The crap they're teaching your kids!

[Dandontdare]

I was actually taught to read using that bizarre phonetic alphabet - it was called ITC or ICA or some such acronym - anyone remember it? Seemed to work for me, but I think it has been totally discredited and abandoned now. Once we'd got the hang of printed letters, in class 3 (age 7) the formidable Mrs Duckworth taught us joined-up writing to a strict and precise formula. A lower case k did indeed have a closed loop and a lower case s was rather odd too, but it was made clear that these variations were only used in handwriting. Your nephew's teacher sounds like an idiot. All my younger relatives talk about "curly cuh and kicking kuh" to differentiate C and K, which seems to be common today.

Now, can we PLEASE get back to girls flashing their jigglies?

[Dandontdare]

There's gabber for you.
//http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd8E4GPdu4k&feature=related
And some industrial techno - possibly not work safe. 'Hardcore M*****f*****' by Ultraviolence.
//http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utNoKNQL_DU

Jeez, I now know what to say if ever invited to a Gabber night, and it ain't 'ooh, yes please'!

[House of Usher]

My nephew is 5yrs old and can't recognise the letter k. Why you ask? Well his teacher very helpfully gave the kids in her clas a set of homemade primer cards-one for each letter of the alphabet- to keep in their take home wallets.She'd printed them off from a compter. However, she'd taken a marker pen and changed all the k's by hand. She'd joined the top of the k to the end of the top leg. She'd turned it into an R. Now, when he sees an R he thinks it's a k and when he ses a k he doesn't recognise it at all. Whats that about? Didn't the fact that she'd had to change them by hand-presumably because she couldn't find a font willing to write a k as an R- give her a clue that maybe this wasn't the best idea.

I'm very sorry to hear it. The problem with teacher training nowadays is they emphasize putting current thinking into practice and effectively transforming teaching into a mechanistic activity (pulling levers and following flowcharts and checklists and auditing every step of the process). Teachers, like so many 'knowledge workers', are now expected, and expect, to be trained not educated. They are trained to expect to be told what to do and how to do it, and to be given procedures to follow instead of relying on their own instincts, knowledge and best judgement. Thus, they are not told "teach children to read", they are told "teach children to read this way", because it's the currently orthodox way of doing it. It's a good illustration of what Weber meant when he said bureaucracy is necessary for big and complex systems to work, but eventually it starts throwing up irrational and perverse outcomes. If teachers were allowed to use their own judgement about teaching methods you would get good and bad teaching. Of course we want to stamp out bad teaching. But the bureaucratic mechanism for stamping out bad teaching is to promote uniformity. The irrational outcome of standardized teaching, which raises the standards of the worst teachers, is that it wipes out good teaching along with the bad.

Your nephew's teacher sounds like a bad teacher who thinks good teaching comes from doing whatever the experts say you should do. You don't become a good teacher by following the set of instructions. You become a good teacher by learning to intuit the best way of getting the learning across to your students.

[Paul faplad Finch]

Works for me

[Jim_Campbell]

And some industrial techno - possibly not work safe. 'Hardcore M*****f*****' by Ultraviolence.

Hah! I actually knew Jon Casey when he was starting out, and have a white label copy of his first 12" -- Shout -- knocking about the place somewhere.

Cheers

Jim

[Paul faplad Finch]

My last post makes it seem that I'm blowing off an intelligent response to my comments. Sorry about that. I was actually talking about getting back to girls jigglies when I said  it worked for me and completely blanked on the fact that others had posted in the meantime.

Glad I'm not the only one to think that her teaching methods are flawed. Tragedy is that h's a bright lad who's eager to learn but this, amongst other issues at his schol, is causing him no end of frustration

[House of Usher]

Glad I'm not the only one to think that her teaching methods are flawed. Tragedy is that h's a bright lad who's eager to learn but this, amongst other issues at his schol, is causing him no end of frustration

Well, try this one on for size! Whereas we used to learn times tables in primary school (the evil 'learning by rote'), nowadays they teach them to 'count in fives': 5, 10, 15, 20, etc. A school teacher recently told me about how her class was learning to count in fives and had only got up to 20 so far. They would be getting to 50 next week. I don't get it! Why is she preserving the mystery of what comes after 20? All they need to learn is a rule, and they can work the rest out for themselves: 80, 85, 90, 95, 100. Then when you get to 100 you need a new rule, which goes "ninety-nine, a hundred, a hundred and..."

When I was at school, not having been taught the rule for what happened after 100 led me to imagine that what came after 100 was 200. No-one had taught me about "a hundred and...", so I just used my imagination and came up with the wrong answer. But when I made that mistake it showed I was ready to learn something else.

They seem to make things needlessly complicated by breaking things down into so many components.

[Roger Godpleton]

Just noticed you were all talking about me not so long ago and I think you should all go back to talking about me.

History at school for me was Nazis, Nazis, Nazis. I also found out recently that my inspirational history teacher is actually a bit of a twat. For one thing, he had an affair with another faculty member. I know that grown-ups do that kind of thing but goddamnit teachers having sex with each other is just creepy and gross. Also he had a kid and his wife was a childhood sweetheart or something. Also he has pictures of Che Guevara on his lightswitches.

University provided with me with possibly the most defining moment of my life when my second year marks came back and I got a load of 68s and 69s (This is the overall mark for the class BTW) but not one single 70. I pretty much kicked ass for the entire fucking third year but I was still never going to get a first and I wouldn't get to join the completely unattainable hot girl in the smart kids club and that bald twat SU president and his creepy Irish sidekick would.

[Paul faplad Finch]

Just been re-reading this thread and I can't help but notice that a discussion of educational standards has inspired me to make a shedload of spelling mistakes in almost every post. Tad ironic but there you go.

Unlike Godpleton I don't seem to have any really lasting memories of any of my teachers. The only one I really remember was my English Lit GCSE teacher who had the unmitigated gall to refuse to back down in the face of my utter disdain for the course she was teaching. Maybe it was her methods or maybe it was my attitude but that course came perilously close to killing my love of reading stone dead. It did introduce me to Mockingbird though so it wasn't all bad.

[SuperSurfer]

Speaking of teaching and Nazis, this is what went on in the fourth year of my junior school.

My teacher used to keep an extra pair of "slippers" (white plimsoles) in the cupboard, one size up from the size of his stinkers. This one size up pair of plimsoles was for whacking kids with.

But that's nothing. When the class was unruly, the following was his method of getting the class to calm down. He had a collection of knives and pen knives in his desk drawer, which he would keep unlocked! He was a WWII veteran and had told me and my friends the captivating story of when they had caned the Germans in a battle and were moving from the lines. He passed a dead German soldier and looking at the dead soldier's dagger, he thought to himself "this chap won't need that" and took it as a souvenir. So he would actually keep this Nazis dagger with large swastika on the handle in his unlocked drawer in the classroom. So to calm the class down he would lean forward, stare at us, put his hand in the drawer, find the Nazi dagger and still looking at us, hold it to the side of his desk from the swastika and let it go. It would fall into the floor, going in by about 3/4 of an inch. I guess it was supposed to terrify us but we thought it was cool.

True story.

Old Mr ****** was a decent chap though. He was forever in my good books. He would let us draw pictures of whatever we wanted in art, so me and my buddies would pretty much only draw superheroes and comic characters for one year's worth of art classes. He thought they were great and the class was completely plastered round three walls above the picture rail with mainly my comic drawings. I still have them, nearly all copies from Marvel comics with the odd one or two from the funnies. I guess he was the only teacher/tutor I ever came across that rated comic art.

Just shocking how they would leave our education to the whims of such characters back then.

[Proudhuff]

Gabba?

as in Gabbagabbahey!?

[TheEdge]

"Romeo and juliet" asshattery of the greatest order

If they didn't show you the Zeffirelli film, then they want shooting. If they did and that's still your response, then you have no soul.

Cheers

Jim.

No films in english except for Redford in Gatsby,


 n history however i saw hunt for red october, top gun and stuff like Nicholas and alexandre and sobibor colditz etc, proper awsome movies.

In religious education we had rthe freakiest hippy type teacher who was luckily a star wars fanatic so you were guaranteed a viewing once every so often,

[TheEdge]

As for Catch-22, you think you should dislike Yossarian because he doesn't want to die?

Your mouth is full of all kinds of wrong.

I'm sorry but lots of people dont want to die, but some of the stunts he pulled were not only cowardly but if caught i'm pretty sure during the WAR Death would have been the penalty.

What would have happened if Guy GIbson and a couple of his boys decided on the night of the Dambusters Raids that they would fake a radio failure.

Another thing Dropping payloads off TARGET so you can turn back early, this would probably cause huge civilian casualties. ( not that on target wouldnt, but on target would prob be a factory or a military site)

[Jim_Campbell]

[
 n history however i saw hunt for red october, top gun

Jesus.

Fucking.

Christ.

...

Jim

[TheEdge]

[
 n history however i saw hunt for red october, top gun

Jesus.

Fucking.

Christ.

...

Jim

None of them for historical purposes i might add Just on those half days before holidays as treats to shut us up.