Not your typical Summer. The whole school holidays it rained with only a few days of complete sunshine. Then at the end we got a week of sunshine. Yesterday was hot and the aircon was on in the office for my first day back at school. Today we didn’t use it and tonight its back to being a bit chilly. The bright summery faces of new Year 7’s cheered me up no end. Excited to be in high school, a little scared, some very prepared, some without even a book to write in. I gave them books. I’m only the literacy tutor, they weren’t my classes. Was I over the top with my enthusiasm? I hope not.
This is going to be, I believe, my last year of teaching. I am a dinosaur, a troglodyte who keeps getting dragged kicking and screaming through new programs and acronyms enough to make your eyeballs fallout. You gotta give the Dept. credit for the bean counters who rebadge the same things every year, except that most of them are now educational companies in on the take. Nothing, repeat nothing will replace a teacher with a Degree, commonsense and experience of child behaviour and learning. You can throw all the data you like at us but it doesn’t take a teacher’s observation of student writing and reading long to see where they fit on a continuum from competent to struggling. Give us resources that are easily reproducible not the latest online assessment. I’m all for hands on , not brains captured by a screen, well not for too long anyway. I’m not such a Luddite that I don’t see the value of google but I am still in love with books. Again and again we are realising- well I didn’t need to- that books capture the child and give them the ideas and the structure of language that a deprived background cannot give them.
I will give you an example- I was small group tutoring last year. I gave them a writing exercise about a ‘Holiday at the Snow’. I added a word bank of words associated with snow sports and the experience of snow. These were the only nouns they used in their paragraphs because none of these kids had ever been taken to see the snow because in Australia that is a wealthy family’s holiday and we don’t get snow where we live. They were better writers for ‘A day at the Beach’ because the sea is less than an hour’s drive away. They had experienced going to the beach.
This is one of the unhappy effects of the covid-19 pandemic on our students- no excursions. Kids who are not taken to new places have limited experience and those limitations are reflected in their writing and their thinking. Books can fill in a gap for information about experiences but they don’t fill the mind with a memory like splashing your feet in the waves as you walk along the shore.
So, parents out there, take your kids to new places. Catch a train, take the car for a Sunday drive, take them to a new restaurant and buy them books- they cost very little secondhand. Your child’s ideas, their thinking need stimulation from books and from experiences not the dulling down *’soma’ of the screen.
*’soma’ was the drug used in Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ to keep everyone happy in the highly regulated social stratum of that society. One of the classic ‘must reads’ for older teenagers and adults
au revior
mes amies!
amundr 