Making fun of teachers?
According to The Telegraph ,
Allowing children to opt out as soon as the going gets tough is no way to teach, says Richard Cairns, whose pupils will soon be learning Chinese
In too many schools today, teachers are being judged not by their success in getting children to think but by their ability to entertain. A good lesson is no longer a lesson that has fired the imagination but, rather, one that has caused the greatest merriment.
We are obsessed with making lessons fun. So geographers teach volcanoes to excitable boys; historians "do" battles.
As a headmaster, I am complicit in this. When I am told that a teacher's lessons are great fun, I am delighted. Much better that than that they are swinging from the lights or flicking paper pellets at Mr Feeble.
But as a teacher myself, I know that it is not enough merely to entertain a class for 40 minutes, easy though that is. What is more difficult is to use the rapport between teacher and pupils to set before them new and challenging concepts, to persuade them that there are some things that simply have to be learned, that there are some ideas that are difficult to comprehend and that there is nothing wrong with a lesson that makes their brains hurt.
Too many pupils, too many teachers and too many parents forget that fun in the classroom should only be a means to an end, not an end in itself. Knowledge and understanding are the goals; merriment merely the means.
An interesting point of view, at one end of the scale.
Allowing children to opt out as soon as the going gets tough is no way to teach, says Richard Cairns, whose pupils will soon be learning Chinese
In too many schools today, teachers are being judged not by their success in getting children to think but by their ability to entertain. A good lesson is no longer a lesson that has fired the imagination but, rather, one that has caused the greatest merriment.
We are obsessed with making lessons fun. So geographers teach volcanoes to excitable boys; historians "do" battles.
As a headmaster, I am complicit in this. When I am told that a teacher's lessons are great fun, I am delighted. Much better that than that they are swinging from the lights or flicking paper pellets at Mr Feeble.
But as a teacher myself, I know that it is not enough merely to entertain a class for 40 minutes, easy though that is. What is more difficult is to use the rapport between teacher and pupils to set before them new and challenging concepts, to persuade them that there are some things that simply have to be learned, that there are some ideas that are difficult to comprehend and that there is nothing wrong with a lesson that makes their brains hurt.
Too many pupils, too many teachers and too many parents forget that fun in the classroom should only be a means to an end, not an end in itself. Knowledge and understanding are the goals; merriment merely the means.
An interesting point of view, at one end of the scale.
posted by chris at 5:25 pm
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