Eastern Angle
Eastern Angle
Eastern Angle
In February 2012 I began a new column for the East Anglian Daily Times’s new education supplement. Since I’m writing for an audience of non-specialists, I went for a more direct style. Here’s the column from Wed 29 Feb:
Suffocation
When I first moved here from Yorkshire, a colleague took me aside and muttered darkly: “Watch out that you don’t suffocate.”
Suffocate? It seemed an unexpected bit of advice. Then I ‘got’ it: she was warning me against ‘Suffolk-ation’.
Even 200 miles away there was a feeling that Suffolk was so enticing as a county, such a comfortable place to live and work in, that it might prove the scrapheap of ambition. Move down here, she implied, and I’d stop breathing.
Suffolk was then – and remains - a place whose ranking in national league tables has frequently lagged behind our statistical neighbours, those other rural counties like Cornwall and Norfolk we’re compared against.
And given our apparent advantages – pleasant environment, well-maintained schools and no inner cities - it’s not hard to see where the reputation for Suffolkation (aka complacency) came from.
But now Suffolk has now got itself a different reputation as a veritable laboratory of educational experimentation. Frenzied free school ambitions are being stitched together into business plans, as if Dr Frankenstein was doing overtime.
There’s lots of windy rhetoric about the good this will do and lots of quoting places like Sweden that apparently we should aim to emulate.
We shall see.
My own view is that if people want to set up their own schools, that’s fine. But I don’t see why they should be given my money as a taxpayer to do it, especially if it runs the risk of leaving some more disadvantaged communities with schools that can’t be sustained.
These aren’t cans of beans we’re producing: they are children with a single chance of success. And here in Suffolk we ought to feel a commitment to all our youngsters, not just those in the more privileged places that the free schools seem to favour.
Teaching skills
If you were back in school as a pupil, how long do you reckon it would take for you to decide whether a new teacher is any good or not? End of the first week? First lesson? First few minutes?
From America there’s a fascinating bit of research in Malcolm Gladwell’s entertaining book, Blink. It’s an account of how our first impressions are often much more reliable that we might think.
For example, Gladwell quotes John Gottman, the American marriage counsellor, who can analyse an hour of a husband and wife talking and predict with 95% accuracy whether they will still be married fifteen years later. It’s as unnerving as it is impressive.
Then there’s tennis coach Vic Braden who can spot a player’s double-fault before the player has actually hit the ball for the second time.
It’s what Gladwell calls ‘thin-slicing’ – an ability to make laser-like judgements based on rapid impressions.
So how long does it take a class of pupils to decide whether a teacher is any good? Based on experiments in the USA in which students watch a ten-second video clip of teachers without any sound, Gladwell reports that pupils make unerring assessments of teachers very quickly. In fact, ten seconds proves unnecessarily long.
Gladwell’s theory: pupils can tell the quality of a teacher with astonishing accuracy in just two seconds.
It’s why great schools spend their time training teachers in the ‘how’ of the classroom – how to open the door, how to stand – and not just in the knowledge teachers need.
After all, we’ve all been taught by the cleverest teachers in the universe whose actual teaching skills were dreadful.
Big words
I’ve been teaching English for some 27 years. In that time, one view hasn’t changed about writing. It’s the assumption that to write better you have to use bigger words and longer sentences.
When I was a young rookie English teacher in Leeds in the mid-80s, I saw this for the first time.
I asked a class to write a story. Fifth year Helen brought hers out to the teacher’s desk and I read the opening sentence: ‘The golden orb beat down furiously from within the azure wilderness’.
I cleared my throat. ‘Er, it’s interesting,” I remember saying, “but what does it mean?”
Helen looked at me as if I was dim, then stated loudly in her brash east Leeds accent: “The sun was shining”.
Sometimes in writing, as in life, less is more.
Geoff Barton
EADT
29 February 2012
Friday, 2 March 2012