you may turn your paper over now…

Printed out some graph paper as weve finished the jotters like that and off we went. Did the equations here and I think everyone understood it quite well. It’s with something like this that the one to one – or one to two in our case – teaching really come into it’s own. Any little mistake or misunderstanding is caught at once before it becomes a practiced error. I remember sitting in maths explaining pythagoras to people around me, who didn’t understand the teacher’s explanation and getting into trouble for it… I don’t get into trouble now, it’s great

We also played Trilemma, which has been such a well used game, love it’s revision value, and meditated (flying free as a bird) and did some contemporary dance today – they liked the contractions :)

Band of Brothers raised lots of discussion and questions – were working our way through it, it’s long. Charlotte won Geniass again – developing our own way of playing it where we go over all the levels of questions and look up further detail in books after. Learned quite a bit about Sikhism today from this book. Then on with some music practice – great little book that with facts about the composers and pieces throughout.

Thinking about Geniass and how all resources associated with the national curriculum seem to be a dumbed down version of learning. Here’s the brief answer you need for the exam, and no more. Kind of well named game then :) The assing around today was funny though – Daniel had to give a speech persuading us why he should be prime minister. Granted he would undoubtedly be better than the present lot but should ‘traffic on Hebridean islands’ have been a key issue?

Back to exams – they keep coming up in conversation this week. Firstly our financial advisor was out to see the house he helped us buy. He was talking about the way schools treat kids, manipulating of league tables, kids leaving school with no respect for adults, and how dumbed down the exams are. It’s very confusing for employers – a huge list of exams or even a degree does not always mean the person can read/write/add up at basic levels (and this is essential for some jobs eg. writing down/deciding medication doses etc.). Another friend told me about some application forms for jobs she had insisting on them being hand written and how some interviews now include a basic test on reading, writing and maths regardless of qualifications held. Another HE friend had been looking at the English GCSE for her daughter but found it didn’t teach grammar anymore so wouldn’t actually be appropriate for the kind of learning they were looking for. This gradual process of making the exams easier has been happening for a while. My year at school were the first that were meant to take Standard Grade maths and English (these replaced our old Scottish O grades much like O levels). So that’s the syllabus we studied. However the teachers were cross about it and kept going on strike (I loved all the days off). So we took the O Grades in the end but most people failed the maths because the standard grade stuff we’d studied didn’t cover all the subjects in the O. Can you imagine the critisism if a home educator were to do this? I don’t think anyone complained about the school doing it – that’s how ingrained the idea that ‘schools are right whatever’ is/was. There was a bit of a who-hah last year when it came out that one of the standard grade maths papers could be passed with 38% correct… then it came out that that’s fairly common and people stopped talking about it. Let’s not go there, we might make people think…

Scotland st. School Museum Glasgow - school as a historical exhibit!

What’s going to happen to the British education system, what’s left of it? And (never start a sentence with and!) to say were not going down an exam centered route in the near future. If the children want to do them at some point they obviously can (believe me Daniel seems to know the GCSE stuff very well already!) but we’ll see what they want to do with their lives. No league table to worry about or trying to fit in what you want to do with a school timetable, having to give up subjects you like… (physics is not a girl’s subject dear,  *patronising sigh*) so the examination is over, I’ll put down my pen (mouse) and back away from the paper (screen).

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