I shouldn't say it, after all it might get back to the wrong people and lose me my job, but sometimes I get profoundly depressed about teaching and education.It's not when I'm actually standing in front of a class, and it's not usually when I'm doing the associated preparation, and it's only rarely when I'm doing the apparently endless admin. No, it's usually when I'm off at some obligatory training.
Last week we had some obligatory training. Each of the three sessions I attended, in it's own way, depressed me a little bit further.
The first session was actually quite fun. We played with wireless keyboards, digital voice recorders, smart boards, digital cameras and so on. No two ways about it, it was fun. Nevertheless it depressed me. It depressed me because it seems to me that in our headlong rush towards embracing every bit of new technology that is thrown at us we seem to be forgetting what teaching is actually meant to be about. Let's get right down to basics. Teaching is this: one person has some knowledge or a skill, one or more others don't, the one who does attempts to transfer that knowledge or skill to the ones who don't.
You can use whatever tools you like but it doesn't change the actual purpose of the job. Now I teach people, who don't speak English, how to speak English. That's the skill I have that they don't. The technology is nothing more than toys. I have a use for some bits of it and I have no use for other bits of it. But the prevailing thinking seems to be that all technology is good technology, that if I choose to teach using a board and a marker then I am somehow failing my students. I'm sorry, I disagree. In my classes there are students that like computers and technology and students that don't. I have one student who wants to be a sound engineer and will happily play with any bit of electrical equipment I hand over. I have another who after eight weeks of trying STILL can't even manage to turn on the computer. And why should she? I'm not there to teach them how to use computers. I'm there to teach them English. Forcing computers onto everybody is a ridiculous idea and I've lost count of the number of times I've been forced to defend a policy that I don't believe in, in the face of questions like "Why are we wasting our time on computers when I came here to learn English?"
I don't need all these toys to teach and for the most part the students don't want them.
On then to part two and one of my own favourite betes noire, the cult of the individual. The second piece of training was about preparing for an inspection and focussed largely on ILPs. Let me say from the outset that I believe absolutely and without question that it is important to know and respond to your students as individuals. I believe you should get to know their strengths and weaknesses, their likes and dislikes, their preferred learning styles. I also believe that it is the gravest and most fundamental of errors to believe that you can teach a class of twenty people by perceiving it as twenty separate units rather than one single entity. And that's what's wrong with the whole concept of Individual Learning Plans. The idea that there is time to give each student a twenty to thirty minute tutorial once every six weeks and in that tutorial set separate goals and separate time frames (don't get me started on SMART targets) and then teach your class in such a way that those goals are achieved, monitored and marked is beyond ludicrous. It's flat out impossible. There are only twenty four hours in a day and you cannot teach twenty sets of individual goals without teaching each student for ten minutes and neglecting him for the rest of the lesson. In the training I heard people claiming that they do it and do you know what? I don't believe them.
Whenever we have training on this subject most people seem to nod a lot and say what a great idea it all is and how, if they didn't do it before, they certainly will now. And I NEVER believe them. I try very hard never to believe anything that is actually impossible. The few people that I know with certainty agree with me on this invariably remain silent in this training. Others go along with the assertions of the trainers no matter how far from reality they stray. Everybody is scared that voicing contrary thoughts will be seen as the kind of negative thinking that will be frowned upon and could, in extreme circumstances lose them their jobs. Agree or shut up are the only choices available. And that's what depresses me here.
And so to the third and final piece of training, the Government's laudable, Every Child Matters agenda. For those who don't know I should point out that even though I teach adults the principal applies not just to children but to "vulnerable adults" which, by definition, includes those who cannot speak English. There is nothing much to disagree with in the policy unless it's that it should really say "Every Student Matters". The five principals are entirely uncontentious; every child has a right to be healthy, stay safe, enjoy and achieve, make a positive contribution, achieve economic well-being. All that is fine. There are two things about such training that depress me. The first is only mild. Is the training really telling us anything that isn't just a matter of common sense? It's just an attempt to codify something that we all do every day anyway. So far it's not much of a problem. The more depressing thing is the obsession with not just codifying things but with documenting the minutiae of everything we do. Made a phone call to the housing authorities on behalf of a student? Write it down, record it, annotate it. Helped a student get a bus pass? Write it down, record it, annotate it. Something in your lesson plan that could be construed as fitting one of those categories? Make sure it's documented as such on the plan. Nothing in the plan that does the trick? Change the plan to make sure there is something.
I help my students on all five of those "rights" every day. If I have to spend hours writing it all down will I be more or less inclined to do it in the first place? What do you think? As I said before there are only twenty four hours in a day and as I've said elsewhere the obsessions in education with targets, measurability and evidence are killing teaching. Possibly killing teachers too with the stress of it all.
Now I feel profoundly depressed again. I think I'll go and do some of the fun bits of the job and prepare some lessons to cheer me up.
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