Education, testing, knowledge, testing, education, testing

1. Make claim that education has gone to the dogs.
2. Make even stronger claim that this is because teachers are lazy, bad and wrong-headed.
3. Turn the claim into a fact.
4. Announce 'reforms' which you say will 'turn education round'.
5. These reforms are based on new kinds of tests.
6. These tests test a narrow range of ability, capability and response.
7. Link the tests to tables that rank schools, and to inspections which are punitive not advisory - that's to say 'not helpful.
8. The tests narrow the educational experience of the children down because teachers, quite rightly, want to do the best by the children and their school.
9. The tests become one of the key means by which schools can be closed and reopened according to a model that the government has come up with.
10. This model passes the property of the school over to a 125 year lease to the company or organisation that now controls the school.
11. There is no evidence that this process of changing the school makes it 'better' by any of the criteria that the government has itself come up with.
12. The fact there is no evidence for this is acknowledged by everyone, even the very people who enact the school-changing process.
13. Across the school-system, a good deal of the tests and exams have been altered so that they are much more 'knowledge-based'. This is justified on the grounds of rigour and liberation for the previously uneducated.
14. In actual fact, these knowledge-based exams and tests simply make it easier for the exam-system to micro-mark pupils as 'right' and 'wrong'. This is the exact opposite of 'knowledge is power'. It's 'knowledge is segregation'.
15. All the tests and exams are in any case 'norm-referenced'. That is, there is a pre-judged 'curve' that the exams have to adhere to. Put another way, the failure rate is fixed before the students sit the exams. The knowledge-based curriculum simply makes it easier for the examiners to choose the failures. So, far from liberating the previously un-liberated, the knowledge-based curriculum simply makes it easier for the exam system to dump the so-called 'failures'.
16. All statements about whether the school-system is getting 'better' or 'worse' are now based on these tests and exams.

WMDs, New Labour, Tories and Corbyn

Perhaps when the Chilcot report comes out, those who have blathered on about how wonderful the New Labour leadership were, how much better it would have been if one of them - David Miliband especially - had been chosen to lead the Labour Party, will pause for a moment and look through the details of what is coming out about how Blix told Blair that there was no evidence for WMDs, that Saddam's sidekick had said that Saddam had destroyed biological weapons and that these crucial pieces of information and intelligence were consistently left off documents and left out of speeches designed to convince MPs and the electorate that a gigantic war machine should be unleashed on Iraq. These exaggerators and deceivers and media-massagers are, say the media, the ones we should admire and support and follow. What fools we are if we find in Jeremy Corbyn anything we might agree with.

Now scoot forwards to the day of publication of Chilcot. Let's imagine for a brief moment that Chilcot does indeed produce some of this damaging evidence (that's so obvious to so many of us, anyway), will the Tories be able to point the finger at Corbyn and say, 'You are the culpable one too! You are part of the same crowd!'? I don't think so. Jeremy will have the trump card. He marched. He spoke. He was right.

Of course the Tories will say that they only supported the war because they only had the evidence made available by Blair. Of course they will.

Which will make it all the more mysterious that those of us who marched knew that the WMD story was a lie. Goodness me, how did we know?????

Some queries about the sample questions for the 2016 Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar Test

This is what Year 6 teachers and pupils will be spending their time doing, this year. Here are some queries:

1. How many of the questions use terms that have had other terminology in the last ten years?

2. How many of the questions do not really involve right and wrong answers?

3. How many of the questions are nothing more than naming bits of language as opposed to helping children use language?

4. Are all the distinctions being made in the questions genuine and valid - how many are really just one of several alternatives?


https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/439299/Sample_ks2_EnglishGPS_paper1_questions.pdf

I'm supposed to be rooting for the Northern Hemisphere now, am I?

The lunacy of sporting nationalisms:

if you're from England, you are supposed to support England, when England are knocked out or not represented, you support other parts of the UK (think Andy Murray but if it's England V Scotland you hate Scotland), if other parts of the UK are not represented you support Ireland (though obviously at other times Ireland should be hated and/or despised). If Ireland are not represented, you support Europe (though that is where Jonny foreigner comes from except during the Ryder Cup when he can be good at beating the USA). If Europe are not represented, you support 'the Northern Hemisphere' as in the rugby. The Northern Hemisphere???? I'm supposed to be a northern hemisphere chauvinist now????!!!!

I'm not sure where 'we' are supposed to go after that.

Labour MP explains what's wrong with Osbornomics

Labour MP Jonathan Reynolds said in the House tonight:

"We’re getting to the crux of this debate, which is that this fiscal charter is intellectually moronic. It essentially commits this House to never borrowing to invest, even when the cost/benefit analysis of that investment is such that the country would benefit greatly. And that is why it has not one serious economist backing it, other than the self-styled experts on the government benches."

Comment by teacher on how to interest children in books and reading

"At the moment I am designing a series of vinyl displays for teachers to attach to their existing display boards. The aim is to encourage and to celebrate reading within the classroom for EY, KS1 and 2.

Each display will show books, magazines, newspaper articles, traditional and contemporary stories around the edge. There will be a space in the middle for teachers to attach images and words from children, specifically their reactions and feelings towards stories and words that interest them. If anyone has any words or phrases they'd like to see printed on the vinyl images please let me know. For example...dream, understand, make believe, discover etc... Thank you"

Poems can...my slogans for poetry: please share any or all...

Poetry is for everyone. In private or for sharing, we find ourselves in it.

The poet suggests. We interpret. That's freedom.

Poetry makes the familiar unfamiliar. And the unfamiliar familiar.

Poetry can tell stories but it doesn't have to. It can talk about the moment or the thing.

Poetry can say I Am. Poetry can say We Are.

Poetry can say I Believe. Poetry can say We Believe.

Poetry can stick up for the weak. Poetry can mock the mighty.

Poetry can glorify our rulers or it can dissect them. You choose.

Poetry can dream. It can analyse. It can do both at the same time.

Poetry can say things through its sounds without telling you that this is what it’s doing.

Poetry can celebrate. Poetry can mourn. We choose who to celebrate who to mourn.

Poetry begs borrows and steals from all other uses of language and recycles it as poems.

Poetry can change the usual patterns of language.

One way to write poems is to talk with your pen.

Some poems can say thing about feelings but only talk about things we can see.

In rhythmic poems the rhythm is made by the 'foot'. In free verse, the rhythm is usually the line.

When children say how do you start to write a poem, I say 'by daydreaming'.

A lot of poems start in a poet's mind with a query.

Beware when the poet says 'I'. It is not the poet. The 'I' is made of words the poet has chosen. The poet is a person. 


Most poems repeat something: words, sounds, images,rhythms, meanings.Even opposites are a kind of repetition.


For poets there are no such thing as wow words. For poets all words are wow words. Especially 'the' and 'a'.

Some poems can be mimed.

Poets often walk about looking for ways to begin poems.

Try bringing together two things that don't belong together.

Poems like psychic reality. It's where the feelings are believable even if it's demons or giants or...

There are no right and wrong answers on what poems mean but it does no harm to read or listen to what others say.

Some poems cheat time: they freeze the moment. But they can't cheat the reader's time.

Studying poetry shouldn't be a humiliation.

In science the truth has to be proven. In poetry the truth can be suggested.

If you don't know what a poem means, ask yourself and the person nearest you what it reminds you of. Then ask why or how.

A poem is a poem if the writer and the reader agree it's a poem. If they don't agree, it's under discussion.

Everytime you say that something is like another you get a new angle on those two things. Poems often do that.

Many poems don't solve anything.They may start conversations that help you though.

Poets don't know all the meanings of their poems. All the meanings of the poems are made by the poet and the readers.

Poems aren't made of words. They're made of sequences of words.

Poems can capture simultaneous opposites and contradictions when the sound runs counter to the most customary meaning of the words

Think of political poems as if they are political speeches. Only if they are dull, do they not work. Not because they are political.

'Dulce et Decorum est' by Wilfred Owen must be a perfect poem because no Prime Minister so far has recited it at a war memorial. So far.