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.

Reading stories in class - great news

Writers for children always receive letters from children and schools. We don't all always manage to reply to all of them. Sometimes, the responses or questions are amazing and so very acute. I got one of those today from a Year 3 responding to 'Uncle Gobb and the Dread Shed'. Judging by the open-ended far-ranging questions and thoughts, that's a class who are having a fantastic time, reading and responding to books without the weight of SATs and/or SPaG tests hanging too heavily on them.

How cheering.

Worrying comment about faith school in Liverpool.

This comment (not by me) is on a thread following an article about a Church of England school on the Guardian website. The school below is not the CofE school, it's a Jewish school.

If it is true, it is quite worrying, isn't it? After all, we're paying for this sort of thing to be going on.


"At the King David in Liverpool, state maintained Jewish Primary school, the percentage of Jewish children is roughly about 25%. Even though the percentage of Jewish children attending is quite small, the school has been infiltrated by, in my opinion, what is an extremist Jewish orthodoxy, and have thus implemented ridiculous rules on the rest of the population, whereby all children bringing packed lunches, even if they are not of the Jewish faith, are having them scrutinized by staff and offending foodstuffs removed. By offending foodstuffs, I mean things like Ready Salted Walker's crisps and other things that perhaps would be considered acceptable to most Jews, even those who consider themselves more religious. This whole extremist Jewish agenda has also crossed into the way, those who consider themselves more secular Jews are treated, with children of mothers who have converted treated as if they are not Jewish, this I have seen first hand at services and funerals.

To be quite frank, there should be no such thing as state maintained faith schools and there is no place for religious indoctrination in state maintained schools, for that is what it is.

In the case of the King David, the Jewish children are separated from the non-Jewish children for religious education and follow a different course, as the board puts it, Jewish children are not permitted to follow the same RE course as they, Jewish children, are taught differently than non- Jewish children and learn about other religions in a different way than non-Jews. Why? Why are Jewish children taught in a different manner about other religions than non-Jewish children are taught?"

Tips for govt: how to guarantee teacher shortage

On the Guardian thread about teacher shortages and how they could possibly have come about, I posted some government policies to keep teaching recruitment and retention down:


1. Encourage the press to run stories saying that teachers are lazy and that there are thousands of bad ones.

2. Get the head of Ofsted to say the same.

3. Keep this up for decades. (both main parties)

4. Bring in hundreds of measuring and assessment systems, levels, targets, tests, exams, which then breed more 'rehearsal' tests and exams.

5. Bring in a punitive, rapid, unsupportive inspection system which ignores the fact that scores are attached to children so that if you're in a school where there has been turnover the inspectorate say that has nothing to do with us.

6. Run a new kind of school where the salaries of management are not open to public scrutiny.

7. Allow interest groups to open schools which take on proportionally fewer SEN, EAL and FSM pupils than nearby LA schools.

8 Allow covert selection and exclusion process to take place around these new kinds of schools because the LA schools have to pick up the pieces.

9. Use international data as if it is holy writ and ignore evidence that suggests that comparing countries does not compare like with like, that some countries which are 'top' are selecting. Obscure the differences between the countries by only talking about 'places' in the table, without ever making clear whether these differences are 'significant' or not.

10. Use China as an example of utopia in education without making a comparison between the two societies - as if education exists separately from the societies that produce the respective education systems.

11. Make sure that very nearly all the people running the state education system from government have no, or very little, state education experience themselves.

National Word Day #NWD

How about a National Word Day (hashtag NWD)?

On National Word Day,
just for once,
for a change,
everyone will go about saying words.
Or writing words.
Or thinking words.
Like 'like'.
And 'and'.
You just get together with some people
and say words.
Any words.
Even 'word'.
'Word' is a word.
Or you can do it on your own.
You could be in the kitchen, say,
and you drop an egg on your foot.
That annoys you.
So you shout something.
That would be a word.
Fantastic.
What might come out, though is an 'ow!'
I'm not sure if that's a word,
but that's something to talk about, isn't it? -
using words.
If you see a word anywhere
(there are loads of them around)
just point to it.
You might be sitting next to someone on a bus.
Just say to them, 'Hey look, there's a word.'
If at any point in the day, you think of a word,
that would be brilliant too.
'Too' is a word.
So's 'two'.
And 'to'.
Huh, that's words for you, eh?

And 'irony' - that's another word.
Where it sounds like you're saying one thing
but meaning another.
It can be a way of making fun
of something.
Even making fun of yourself,
or of something you care about.
Words. Yeah.
Hashtag NWD.

Tweets on poetry, poems and poets (collected)

Yesterday on twitter through the day, I put up some thoughts about what poets, poetry and poems can do, sometimes do, often do....

It starts with the last one on this list and finishes with the first, so there is a kind of train of thought. But you don't have to read them that way. (I rather like Marx's Theses on Feuerbach so they've ended up being a bit like some 'Theses'....but they were actually tweets. Maybe Marx invented the tweet.


Anyway, here's Rosen's tweets on poetry. Finishing (starting) with a tweet poem about war, inspired by 'Dulce et Decorum est'


War:when governments convince enough people who don't want to kill, to kill people who don't want to kill but who've been convinced to kill


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


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


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


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.


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


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


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


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


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

\

Poetry can change the usual patterns of language.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


Poetry makes the familiar unfamiliar. And the unfamiliar familiar.

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


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

Poem: My mother Ate Sour Milk

My mother ate sour milk.
We didn't have a fridge.
The milk was in the larder.
And sometimes it went sour.
When my brother and I came down to breakfast,
if the milk was sour, we tipped it down the sink.
It was blobby and when it came out of the bottle
it went ker-plup, ker-plup, ker-plup
and dribbly stuff flowed out too.
But it was the smell.
You couldn't put your face over the sink
while the sour milk was coming out.
It was worse than sick.
And it made you want to be sick.


If my mother was there though
she'd say, 'Oh don't throw that away,'
and she poured the sour milk into a bowl
and ate it with a spoon.
It was like she was eating white sick.


My brother and I said,
'Nooooooo! You can't. That's horrible.'
'Mmmm, lovely,' she said
and you could hear her sipping it.
Sip, sip, sip.


She tried to get us to understand.
'You know the nursery rhyme about Little Miss Muffet,'
she said. 'Curds and whey,' that's what this is,' she said
'We don't care,' we said, 'it's horrible.'


Our dad explained that Mum's grandfather
made yoghurt and something called
'shmatana' and sour milk.
It didn't make it any better.
Why would anyone make sour milk?


When we went to see Mum's mother,
she gave us shmatana.
That was nice.
She didn't try the sour milk on us though.
Just as well.

They say, "we can only have the welfare we can afford": a story

Mr Bill owned a shop and Mina worked in the shop. In winter it got cold and Mr Bill said that he could heat some of the shop but not all of it. Mina felt very cold.
We can't afford to heat the whole shop, said Mr Bill.
Mina didn't know anything about Mr. Bill but one day she was going for a walk in the country with her friends and one of them said, 'We're near where Mr Bill lives.'
So, they went and had a look.

It was a big house, with a beautiful garden. Looking over the wall, Mina and her friends could see a big de luxe car in the drive.

On the way home, Mina thought more and more about what Mr Bill had said about 'we can't afford to heat the whole shop.' Certainly, she couldn't afford to heat the shop. Mr Bill only paid her enough to feed herself and pay her rent. It was true, the shop didn't seem to make huge amounts of money, but it was doing well, well enough for Mr Bill to buy a lovely house and car.

So how did it all work? And why was she cold?

Grammar: it's not the name of the word that makes it behave that way...

Steven Pinker has written an article in the Guardian:

Steven Pinker: 'Many of the alleged rules of writing are actually superstitions'

and there is a thread following his article - which itself is a summary of a new book he has out.

On the thread people were getting exercised about starting a sentence with 'but'. This is because people think that when we say a word 'is' a 'noun' or a 'verb' etc, then that's what it is forever more. Part of the reason for that is because that's how grammar is taught i.e. wrongly. Another reason, it's how dictionaries list words - but that is really only meant to be a guide not a prescriptive order.

On the thread below I made the comment below. It's an attempt to focus on the fact that there is 'grammar' but the 'grammar' is not in the names and rules we invent. It's in our usage, how we say and write things. The job of grammarians, or anyone describing language, is to describe it in use. Words in use have functions and work like cogs in a machine, they link with other cogs (words) so that there is a coherent 'utterance'. Unlike cogs, which are of a fixed shape in a fixed place in the machine, words can morph, move about, change how they fit with the other words. If we are serious about grammar, and serious about helping children understand it, then that's the model we should work with and not this silly stuff about naming words and telling them that the words have to behave in a certain way because we've named them that way. Here's my comment:

"There is no essential grammatical quality attached to any word until it is used. A word is not a noun until it is used as a noun. Same goes for 'but'.  When it is used as a conjunction, it is a conjunction. When it is used as a frontal adverbial or 'sentence adverb' - as it is when it begins a sentence, that's what it is. The great mistake of pedantry is to assume that words are what grammarians have called them. It's a form of nomenclature determinism. Luckily we are human beings and not machines, so we can say, 'but me no buts' or 'proud me no prouds' (which gets a red underline from the typography nazis in my computer) but was good enough for Shakespeare. 'Hah, but 'proud' is an adjective,' they cry. Not in that sentence - one is a verb and the other is a noun."

Eye-watering sums in merger - great for the shareholders, bad for us

Anthony Hilton - no raving lefty he - the economics editor of the London Evening Standard, had an article in the paper last night about a big new merger that may or may not take place in the brewing industry. When I say big, this is seriously massive, and calls into question all the usual rubbish that lovers of capitalism talk about when they say that the marvellous thing about capitalism is that 'competition' is good for the consumer. In reality, if this merger takes place, when we go into a pub or are buying beer we will be choosing between different offshoots of the same company, under different labels.

That to one side, Hilton is against the merger and amongst the reasons he cites are as follows:

"Apart from the shareholders [who, he explains elsewhere are likely to make a big, big killing if the merger goes through] what characterises this deal is the number of losers - there will be fewer suppliers, fewer employees, less choice for customers and no doubt lots of legitimate new ways for the company to avoid paying taxes.'

Just spend a few seconds on that sentence, please. He is saying that if this merger, worth billions of pounds - it involves, yes, the world's largest brewer - goes ahead, it will result in people being put out of work, more of the same kind of thin watery crap beer, and more tax-dodging ('legitimate' of course - we don't want legal proceedings to take place by not calling it 'legitimate') - which means less revenue to the state to pay for schools, hospitals and welfare.

But this is normal market activity. This is what we have to remember. It's normal. If it's 'normal', that means it's 'right'. That means it's 'nice', that means it's 'good' for us.

But it's not. It's about making some people richer - 'shareholders' i.e. people who happen to have some money and earn money from that money by doing no work, working-people laid off and therefore instantly poorer, crap beer, and less tax.

[The potential merger is between AB InBEv and SABMiller - combined value £180 billion. Lawyers' and accountants' fees to put the merger together, $3billion. (Hilton gives those 2 figures, as I have, in sterling and dollars.)]

Great stuff down at Discover, Stratford, E.London

Something very exciting is brewing at the Discover Centre, in Stratford, East London. I know I'm biased but...

They are building an 'immersive' visit for young children based on several of my books. There are several 'habitats' or 'experiences' - the various sites of 'Bear Hunt', an old classroom (from my era), my grandparents sitting room, a chocolate cake that you can walk into and a 'dread shed'.

In each of these there is the potential just to look at things I've written about turned into an exhibit or tactile experience or read poems relevant to the habitats or write poems triggered off by the exhibits are the 'story-builder-guides' who are on hand to lead workshops.

There'll be a soundscape of sounds, words, parts of poems from me (pre-recorded) as well as some of my vids.

The exhibition is in effect a slice of my mind, which children enter.

I think it'll be a fantastic visit for children with their relatives, friends or - as during their week - with their class. It's the kind of 'education' that I really believe in: exposing children to surprising, challenging places and experiences, encouraging them and helping them create things of their own, in a safe, friendly environment.