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Teaching to the test

by Renegadeparent 5. March 2009 20:19

Apparently maths teachers are now being taught to teach, poor loves.

Ofsted has said that too much of the subject was "taught to the test" and that this did not equip pupils for their futures. So… do parents send children to school to equip them for their futures, or to pass tests? Too many people fail to see a difference between the two, conditioned to believe that life is, by its very definition, a series of boxes to be ticked and hoops to be jumped through.

I find myself in the peculiar position of agreeing with Ofsted. And if what they are saying is true, why the hell do schools continue to test?

Comments

3/5/2009 10:55:22 PM #

It's really teachers who ought to be tested. They're the ones being paid. Also pupils need to know whose classes are worth attending (not that they have much choice).

ThomasR

3/6/2009 7:39:19 AM #

@ThomasR, it's crazy that the Education Act gives parents (and children by implication) virtually unlimited choice, by requiring only that they ensure their child receives a full time education that is suited to their individual needs. But once parents select the state system as a means of delivery for this, consumer choice goes out of the window, and the system itself takes control.

RenegadeParent

3/12/2009 8:08:17 AM #

Perhaps if the State had not confiscated the right to define mass education, we would have enough teachers of maths who actually know enough maths to be able to understand how to teach it. Moreover, and to make it interesting. Trying to interest a 14-y-o, say, in why "Sanjit buys two apples ane 4 packs of biros for £2.20, but Sunita buys 3 apples and 2 packs of biros for £1.60 - find the cost of one of each" is a simultaneous equation pair, is counterproductive. They should be using the Newton-Raphson method of converging solutions to find roots to a polynomial by then - and understanding how this helped astronomers to approximate the planetary orbits.

you will probably have seen our published AQA maths papers for gCSE. They are rather demotivating. the A-level ones are hardl better.

David Davis

3/12/2009 10:03:14 AM #

@David - showing the inter-relatedness and relevance of different disciplines? Now there's a novel idea Sadly, as the papers you published show, education is increasingly about a politicised social agenda, and far less to do with real learning.

Treat a child like an incapable idiot and lo! You will have before your very eyes an incapable idiot. I am very much of the opinion that, as with babies and toddlers, children, young people and adults would be interested in and engaged with pretty much anything they came across, no matter how sophisticated or complex, if only they weren't put off or discouraged at every turn.

Every Child Matters (an insidious policy document that covers all children, like it or not) compels LAs to identify emotional abuse as: "featur[ing] age or developmentally inappropriate expectations being imposed on children. These may include interactions that are beyond the child’s developmental capability..."

I do worry that failing to place the current low-level school "limits" on our child's learning might be deemed "emotional abuse" by an over-zealous LA officer, rather than, say, exposure to hardcore porn. In which case, we are moving country before the state decides to start inspections.