Vocal Voices

Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, wants all pupils to know their times tables by the time they leave primary school, and that they should know correct punctuation, spelling and grammar.

They have to do all that by age 11! Exactly how far has education slipped over the years?

There is also a need to be able to do multiplication and long division!

Key Stage Two tests already include questions on times tables and long division but pupils are not required to answer them correctly.

Pardon?

I did check that it was February the 1st and not April the 1st.

We were doing all those things by year 4 as well as working in lbs and oz, £.s.d, inches, feet, yards and miles. We did decimals, fractions and percentages, and we did it all without calculators.

Ah WM, but we did it the wrong way!

Sitting in class, all chanting together in unison "Two twos are four, two threes are six, two fours are eight.." etc worked, but it worked unacceptably for educational "experts".

Far better for children to learn creatively, exploring their own abilities etc etc in the right manner, rather than be restricted by inappropriate ways of learning. (Even if they worked..)

I remember decimalisation. It was going to turn us into a national of mathematical geniuses because our children would no longer be confused with units of twelves, sixteens, fourteens and twenties - everything was going to be in logical units of ten.

How do we reckon that panned out, Lol!

That says it all really

Yes, and if you spelt a word wrong, you had to write it out 100 times till you'd memorised it correctly.

In my case - I can still remember this - it was "ambulance" ....

Nowadays I guess you just get hold of a spell-checker.

Cromwell, I have been reading the comments and the mantra "Rote learning bad" is still being trotted out by those keen to let us know that they are teachers, were teachers or some other education worker.

What they have forgotten, or probably never knew, because their trendy teaching colleges never taught them, is that rote learning is the tool used by babies, toddlers and infants to learn about life and the world abort them long before they could use creative or cognitive learning. It was how they learned the basics of language and how to talk. It is how they came to notice the difference between different types of good and bad. It is how buttons and shoelaces began to be mastered.

It is such a useful tool that we use it throughout our lives whenever we try new things - we practice, practice, practice doing the same thing over again till we master it. A new formula in physics - keep repeating it till it is lodged in. Studying for an exam, keep going over the dates, the facts, till they are all crammed in.

It would be easy to creatively teach the science behind driving a nail in. We could learn about speed, force, velocity, kinetic energy, point pressure, but I can assure everyone that the first time anyone goes to drive a nail in,one being held between their finger and thumb, they will do it gently, very gently. They will keep doing it gently, over and over, until they are confident enough to put a bit of elbow into it. During that time all the interesting science will have been forgotten or ignored.

So true!

Mrs S' last school was a primary and community school. In the end she went for and got, a community teacher job. This meant she had a split role, 50% teaching and 50% community including running the community school sessions and running the summer playschool. It worked very well as she managed to get a lot of holiday and extra time back for the community work.

However, she used to hold sessions with the PTA mums in the classrooms. One of the Mum's looked at the wall and the work, clearly put there by the teacher, had 3 clear spelling mistakes in it. Really serious one's too. The parents took it to the head and the teacher was taken aside and told that nothing goes on the wall without being checked in the dictionary.

Simply put there is at least one generation and probably another coming up, which didn't learn to spell. Now they are teachers who can't spell and don't see the need to teach children to spell either. Eventually these generations will rise to the top and be making policy....

Set a low standard and fail to achieve it.... Seems to be the general way with education today. It's only being highlighted now because they've stopped lowering standards and are now raising them again.

i know a retired teacher who can't spell and does not know the difference between to,too,two, and says " it's not important to know that" !!!!!

What I learned at junior school has stood me in good stead all my life,
and those tables I learned by repetition are still up in my brain-box, and
are still useful today on occasions. I am surprised how many adults today
are incapable of working out simple arithmetical problems in their heads.

Even obsolete things like '40 pence are three and fourpence' I still find
useful, because 40 inches are three foot four inches. (I haven't gone fully
metric yet!)

Why the hell don't they let senior citizens run the country instead of these
young whipper-snappers whose only attribute is there ability to play about
with smartphones?

Ah because it would never change.

I was too slow with one of my staff sergeant's when I joined the TA after leaving the Army. When doing NBC (Nuclear Biological and Chemical), drills I stated that it had changed since I was in the regulars. The staff sergeant had a small tantrum and ranted that "It had not changed it had Evolved". What I should have said was that you can have change without evolution but you can't have evolution without change.

What I see today, in government, is change without evolution. Or change for change's sake. Or a dead end evolution if you like....

If you think about it, for quite a long time, there has been a determined effort to make the general population less intelligent, less aware and less capable. Probably because aware, capable and intelligent people ask difficult questions and want quality answers. Something our great leaders are, in order, both unwilling and incapable of giving an answer.

I don't see the quality of general education going up any time soon. That particular little ambition is dying a death. Is a street sweeper more happy with or without a degree? But a street sweeper needs to be able to read, write, count and talk intelligently. Something the focus of the education system is drawing away from.

As for counting in your head? I've never really been able to do that even before the advent of calculators. That is not my skill set. My skill set is physical and logical mechanical constructs. One of the reasons I'm fairly good with computers, they're logical mechanical constructs. Sadly my world has moved me to Project Management where I'd be much better off as an accountant. I find it significantly harder than planning and designing the environment for 3,000 servers in 80 countries with quality working for all the users and closed security. Boring too.

Such is life. Remember that every time a government makes a big noise about Education, but does nothing to improve standards, they are lying to you. BTW, that's not this one.