JUNK MAIL FIRST YEAR #15 PUBLISHED: 20 October 2008
it is all down hill from here on in… yeah, right!
I
hope you all had a good break. Term 4 is all down hill as the seniors will be off your hands before you can say ‘The fish and chip shop chap.’ three times — out aloud — in quick succession. Once you’ve marked the senior exams, completed the senior reports and survived prize giving you are then immediately into junior exams, more reports, Y10 prize giving, Wider Living Week, Y9 prize giving, farewell speeches, end of the year Christmas dinner and summer holidays…
Of course you’ll cope! We’re in the only profession where you wind up to wind down for the year...
Oh, by the way, were you successful in repeating the limerick three times???? Try it; it’s mouthful!
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
§ The massey way
School holidays are a great opportunity to tune into talk back radio and hear what the masses think of the current state of education. And as everyone has been ‘educated’ then it is not surprising that everyone seems to have an opinion on education. Often the inspiration for talkback originates from the NZEI or PPTA conferences, which are held in holiday time. 2006 was no exception as the following NZ HERALD article shows:
Threatened teachers 'too frightened to tell principal'
Some teachers are so afraid of being labelled incompetent they are failing to report threats and abuse from students, says the secondary teachers' union.
A report to be presented to the Post-Primary Teachers' Association conference next week says teachers are increasingly facing students with severe behavioural difficulties.
Some schools have hired guards and there have been several high-profile incidents this year, including an Alfriston College teacher punched so hard she needed hospital treatment for facial injuries.
At Waitakere College a 13-year-old boy was stabbed "down to the bone" and the schools sports co-ordinator twice had to break up the fight.
In both cases the police were called. But the new report, Managing Challenging Student Behaviour, suggests violence in some schools is going un-reported.
It says that teachers in some schools are working under a "climate of denial".
In those schools, the usual response of leaders was to blame the teacher, which in turn pressured staff not to refer incidents, or to attempt to deal with them on their own.
The report warns that some teachers may subtly or unsubtly encourage badly behaved students to stay away from the class.
"If this becomes the automatic response of school leadership, it can only be read as a climate of denial that cannot be in the best interests of student learning."
Chris Haines, president of the School Trustees Association, said teachers should go to their principal and, if they were not helped, could approach the board.
"Then it becomes a matter of the performance of the principal," Mr Haines said. "It's their responsibility to manage the school and boards will watch them to make sure they do it."
Secondary Principals' Association head Graham Young said schools needed an open environment. "The 'hide everything in a cupboard' mentality does not belong today. If it exists it is very, very disappointing."
Mr Young said on the whole students were better behaved today than 20 years ago.
"But what we do have are gross behavioural disorders which were not in the classroom 20 years ago because other agencies dealt with them. If they are now the responsibility of schools, is the cheque in the mail?"
The PPTA also says that schools are increasingly serving trespass orders against abusive parents.
In May, the Government announced a $10 million package to combat disruptive classroom behaviour and bullying. The report said that was an admission that schools were struggling to deal with difficult student behaviour.
Reporter: Stuart Dye
NZ Herald
Friday September 22, 2006
Now I’d respectfully disagree with Mr Young’s opinion that ‘on the whole students were better behaved today than 20 years ago’. My own observation is that there are is a higher proportion of disruptive/dysfunctional students now than when I started teaching some 30 years ago. More importantly, however, misbehaviours which once could be described as ‘naughty’, ‘silly’, ‘childish’, ‘immature’ and so on still happen, but they have been augmented by behaviours which now attract labels like ‘malicious’, ‘bordering on criminal’, ‘evil’, ‘drug related’, ‘gang related’ and ‘remorseless’. Compared to some schools we here at Massey are relatively free of such extreme misbehaviour but we are not immune from what happens in our local community.
The ante is on the rise. The regular appearance of a police car in our car park attests to that.
For far too long the pendulum has swung in support of the wrong doer. In society in general and therefore also in our schools (which are just part of society), every excuse, real or imagined, has been trotted out to ‘excuse and explain away’ unacceptable behaviour in the classroom and around the school. Many students have no idea of accountability; freedom, without responsibility, is what seems to rule. Not surprising, many teachers feel that putting in a complaint is ‘not worth the effort’ as the perception is that if anything happens it will be of the wet bus ticket variety. Or teachers are paralysed into inaction by the embarrassment they feel when they are verbally, physically, mentally, academically or sexually harassed or abused.
It will be a sad day when teachers feel so intimidated that they can’t speak up against a student’s misbehaviour. Tolerance is not an option here especially when society shows little consideration, and rightly so, where teachers fall seriously short of professional standards. If some of us feel disinclined to act on our own behalf surely our colleagues need to rally round and offer support. Failure to address such issues sends all the wrong signals to the students, society and the next generation of would-be teachers.
The Massey Way states: Teachers have the right to teach and all students have the right to learn. Neither effective teaching nor learning will happen unless the condition in which education happens is rooted in mutual respect. When that respect is absent, breaks down or is eroded then remedial action is required. If left unaddressed, irrespective of ‘fault’, ‘classes from hell’ can develop with alarming rapidity. Once lost, restoring respect on both sides is both difficult and time consuming. A really good place to start is to uphold the school rules and basic manners.
§ the massey way: part 2
Part of my job, a rapidly increasingly part too, is to follow up on student’s or parental concerns regarding the quality of the teaching happening in a classroom. The Deans handle low-level concerns. More serious allegations result in a request from senior management that I look into what is happening. Such investigations usually involve a discussion with the teacher in question around the concerns expressed by either students or parents, a week of complete lesson observations of the target class, an observation of another class taught by the same teacher and the writing of a report which is distributed to the parties involved. The process is lengthy and hopefully thorough. It is also daunting for the teacher. Invariably the end result, especially where a class has become ‘dysfunctional’, is 20 or more hours of in-class support where the aim is to address the concerns by working with both the teacher and the class to achieve a better working environment. The teacher is invited to reflect on their teaching practices and make any appropriate modifications (I have used a multi-pronged approach in some cases but have had success by simply getting the teacher to welcome the class and use affirmations in one case right through to changing pupils’ attitudes in a positive way in another) while I simultaneously work with the class to minimise behaviours which interfere with the learning or teaching process.
I have yet to find a class where the teacher is solely or even largely responsible for any ‘issues’ arising. I have yet to work with a teacher who, having modified their teaching style, hasn’t experienced success by way of positive outcomes in the classroom.
But I am seeing more and more classes where teaching and learning is proving unnecessarily hard because teachers have not adhered to some basic procedures.
No teacher believes that their job is done once they have delivered ‘the content’. Content has to be planned, packaged up and delivered in appropriate ways and success depends on the variety of skills and strategies that a teacher employs to facilitate both the teaching and learning process. I highlight ‘both’ because in many under-performing or dysfunctional classes the students have lost sight of their active role in the educational process. Students should not be treated as an empty, passive vessel into which teachers daily pour in a measured amount of ‘knowledge’. Education is NOT a spectator sport!
A growing number of students either don’t bring a school bag or bring one inadequate for the role. Such students arrive in class totally lacking in the necessary equipment to actively participate in a standard lesson; they then waste their time, your time and the classes’, time trying to borrow gear. A much larger group of students (I‘ve seen classes where these students make up over 30% of the students) don’t have a complete record of the year’s work. These students often have no exercise book (a history of leaving their exercise book at home results in the teacher ‘keeping’ the students’ exercise books/scrappy notes in class… which creates more problems) so they write their notes on scrap paper or in a compendium exercise book/loose leaf folder that holds notes for all their subjects. Theses notes are not even sorted by subject. In reality, these students eventually lose their exercise book (or it is stolen from the storage box in the classroom) and have no material to build up their knowledge base, they have no notes to refer to when they have forgotten what the teacher taught (yes, this does happen!) and God only knows what they study from at topic test time or exam time. Busy teachers (or teachers constantly distracted by disruptive students) often fail to see that many students in the class aren’t actually copying the notes down at all. A Y11 student I recently ‘worked with’ complained that the teacher was making the class copy down “piles” of notes. Over three lessons I noted that the teacher was expecting about one and a half pages of written work in a standard 1B5 exercise book per lesson (hardly a slave driver!) while the complaining pupil was randomly ‘editing’ the teacher’s notes down to what she felt was necessary which equated to a rate
of 1 word every 3 minutes. Her parents were not amused when I sent home the evidence of this alleged ‘slave driving’. The poor/inadequate/non-existent notes that many students have causes havoc in all subjects but is especially crucial in sequential subjects like maths and science. In one class last term several students in maths made accusations that the teacher ‘couldn’t teach’. These students constantly wanted one-on-one in-class explanations of whatever was being taught, as they couldn’t understand the original explanation. These very vocal and demanding students used up a hugely disproportionate amount of the teacher’s time, which simultaneously deprived other students of their fair share of the teacher’s attention. I pointed out to the parents that all but one of the complaining students had no record of notes from previous lessons (and the one who did have notes had less than 20% of the notes the top student had and none of the 28 hand outs that the teacher had given out so far this year!). These students (and their parents) were also ‘astounded’ when I showed them some data on the amount of time they had wasted coming to class late on a regular basis and then chatted away while the teacher was explaining the theory.
Then there are the students who ‘attend’ classes and may even take down some notes, but like the neglected pot plant in the corner of the room that they simply occupy a space for the whole of the lesson (and all the rest of this year’s course). And like the plant they have no idea of what is going on. Often these are spectators in you room. They are the ‘can’t do it/don’t understand it/it’s too hard’ type of student. These students believe in educational osmosis theory which states that if you attend class, stay awake, record the notes then that ought to be sufficient expenditure of effort and energy on their part in the educational process and if they “don’t get it” after such an expenditure of energy then either the teacher is incompetent or the content is rocket science and therefore beyond them. A student, again in maths, moaned to me (and his parents) that the teacher had not taught powers adequately. The teacher’s notes (which the pupil had written down) clearly explained that when you multiply powers like x2 times x3 you simply (well I think it is simple!!!) add the powers (for those of you mathematically challenged the power is the number in superscript like x2 meaning ‘x squared’). The teacher’s notes not only explained how to multiply powers but also included four worked examples for reference purposes. The teacher checked that the class understood what was taught and then set the class to do 10 examples. The student immediately put up his hand and blurted, “I can’t do it. Come here and show me what to do.”
I arrived at this pupil’s desk before the teacher. I checked that he’d had accurately copied down the notes (he had) then instead of giving him the answer or help (instant fix?) that he sought I asked him to READ his notes. When he had finished, I asked him, and then checked, if there were any words he didn’t understand in the teacher’s notes and there were none so I urged the boy to follow the instructions and do example 1. He did it, correctly. I congratulated him and suggested he now do example 2 which he did and again he did it correctly. When he succeeded with example 3 he burst into a wide smile and stated, “Gosh is that it!? This is easy!!!” Do’h!