Should the school system be a bit more "planned"?

[old.Tohtori]

Let me explain.

The current school system, from what i gather, goes a bit like this(in a nutshell):

Go to school.
Learn stuff.
Do tests.
Repeat.
THEN-LAST-MONTH-TESTS-TESTS-HURRY-STRESS-AAAAAAA!!!
Complete.

Should the school system be more planned in a sense that there wouldn't be this ultimate rush at graduation?

Seems rather pointless to train people in a relaxing cool environment and then bash their heads in and steal their souls at the last hurdle.

Not to mention, it should be an 8 hours at school, no homework. Just like work.

 

[00dave]

Let me give you a run down of my school experience

Go to school
Get bullied
Learn stuff
Get bullied
Fall in with the wrong crowd for bully protection
Fail to learn stuff
Get scalded by parent regularly
Go back to learning stuff
Go back to getting bullied
Start doing what seems like meaningless classwork with no explanation as to why
Prepare for exams
Get bullied
Get told "btw all that classwork is your coursework and counts towards a high percentage of your final grade"
Panic and try to fill in coursework gaps
Get bullied
EXAMS! EXAMS! EXAMS!
Play house of the dead to relieve stress
MORE EXAMS!
Scrape through with below average grades due to poor coursework marks

Although I believe the system is now

Go to school
Learn basic stuff
Have a kid
Abuse the teachers
Exams
Pass with A* for writing your name

 

[chipper]

frankly tohtori i think your not very clued up on current events when it comes to schools.

kids today have far more to learn than we did even 15-20 years ago and what they have to learn is more difficult than we did look on GCSE bytesize website and have a look at a mock exam paper theres plenty on there i didnt recall doing at school.

SAT's from what i understand (because i was fortunate to be the last year before they came into force) are designed to test your current lvl of understanding of what you have learned. this then allows the teaches to asses your abilities and put you in grps that are suitable for your learning abilities (ie if ya an idiot you go in the duggy class) but not only that they are an effective way of spotting weak points in a childs learning potential.


exams are not rushed youve had 2 years to study for them only person to blame is yourself if you havent studied for them i didnt and it fucked me up. end of the day its my fault and i accept that, even back then i accepted it i fucked about in school and it cost me, consider it one of lifes early lessons on taking responsiblity for your actions.

kids have so much to learn these days that its impossible to fit it all in to a 40 hour week, the government did a good thing upping the school leavers age i genuinely believe this will help our children. homework is a neccessity for a number of reasons. in my eyes the biggest reason it teaches responsiblity and how to meet a deadline both real life skills you cannot do without.

if i had my way id remove some lessons from the curriculum primarily these would be music and RE these are not vital to the success of life make them after school classes then those who are genuinely intersted benefit.

 

[PLightstar]

The main problem with the school system is that it is obsessed with stats and figures, so kids are taught how to pass exams and get high scores and not the knowledge of the subject itself, speaking to my younger sister about it the other day, she took mainly the same subjects as me, but her and her friends have hardly retained any of the subjects, yet I can still remember pretty much everything and that was 10yrs ago. They should introduce plans to get kids interested in the classes they are in and have a coursework/exam process for each subject not just the odd few. I was terrible in exams I got nervous and forgot alot in the exam, that is why my teachers were not happy with my results as I was a B sometime A student yet in an exam I would get C's or D's yet my coursework was flawless, otherwise I would have failed some of my subjects.

 

[chipper]

i was alot like you plightstar im shit in exams i get nervous and forget alot of things, yet when it came to practical assesments i excelled and often got very good grades.

there should be and i believe there is in some schools different ways of assessing ability, it has been proven that some people just cannot absorb information from a text book yet if they are engaged in a practical way they often retain far more information than someone reading from a book. this is a method i would like to see encouraged in schools a learn by doing attitude not a learn by remembering. anyone can read a book and remember what it says it doesnt mean you understand what you've remembered.

 

[ECA]

School is well planned.

The problem is most children fail to understand the importance of their school life in how it effects the rest of their lives.

Many parents ( even good ones ) assume that the school will deal with it and they dont really have to be involved ( because their parents never got involved with their school life ).

Blah.

I also think GCSE/ALevel/Degree are a terrible way of judging people.

 

[chipper]

pisses me off how almost every job requires GCSE A level etc its so restricting. im glad we have things like NVQ's and BTEC's and key skills now they are alot better but they should be givin the same status as the equivalent levels.

 

[DaGaffer]

kids today have far more to learn than we did even 15-20 years ago and what they have to learn is more difficult than we did look on GCSE bytesize website and have a look at a mock exam paper theres plenty on there i didnt recall doing at school.

You've got to be joking. I just did a couple of the maths algebra tests on that website in my head and got 100%. I took maths "O" level over 25 years ago and got a C grade, and believe me, I don't do algebra every day. I'm thinking..."not so tough".

To address Toht's point though; these days most education systems have a mix of course work and exams to make up the total, but exams are seen to have a value in understanding if the work has sunk in. Personally, if school and uni had been all coursework, I'd have done a damn site better; exams were never my forte, but I can see their value.

 

[Zenith.UK]

I was lucky enough to see a GCSE Maths past paper and marking scheme for the highest paper a couple of years ago (WJEC). The baseline mark for C was 35%, B 45%, A 55% and A* 65%.

I took my GCSEs in 1989 which was also the second year of GCSEs. The school year before us got stupendous results with record numbers getting 8-10 A grades (there was no A* back then). In our school year, NOT ONE got ALL A's and it wasn't because of bad teaching or lack of ability. It was because the marking scheme was set VERY harshly that year. I remember our top student crying when she got her results because she was worried that she wouldn't get into Oxford/Cambridge. I later found out that you had to get over 90% to get an A in Maths that year.

Let me tell you that there is simply NO comparison between the Maths GCSE of 20 years ago and the Maths GCSE of 2006. The 2006 Maths GCSE was easier in content, has less depth and breadth and has lower grade bands than the equivalent paper from 1989. If you look purely at empirical evidence, this particular GCSE is much easier today than it was 20 years ago. Politicians turn around and say that people are unfairly saying that GCSEs are easier than they used to be. No matter how you try to spin it, THEY ARE EASIER!


On a final note, my wife turned up for her chemistry GCSE exam, put her name on the front of the page and just sat there glaring at the chemistry teacher.
She got an F grade JUST FOR PUTTING HER NAME ON THE SHEET!
She's not thick, just couldn't stand chemistry.
:lol:

 

[Zenith.UK]

Coming back to the point of the OP, I reckon there is merit to the idea of breaking subjects into modules. FE and HE courses work on this system, so why not GCSE? It makes for less stress and means that students are doing something different for each subject without overloading on any one area.

I had a mental block with quadratic equations. It took until the night before my GCSE to finally break the block and understand how they work. If we had done Maths as modules, I wouldn't have had all that stress just before my exam.

 

[old.Tohtori]

Chipper, but isn't there a major rush at the end of schools where there's even the need for "exam weeks"?

I think it should be done more in a way of periodic training, where the exam is after the 8 hour school training period.

You know, train a month of math and...done. You know it, well done, move on.

Also the grading system should be pass or not really and more put selections on the table. If you can "barely" pass your exam on nuclear physics, no...NO. Just no. You'll train it until you get it right.

"I wantz to be a fireman!", very well, no "english courses" for you then. Per example(no i'm not calling firemen dumb, it's an example, get over it).

 

[Ch3tan]

Sorry chipper but that is not true, exams get easier year on year and the quality of the subject matter being taught goes down.

 

[`mongoose]

I think schools could do with a little less planning and a little more teaching tbfh. Having a curriculum that changes depending upon which way the wind blows is perhaps a little crazy.

We're slowly eroding away courses which aren't required anymore. Home Economics (cookery, housemaking, whatever it was called on your manor) wasn't required and now we have a whole generation of people who cannot cook and don't understand the basics of nutrition. Hell why not get rid of art, french & Design Technology too? Nobody needs to draw, speak other languages or understand how buildings are built anymore. Let's teach them how to count properly or write when we don't care and neither do our bankers or writers.

I don't want to turn this into a loony lefty rant so I think I'll bow out here.

Suffice to say I think we're going down the wrong path in this country educationally and I hope, one day soon, that we realise this and stop the educational future of our children being commodotised by people who should know better.

M

 

[Scouse]

I started reading this thread till I came across this:

kids today have far more to learn than we did even 15-20 years ago and what they have to learn is more difficult than we did look on GCSE bytesize website and have a look at a mock exam paper theres plenty on there i didnt recall doing at school.

Fucking LOL!

I've looked at my sister's kids workload and it's pathetic.

 

[Furr]

Or!


Go to a Public School


Win! tbfh... Especially since they are all dumping A levels and GCSEs and telling the Gov to go f**k themselves... so expect to see the likes of Eton, Marlborough and the rest of this lot HMC, lists the UK public schools at the bottom of league tables from now on! lol

failing that grammar schools are the next best thing.

 

[Zenith.UK]

Are the public schools going for International Bacclaureate by any chance?
I remember my local FE college bringing those in a few years ago. It certainly makes for a more rounded education from all accounts.

 

[chipper]

yes well you have the advantage of been an adult now of course its bloody easier now come on.

my nephew is 5 and he regularly brings home homework my niece is 11 and is bringing home homework 4 nights a week

i dont remember gettin that much homework at 11 and hell 5??? wtf is homework i didnt even know what it was till i hit the comp.

hes also learning spanish at 5! im not even sure i knew the country exsisted at that age. its easy to turn round now x amount of years later and go ye thats a bag of piss of course it is. i helped my niece with her fractions other week if i was her age id have struggled just as much if not more so cos maths still isnt one of my strong points.


frankly tohtori if i could have done all my exams in 1 week i would have cos it took far too long to get through em all 3 weeks nearly

im saying kids are learning things at a much earlier age than we did at least thats the experience ive had i didnt do languages in the juniors or vectors or algebra,

however no 2 schools are the same maybe my brothers kids school just like to push their students i dunno

 

[old.Tohtori]

While i agree that there is "more" to learn, meaning that people are smarter in some areas and science alone has advanced so much that there's more to teach, i also have to say that the standards are going down and to return to my original point; schools stress out kids too much with too much work.

I'm guessing, that with a major overhaul(which isn't always good ranted), we could get a teaching system that would let school be school and let kids have the freetime they need.

 

[Embattle]

Since I went to school I've felt they've introduced far too many tests.

 

[leviathane]

The main problem with schools, is they're all obsesses with "results" and yet they don't actually teach you how the material is applicable in real world situations. Your pretty much taught just to pass exams these days, simply because you have to do about 500000 a year, you don't really care what it's about just squat up on past papers and bobs your uncle even someone who doesn't show up to class can pass.
Schools don't really cater for people like me who do shit in exam type processes, but excel in practical hands on stuff or oral face to face communication of the subject. But as said previously just squat up on past papers and can scrap a pass

 

[Ormorof]

as said far far far too much focus on being able to re-gurgitate facts, no where near enough on actually being able to use the information in any kind of useful manner

ie: (for the UK at least)
Secondary school start - "ok kids forget everything you've ever done it was wrong and mostly just to pass your exams, heres how the world REALLY works!"
College - "ok guys and gals forget everything you've ever done it wasnt wrong as such just watered down so much as to be useless"
University - "hey, ok so you've already had this talk twice now i dont think we need to remind you that you dont know shiz"

 

[GReaper]

These days schools feel like exam factories. I can understand the need for testing, but children shouldn't be under so much pressure from such an early age - especially with primary schools and Sats.

 

[Macey]

The problem with schools and poor grades these days seems more to do with the culture amongst young people more than standards of teaching in my view. My missus is working in a school now getting experience so that she can get onto a PGCE course to teach A-level psychology. The teachers all work hard at her school and are all fairly dedicated good teachers, the problem is that, in an inner city school in Nottingham, none of the kids past year 7 actually care about it.

Example: Last couple of weeks my missus has been covering a year 9 geography class doing their assesment project, the project was on global warming - from what I recall of geography this is a fairly up-to-date interesting topic, which is easily accessible and highly relevant (compared to measuring stones and talking about tidal flow when I was at school) - the response she got from the kids when introducing was "whats global warming" and "I wont need to know about this in the real world so why should I bother"

She also covers a gcse business class, who spend their entire time playing on games on the internet and generally screwing around.

The problem is, the parents of a lot of the kids in schools like that are on the dole, have never worked, have no intention of working, didnt bother with school, got into crime, went to prison etc etc. The kids therefore have no aspirations, no drive to do anything and no motivation from their parents to push themselves to achieve. There is only so much that a school can do in those situations to actually push a child to succeed. Culture amongst people at exam age is so different now from when I was at school, and I only sat my A-levels in 2005, so its not that long ago. I went to a very good, well respected school which had a massive pass rate, my year the pass rate of gcse's grade A-C was around 75% which is fairly decent. From what Ive heard from friends with younger siblings in the same school, with the same teachers, that figure has dropped by over 20% - to me, that cannot be a problem with the teachers, as I know some of them very well and have stayed in contact, if you get a class of 25+ children who have no interest in what you are saying, a teacher has no power to actually do anything about it.

As for the exam culture in school, in all honesty, its not that difficult, passing is more about learning how to sit an exam than actually learning a subject in depth - I got an A in A level English, without doing any revision, simply because my teacher was fantastic at teaching exam technique, he told us exactly how to answer each type of question and I got 95% on one of my papers. I know Im not a massively gifted student, but if you have the right teaching method then its easy to pass an exam.

Also, if you tried to make students from age 11-16 sit an 8 hour day at school they wouldnt be able to do it, they would be falling asleep after 5 hours and losing interest after 3, it would never, ever work.

This is even more relevant when it comes to GCSE's which, frankly are easy. You have about 3 or 4 weeks off prior to the exams starting, after having sat mocks, and end of year exams in year 10, giving you 2 sets of full exam practice at GCSE standard, and plenty of time to revise for each subject. As people have said, you have 2 years to study for the exams, and you have a very generous allocation of time throughout those 2 years to get the coursework done.

A major problem with schools is simply the fact that the government is ruining them. The headteacher at the school my missus works for has said that there are plans to replace history with citizenship...for no reason which I can discern at all.

I think schools need to just be allowed to get on with things and run themselves rather than the government being too heavy handed and interfering too much, as to me, the level of interference in schools by the government is adverse of the results students achieve. Part of this needs to be the fact that head teachers should actually be able to discipline disruptive children effectively, its become so difficult to expel a child from school now that it almost never happens, this means that every troublesome child stays in school and disrupts entire lessons, causing the children with potential to learn and do well not to, be it via fear of bullying, peer pressure or any number of other reasons - again down to over interference on the part of hte government.

Thats just my views anyway.

 

[Bugz]

Hahaha.

I'd like to see some of you trying Further Maths / Advanced Maths at A-Level and then say it's all easy now-a-days.

You would get owned hard.

 

[leviathane]

Hahaha.

I'd like to see some of you trying Further Maths / Advanced Maths at A-Level and then say it's all easy now-a-days.

You would get owned hard.

Brilliant good contribution to the thread. And fyi i've been there done that.

 

[Bugz]

I dislike this attitude of it's all easy now-a-days.

No it fuckin isn't.

It's easy for the lower end of schooling sure, but if you're a top student and you reach for the top, it is far from it.

 

[leviathane]

I'm pretty sure the majority of the ppl that have actually posted in this thread haven't said that that is the case. Read the whole thread first then add something constructive perhaps?

 

[Jeros]

Kids need encouragement to succeed from all quaters, bullies need to be stamped down on hard, parents need to walk the line between not caring and massive pressure to succeed.

I think the main problem with the education system are social, some kids go in thinking they cant do anything, some will work there guts out just to please there parents, some just go in to cause trouble.

We need to raise kids better tbh.

 

[pcg79]

I dislike this attitude of it's all easy now-a-days.

No it fuckin isn't.

It's easy for the lower end of schooling sure, but if you're a top student and you reach for the top, it is far from it.

i did a level maths and as further maths (didnt even think about further maths when i was in 1st year of college) back in 2003/2004. it was ridiculously easy. ridiculously! like, getting an A wasnt a problem, it was getting 95+ that was the challenge, and then not even that much.

AEA and STEP though, those are quite hard.

 

[Bugz]

What uni did you head off to?