crammed into every term that there’s rarely the allowance to consolidate skills rather than continue to cram more in. Lessons can therefore be a lottery for the pupil, and sometimes they only succeed because of the luck of the draw: a teacher that doesn’t feel worn out, lessons that aren’t solely timetabled at the end of the day when nobody feels bothered much, or lessons that always coincide with the pupil’s death-bed sickness or foreign holiday.
added 3/3/06
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