I disliked my secondary school, and when I’m King the first thing I’ll be doing is banning private schools just to piss them off. But my dislike is miles away from this:

I’ve no wish to EVER enter a school again, why would I put myself through that?
The thought of it makes me nauseous and last time I tried 30 years ago (measuring a playground for a summer job) I was tachycardic and vomited.

Serious answer time: @stevextc I find it very hard to believe your kid isn’t picking up on this – certainly my daughters have worked out loads of things my wife and I thought were secret. Unless your kid is one of unfortunate few to be bullied, or genuinely suffering from systematically poor teaching (which strikes me as highly unlikely), perhaps you ought to consider some kind of professional help to get over what is (seen from the outside) an extreme over-reaction to your time at school?

Why doesn’t he want to score too highly? I got my shins kicked and worse for that which was bullying. As I said the problem in my schooling wasn’t the school or the system it was the ferals. Successful retaliation resulted in punishment but I sucked that up and continued with the high scores.

Madame had a problem with a sort of mafia in one class which put pressure on kids not to perform.

Keep your eyes and ears open, the problem might be the other kids.

His teacher said to you that they despise your son? I’m going to have to call BS on that.

His teacher told the head she wanted him out of her class and a few comments to colleagues in the staff room which were repeated to his mother (who is also a teacher at the same school).

She refused to mark his SATS done at home and the HOY did it instead.

His teacher told the head she wanted him out of her class and a few comments to colleagues in the staff room

So she didnt either say she “despised” him or demonstrate any behaviour showing she despised him, you really do either need to pull on some big boy pants and get on with life or seek professional for your issues.

Why doesn’t he want to score too highly?

Expectation management … the UK at primary now does expectation based grades so if you “exceed” one term you can only go down the next or have a spiraling expectation.

He worked this out himself but I can’t really argue as it’s the same as work used to do.
“You got an ‘exceeds’ last Q, why have you slipped to ‘meets'”?

So long as he pulls his finger out for exams I guess he’s learned a useful skill for the world of work.. or he’ll end up working 18hr days just to try and keep the exceeds

She refused to mark his SATS done at home and the HOY did it instead.

I can think of a few reasons to do that and none have anything to do with the kid.

So she didnt either say she “despised” him

That was one of the comments yes.
As those who have met him on here will know he can be very enthusiastic and very very chatty on anything he is interested in. (As I said he’s very marmite with his teachers and I’m not completely blaming them for that). His last HOY sent him a personal XMAS card this year… his form teacher asked for him to be put into a different form… we were happy, his HOY was happy and presumably the teacher was happy but the head for whatever reason said no

I can think of a few reasons to do that and none have anything to do with the kid.

Well the fact she predicted he’d do terribly may have been one reason?

A big difference between performance in class and work done at home. A difference in style compared with work done in class.

If it’s due to a comparison with your son’s deliberately erratic work with deliberate wrong answers then he really isn’t doing himself any favours because if he does much better in a test done at home the teacher will wonder why and if it’s likely to become an issue with the parents just hand it to the HOY to deal with.

We have a laugh sometimes with work done at home by Madame’s kids. First step is to type anything odd into a browser and see where it’s from.

If it’s due to a comparison with your son’s deliberately erratic work with deliberate wrong answers then he really isn’t doing himself any favours because if he does much better in a test done at home the teacher will wonder why and if it’s likely to become an issue with the parents just hand it to the HOY to deal with.

His mother just got the HOY to deal with it… due to lockdown etc. only actually possible since she has all the other teachers private numbers. Either way he’s clear of that school now and seems to get on well with his current teachers.

If it’s due to a comparison with your son’s deliberately erratic work with deliberate wrong answers then he really isn’t doing himself any favours because if he does much better in a test done at home the teacher will wonder why

This was just due to lockdown, he’s usually just erratic at school.
He just calculates the bare miniumum to scrape though then suddenly he’ll do something exceptional then he’ll be back to bare minimum.

We have a laugh sometimes with work done at home by Madame’s kids. First step is to type anything odd into a browser and see where it’s from.

His mother was invigilating and she takes it very seriously… plus there was an iPhone at stake.

He pulled the same thing years ago when he was 5… “If I can ride this bike without stabilisers can I have a proper bike”… I’m pretty sure he’d practiced with friends bikes at school because there was zero learning, he just pedalled off, turned round and pedalled back. (Sadly a missed moment as I wasn’t even ready to film)

Also for reasons I can’t explain I used to do the same at school. [seriously can’t say why] but we had one English teacher who gave out homework and being in the bottom remedial set it was stupidly easy and quicker to just answer than try and answer incorrectly. We had red pens to mark… so I just used to mark correct answers incorrect knowing he’d never check a wrong answer. One week we got surprised and had to swap books and I got some silly high mark… the teacher didn’t believe it and just made a mark up.

Ultimately it didn’t make any difference as I entered for GCE not CSE anyway.

plus there was an iPhone at stake

At 11! Junior got a dumb phone at 15. We’ve never rewarded junior’s academic performance with anything other than verbal congratulations. Not even an 1.2 at Abitur/félicitations du jury at Bac.

Kids need to learn to live up to their own expectations not other people’s. Parental expectations can too easily become parental pressure and too much of it destructive. With an expensive reward such as an iPhone you’re revealing how much his success means to you. That might work for as long as he’s trying to please you but that won’t be for much longer. At some point he has to start working for himself, the motivation coming from within to reach his own goals.

We’ll discuss this again when he’s 15. 😉

So were the ones that did brighter than you ? Or were they just more interested? Happier to be learning? Happier to be in school?

totally brighter and smarter.

and by stupid I don’t mean thick. kids are generally stupid and don’t listen to adults that have been through the exact same thing thus able to offer advice.

He just finds it boring and has no wish to be better than anyone else.

different teachers; different subjects; different conditions in school. You’ll find a lot of kids change year to year. How old is he now?

From my experience as a parent and pupil. we have a state educational system which is almost completely based on ‘one size fits all’. Systemically it doesn’t appear to really recognise or support individual differences.

An argument could be made that is works to some degree for most people and that is the only efficient and economic way.

Personally, I’m not sure that works or that argument is even morally justifiable, but seeing as the rest of our societal systems are similar…

This is before we even acknowledge that some schools are appalling anyway and more about crowd control than education.

I think we need to revisit the purpose of education – especially as automation increases. The original notions of social control or creating effective parts to fit in our economic machine don’t seem so relevant to me.

My education was like a long drawn out car crash.

Secondary School, was the real disaster. We took some kind of pre-entry tests and I was put in the top set for everything as ‘gifted’ but kids being kids, my mates convinced me there had been some kind of mistake and I spent the whole first year waiting to be found out, I crashed through the sets and spent more time staring out of the windows. Even now, decades later, if I must take a course for work, if it involves someone talking over some Powerpoint slides or whatever, I might as well not bother, I just don’t have the attention span for it. I was being bullied a lot at the time too, so it was boring in class and hell at break times.

I actually did 1 year of 6th form, mostly because it made my Mum happy, this was still an age when about half the kids left school at 16 to get a job so her sending me off to school with the 6th form tie on was a badge of honour, even if I was only going for GCSE resits and some kind of “A Level equivalent” GNVQ. I did the second year of 6th form in collage.

It’s not to say I didn’t learn anything in school, the odd thing that interested me stuck very easily and I picked up enough, especially in collage to at least act like I had some marketable skills.

I won’t say what actual qualifications I gained, I’ve mentioned it before and some STWers got VERY upset that I cheated the system and I have a nice, middle-class, reasonably well-paid job now. To them I should be hitting rocks with a hammer or doing something wearing Hi-Viz in a Van because to them only thick people don’t have the usual “9 GCSEs, 3 A-Levels and a Degree” and only thick people have a Trade. I’m always amazed when people in middle age and older still put so much worth in a degree gained decades before.

Anyway. I entered the workplace at 19, working in a Call Centre, which I detested. If school was boring then saying the same thing over and over 200 times a day was torture. I actually picked up the basics in English working in that job I just missed in school. A few years later, I ‘accidentally’ got a job in a Bank, it was advertised under one of their sub-brands I’d never heard off. The description made little sense to me, mainly because I wasn’t a great reader back then. It was one of the times my Education was very useful to me, I was the only Non-Grad out of 50+ applicants to apply, I was almost binned at the application stage because of that and they only interviewed me because the Boss was pissed off at the lack of workplace experience from the first round of applicants. When they asked me about some basic accounting principles, Management Buy Outs etc etc I knew about that stuff from collage. I spent 15 mins selling the virtues of a ‘Vocational Education’ (I phrase I’d only heard a few minutes before when he said “so, you had a Vocational Education?”. Frankly, I was pretty thick when I started that job, the holes in my education were huge and abundant, but it was easy to ‘fake it till you make it’ because it doesn’t matter if you can’t spell very well if you only ever write in Word, which has a spelling and grammar tool, and it really don’t matter if your Maths skills are crap, because no one is going to trust you to write out a complex loan agreement on paper, far too much money to risk with human error, it’s all done on the system. I was in my mid-20s before my basic skills were what most people leave school with. Ironically by then I was a mentor for the Grad Scheme.

I won’t say what actual qualifications I gained, I’ve mentioned it before and some STWers got VERY upset that I cheated the system and I have a nice, middle-class, reasonably well-paid job now. To them I should be hitting rocks with a hammer or doing something wearing Hi-Viz in a Van because to them only thick people don’t have the usual “9 GCSEs, 3 A-Levels and a Degree” and only thick people have a Trade. I’m always amazed when people in middle age and older still put so much worth in a degree gained decades before.

LOL that’s me in trouble then too. I got 4 x Cs at GCSE in the first year they came out…. I have no further education qualifications.

Well unless you class a City and Guilds in CAD as qualifications, which funnily has absolutely nothing to do with my job 😀

Plenty of thick people with

the usual “9 GCSEs, 3 A-Levels and a Degree

…

I got 4 x Cs at GCSE

I got 5!!!! Although I did re do English and get a C in that too!!

It has changed a lot since I started work in the 80’s though. I had some low grade A levels but managed to end up doing pretty well in a job that 100% needs a degree these days
School didn’t work well for me either (socially or learn/revise/test) but I don’t bitch and whine about it and is reality we can’t have 100 different types of schools to suit 100 different types of pupil

iAll of that requires actually going into a school though.. out in “the real world” education happens in many different ways, only some of which involve classrooms now. (I mean 2000+ not Covid times)

So hitting your point…. what do you mean by “teachers”?
Are you including the people who contribute to learning apps? (such as pointed out earlier Duolingo)

Sorry, wasn’t in work yesterday.

To be honest I hadn’t thought of the contributors, but do they teach as well as d this? Or are they teacher trained but no longer teach? I dont know. But when i say teacher, I mean one from a school environment.

Yes, learning take many forms and a lot can be ‘picked up’ in the real world with no formal training, but school is part of that full package. The education system of the UK needs a proper look at, modernisation and the whole career of being a formal teacher needs to be recognised and lauded a lot more.

The 6 weeks holiday is a perfect example of the wrong way this is looked at. Yes they get a “nice long summer holiday” but  the general public don’t even consider that most teachers, as had been hinted at by posters on here, spend time almost every weekday (and sometimes weekend) evenings, doing marking/planning/task setting etc. because there aren’t enough teachers, so they have no time during the day to do all this, and this is unpaid hours. so yes, teachers deserve all the holidays they get.

POAH

different teachers; different subjects; different conditions in school. You’ll find a lot of kids change year to year. How old is he now?

I think in part it’s what you said earlier … he’s bored because everything gets explained 5 times and even when he might benefit from the 23nd the 5th is well into hoping to be sat next to a window time.

Add to that his previous enthusiasm has been curbed due to widely different practices.
He’s always loved reading and in Yr3 he was allowed to use the Yr 6 library but then his Yr 4 teacher stopped that. (Just an example) Essentially he doesn’t see the point in sticking out. He also made this worse for himself by deliberately “fake asking” the teacher about certain things in Yr6 books that were probably inappropriate for Yr4.

Add to that the grading system. It doesn’t matter how well he does in terms of answers only how he performed compared to last term/yr. If he does well one term then he can only get a meets expectations the next term.

He started his last year at primary with some enthusiasm but it quickly became clear he couldn’t please his form teacher (other than by being quiet perhaps).

kerley

and is reality we can’t have 100 different types of schools to suit 100 different types of pupil

You are conflating schools and education (again) … Most employer’s today find they get better value and results from allowing different types of learning.

crazyjenkins01

But when i say teacher, I mean one from a school environment.

Yes, learning take many forms and a lot can be ‘picked up’ in the real world with no formal training, but school is part of that full package. The education system of the UK needs a proper look at, modernisation and the whole career of being a formal teacher needs to be recognised and lauded a lot more.

I think the first thing is to do an unbiased assessment of what that whole package should/would look like and then do a gap analysis and plan.
However that unbiassed assessment isn’t going to be unbiassed if we pre-decide that schools are what works best for everyone.

jami1974

I think we need to revisit the purpose of education – especially as automation increases. The original notions of social control or creating effective parts to fit in our economic machine don’t seem so relevant to me.

We also then need a mandate for that… or clear opt outs.
Those who don’t want social engineering on their children and pay tax should have a clear return on their investment no to mention those who don’t have kids and pay tax.

It’s a pity you didn’t get taught to write more concisely. Did the teachers used to always leave a TL:DR on all your work 🙂

kerley

It’s a pity you didn’t get taught to write more concisely. Did the teachers used to always leave a TL:DR on all your work

The answer to you was 23 words.

Well done, try and stick to that from now on. Your answer was also crap but we will work on that in your next lesson.