The Invisible Child
I am the invisible child
More often than not I am not present
I am the quiet pause in the register between Price and Tate
Not ‘she’s ill miss’ or ‘she’s gone to the dentist’, but silent acknowledgement
That I won’t arrive, the red circles that mess up the neat black lines
Sometimes, once a term, when there’s forms to fill, they make my mum bring me all the way in
She sulks at the cost of the cab and the extra fags we both need for the stress
I keep myself to myself with crafted style,
In a space they normally stack with texts.
Can you scratch a face in tippex and pretend to write all at once?
I’m good at that – and unpicking the stitches on other people’s bags
They sent my report home once
In a brown paper envelope marked
‘Private and Confidential’
What’s this?
I don’t know?
Is it bad?
Have a look?
What does it all mean?
It means they don’t know who I am
Fiona Ingram
[ view entry ] ( 46 views ) | permalink |
( 3 / 13 )Last Thursday, on a beautifully sunny 1st of March, we held our MLS Development Day at the wonderful Fisher Theatre in Bungay. Around the room were some of the most qualified and experienced educators in the country, many of them engaged in teaching and leadership as well as cutting edge (e-learning, app development, animation) and creative pursuits (screenwriting, theatre, poetry, international development) on a daily basis.
Our focus was to think about the achievement of girls and how leadership can benefit young people and adults alike. Improving the achievement of boys has long been on the list of teacher’s professional development courses – the pacifier for girls being, ‘everything that improves the achievement of boys also improves the achievement of girls’. Well, frankly, this is a bit of a platitude. It is one thing to acknowledge that girls’ GCSE and AS/A level results are better, but what about the big wide world?
‘There continue to be striking gender differences with regard to patterns of subject preference and choice (with implications for post-16 and occupational trajectories). Crucially, the role of educational institutions in perpetuating gender difference is largely ignored.’ (TES April 2010). In other words, girls are still encouraged to take hairdressing and health whilst boys move into wellpaid IT jobs. Numbers of women on boards of top companies are still small, although this is improving since the FTSE top 100 set themselves targets – though even in a more stereotypically female arena, The Arts, the mean average wage for men is £23,492 whilst for women it is £19,334 (The Guardian, 5th March, 2012). The number of women out of work is at its highest since 1988 – and cuts are biting hard on women, especially in the public sector. …and of course Middle class boys outperform working class girls.
A focus on leadership can really help here. At a young age, girls and boys can step up and learn the skills that will enable them to solve problems, find creative solutions, get the best out of others, set themselves up as role models, learn the language of achievement and self confidence. It’s a winner for teachers too – with positive, motivated, well-rounded students who look to gain the most out of every experience. The great work that has been done through P.E leadership programmes and Young Ambassadors should not fall by the wayside after London 2012 but be part of the great legacy that it leaves behind. Our vision is that young people have a real voice in our communities, about the environment, about health, nutrition, politics, relationships and that these things really matter.
So as 16 creative women share their great ideas and work together for a positive future for our young people at MLS, we also celebrate International Women’s Day this week, with their apt slogan ‘Connecting girls, Inspiring Futures’.
[ view entry ] ( 93 views ) | permalink |
( 3 / 49 )I once took a course in Roman History as part of an arts degree. It was the dullest learning experience of my life. The gist of it was basically, over a ten-week term, learn everything you can about the Roman Empire and then have a three-hour exam at the end. I’ve been put off Roman history for life.
I was pleased then when my daughter's first experience of learning about World War II was a much richer one. For years and years, teachers have been striving to harness kinaesthetic, visual and auditory learning styles - but still too often it's chalk and talk. So for the rest of this blog over to my 9 year old who has words to say about her first (very interactive) experience of learning about WW2.
When you were evacuated and you had to go off, they chose the ones they thought would be useful. Can you imagine! It was really interesting wearing the clothes from the 1940s and realising that the children had to have their gas mask and box with them at all times. Dressing up helped us in literacy too, we had to write a first person account actually thinking like you were a person in WW2.
We did lots of making too, in DT we had to make an Anderson shelter – I had pieces of wood and sawed them into the right measurements, 14cm etc, and gluing with PVA. We put goggles on because of the sawdust. I made some bunk beds to go in my Anderson shelter with a bit of woodwork help from my dad. We also made rag rugs because they had to use old scraps of material for everything.
All the parents came in and we sang them Songs, WW2 songs, Run Rabbit Run and Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B, I saw some film of the Andrews sisters too. The parents could ask us questions about what we had learnt and we showed them our rag rugs and things we had made.
It was fun trying out being an evacuee, experiencing it yourself makes you think ‘ hang on a minute’, it’s not quite as simple as you thought, you get a bit more information, you get the feelings – when you read about it it’s not enough, when you experience it it gets you thinking a bit more. When we were doing a dance based on
listening to the air raid sirens, it made me realise that it was a horrible experience for people at the time, like a howling wail.... it was real, it's real fear, not just pretend.
Mr Gove, please take note.
[ view entry ] ( 90 views ) | permalink |
( 3 / 33 )Finland has recently been lauded as a beacon of educational excellence by all and sundry, including our Government. Finland ranked second only after Korea in a world table of OECD countries for attainment in English, Maths and Science. England was at best 13th and as low as 24th in some areas. While many other countries are progressing up the world league tables, if English education system was a football team we’d be in the relegation zone.
With cherry picking from the world’s ‘best’ education systems being part of the current curriculum review – are we really looking at Finland’s success through a smudgy lens?
Let’s look at a few of the reasons Finland does so well educationally. For starters, full time education doesn’t start until a child is seven years old, with free childcare available for all who need it. Stop and think about that for a moment… it’s a colossal difference to the way our society, schools and families are set up.
In Finland, all full time students get a free school lunch that provides 1/3rd of a child’s daily nutritional value. Jamie – imagine how chuffed you’d be if we could say the same about our school lunches? Schools in Finland are comprehensive, free, local and class sizes rarely rise above 20.
At the chalk face, Finland enjoys a very small national curriculum and teachers are trained in school by specially skilled professionals, nicely linking theory and practice on the job.
The Finnish national curriculum is not small because of some desire to remove state intervention but because teachers are trusted and respected to do their own thing where appropriate. Alas, this level of autonomy is not afforded to our teachers, either in terms of financial reward or freedom to teach what it is that works best. Why? Because education provision became the political tool of choice several decades ago and we let it happen. Result? It’s too dangerous to trust teachers to do their jobs.
Until we begin to raise the level of respect we have for our teachers - which requires the recruitment of excellent candidates who can look forward to a high salary and good working conditions - tinkering at the level of national curriculum minutiae will not change a thing – except make teachers feel even more sharply the increasing burden of change. It certainly won’t transform us into Finland.
[ view entry ] ( 54 views ) | permalink |
( 3.1 / 38 )Due to increased business, we are looking for new writers. If you are an experienced teacher with a desire to write refreshingly different teaching and learning resources contact h.mason@multiplelearningsolutions.co.uk
[ view entry ] ( 105 views ) | permalink |
( 3 / 92 )