My point, lost though that cause would seem to be, was that children should be taught to challenge where they see something wrong, how to challenge effectively and how to accept that same challenge themselves. It’s not about telling anyone how to do their job or thinking you know better, it’s about having the confidence to question something and not just blindly following someone with authority.
I totally endorse that, and I think, if I’d been in that circumstance (the 1/2 vs 0.5 thing) when I was at school, I would have queried it and it would have been clarified. But as time goes on, it seems (and , of course, this is all anecdotal) that there is less and less time to actually deliver that kind of collaborative, almost heuristic approach – the pressures teachers are under seem immense; the course material itself seems to change yearly, so there are annual pressures for teachers not only to have to learn new content but also prep how to teach it to others. On top of that, the landscape seems ever-changing (that collaborative approach becomes less valued because putting that time into one child is to the detriment of the rest, and you are now seemingly judged almost solely on the difference you can make from your classes’ predicted grades to what they actually achieve – but those predicted grades are based on a primary that feels similarly pressured to produce predictions as high (some may say unrealistically high) as they can get away with), with an emphasis almost on identifying which pupils you are likely to get the required grade for and focusing on that to the detriment of pupils who are less likely to get the grades they need. It’s stupid (it seems to me from the outside) and not one teacher went into it to do that, but it seems that’s how the industry is going. There’s just no time to do anything but maximise the results you can get out of the class – the results are all that matter, there’s no space for owt else.
Caveat – the ramblings of a half-cut teacher’s husband, not a teacher himself.
