Last night was MiniCat’s parents evening for Y11 – pretty crucial in the run up to GCSEs and as usual it was all a bit random and chaotic but we got to see the teachers eventually. However, the thing that struck me most from the evening’s entertainment was the polarised standard of teachers.

I sat in front of 95% of the teachers in the room wishing I could be back at school and have them as my teachers. They were inspirational, passionate and when MiniCat sat opposite them there was a noticeable change in his attentiveness, he positively fizzed. I was close to jacking in the job and applying to start secondary school again.

Sadly, there was a small cohort of epically dreadful, confused and bumbling idiots that really took the shine off the evening. Having been in their class for 3 years I was a bit surprised to find that one got his name wrong and was talking about a different person until I corrected him. One had MiniCat down as foundation even though he had A* all year – once this was pointed out to him he quickly backtracked and suggested he should be in Upper Tier. MiniCat visibly looked downtrodden when we sat in front of them, the change was amazing. How do these idiots keep their job, one a senior post!

Until we start to recognise the brilliant teachers, pay them lots for taking care of our future and stop promoting them out of the classrooms, sack the xxxx who are hiding in the school system. We are going to have disengaged kids and they will never reach their true potential, this was at a reasonably good state school in a nice area.

So ends my scream into the void, bad teachers get your shit sorted out or sod off and do something else where you are not damaging someone else’s future.

Thanks for reading!

How many teachers does minicat have in order for this to be achievable ? 🙂

Answers on my desk by first thing tomorrow.

rogerthecat – Member

Until we start to recognise the brilliant teachers, pay them lots for taking care of our future and stop promoting them out of the classrooms…

don’t be silly, we don’t promote them, we kill their soul, and force them to quit.

promoting them would be far too expensive!

and because i’m a sucker for a maths question, 19 teachers, or multiples of. (38, 57, etc.)

Good points there.

In Scotland there is / was something designed exactly for your point on keeping teachers in the classroom. Charters Teachers. You can still do the masters but no longer get paid any extra.

20

Top of the class !

How many teachers does minicat have in order for this to be achievable ?

19

19 out of the 20 teachers in the room teach minicat.

It’s a fair point, though I guess you get good and bad in every profession. The challenge is that as soon as you threaten to introduce any kind of pay that rewards the “good” teachers 3 things happen:
1. No-one can decide what “good” is
2. No-one can decide how to measure it reasonably
3. There is uproar from the unions

Mrs Lunge is a teacher and (according to OFSTED at least) a bloody good one. She would agree completely that there are some hugely uninspiring teacher in the profession who go just go through the motions. There are within that a select group who have a habit of turning it on for their observed lessons and being poor the rest of the time making it difficult to pick them up.

don’t be silly, we don’t promote them, we kill their soul, and force them to quit.

^^ FACT

tbf I’d be shocked if he had 19/20 teachers who were good

I read an interesting editorial whilst on holliday in Scotlandshire (Oban’s local paper to be exact). Apparently a local highschool had 3 Gaelic teachers but not a single qualified Chemistry teacher so that subject had to be covered by other teachers.

The point being, there is no job market for Gaelic language qualifications beyond teaching in Scotland, but there is for Chemists, so by only offering the same pay to all subject teachers they were never going to find Chemistry teachers in Oban whent they could go live elsewhere and earn more money as Chemists.

The argument presented was that Schools should independant and paid a per pupil by the government to achieve their targets. Within that budget they should pay teachers whatever they need to in the job market in order to get the best results accross the curiculum. If that means science teachers need paying £60k in line with what they’d earn using their degree in other careers then that’s what needs to be done. Otherwise you end up with mediochre or no teachers in some subjects where pay is ‘low’ for their qualifications and other subjects with a surplus of teachers and subsequenbtly very high quality as the pay is good relative to their similarly qualified peers in other profesions.

Good teachers make such a difference. My son (at junior school) had a brilliant and inspirational teacher last year, and this year’s teacher seems to be fine too. However, 2 years ago, he had a teacher who had nothing positive to say at parents’ evenings (other parents said the same thing) and when I looked through my son’s literacy books, the teacher’s own comments were riddled with basic spelling errors. I was so relieved when that academic year was over!

of course, yes, 20 in total.

finer details of the question escaping me in my rush to answer the question.

it was ever thus.

finer details of the question escaping me in my rush to answer the question.

Actually, those who answer 20 are ignoring the finer details of the question as jon1973 points out

Sorry for your rant being hijacked by puerile maths fun 😉

How many teachers does minicat have in order for this to be achievable ?

19 is the minimum if we are rounding to the nearest percentage. 18/19 will suffice, 17/18 won’t 😉

20 is the correct answer* 🙂

* assuming all the teachers in the room teach minicat 😉

allthepies – Member
anagallis_arvensis said » 20
Top of the class !

Fail! Reread the OP:

there was a small cohort of epically dreadful, confused and bumbling idiots that really took the shine off the evening. Having been in their class for 3 years I was a bit surprised to find that one got his name wrong … One had MiniCat down as …

This clearly implies that the 5% includes at least two teachers – so he has at least 40 teachers.

Well he mentions “one……” three times, although based on the specific greivances I’d infer that it’s 2 teachers and the third “one….” is refering to the one of the aforementioned teachers being in a senior position.

So that makes 40.

[edit] 4 seconds too slow, 4 seconds!

those who answer 20 are ignoring the finer details of the question

You still get some marks for showing your working though.

😆

Dunces hat for me.

She would agree completely that there are some hugely uninspiring teacher in the profession who go just go through the motions.

I’m not sure this is really the case in general terms rubbish teachers are rubbish because they lack the skills to be better, rarely because they cannot be bothered to apply them.

I live with a teacher, was best man to a teacher and my old man is a teacher.

There are incompetents in the profession, as with any profession, but to do a ‘good job’ and ‘just get by’ is almost impossible in teaching. Unfortunately all teachers are cutting corners to get work done – the good ones just do it better and still have enthusiasm for what is an incredibly hard but rewarding and socially beneficial job.

Do I have a solution? No. But I do believe that if teachers had better pay, more support and could actually spend time with kids, we’d have a better system.

I also believe that parents should support teachers – it’s amazing how much blame is levied against them now when in fact it’s often making up for the complainer’s failing as a parent (which is often down to the parents working 12 hours a day to provide for their family, not just because they’re lazy benefit scroungers that believe the world owes them a living).

[edit] 4 seconds too slow, 4 seconds!

😀

The only teacher I can remember being crap at school was the R.E. teacher. She did have a full on nervous breakdown as the kids tortured her relentlessly. Couple of other odd balls along the way but by and large they were all the same.

One of my closest friends is a teacher (one of the good ones, natch) and he’s often told me how incredibly difficult it is to remove an underperforming teacher. The recurring factor it boils down to is: The Unions. That’s also the answer to why you can’t pay different salaries for different subjects although IIRC there are (were?) certain “golden handshakes” for some maths & science positions ?

anagallis_arvensis, I would not agree with you. In any profession there are people who are perfectly cable of doing a good job but just do what is required and no more. Teaching is no different. Yes, there are teachers who just don’t have the skills as well but that is not the only reason.

The mathematical accuracy of the original post goes some way to explain why I work with words for a living rather than numbers. Although the mods didn’t like one of them because they replaced it with xxxx, knobwits! 😀

So, there was a touch of poetic licence in the 95%, it was there mainly for literary effect and I didn’t know so many maths teachers had concurrent free periods this morning, otherwise I may have asked MiniCat to do the calculations for me! (the maths teacher was one of the good ones)

For correctness, we saw 9 teachers 7 of whom were brilliant, 2 of whom I would have happily used as foundations for my new patio.

So, ERRATUM NOTICE: “I sat in front of 95% of the teachers in the room…” should have “I sat in front of 77.77 recurring percent of the teachers in the room…”

The cartoon posted by Pimpmaster contains a lot of truth. One of my colleagues was recently talking about his son’s poor literacy and actually said “I shouldn’t have to teach him to read, that’s the teacher’s job”.

🙄 x eleventy.

Pimpmaster_jazz raises a good point about the parent’s input. My wife and I have 3 kids. Two are in first school (year 1 and 3) and the other is only 4 months old. My wife is still on maternity leave and I work from home most days and hence have time to spend with my kids most evenings. I recognise this puts us in a strong position compared to many parents yet we still feel we struggle to give them the level of support we want to help them with homework, reading etc. How parents who are both working long days support their children through school is beyond me.

One of my closest friends is a teacher (one of the good ones, natch) and he’s often told me how incredibly difficult it is to remove an underperforming teacher.

Unfortunately also true. At my old man’s last full-time gig in the UK (he escaped at 55 to teach at various international schools) the school gave a terrible teacher glowing references to get rid of her. Arguably it’s a game that an employing school could have seen through, but because we are lucky enough not to live under a fascist regime we can’t just take the bad teachers out and shoot them.

How parents who are both working long days support their children through school is beyond me.

They often tend not to and thus put a lot of pressure on the school to take up the slack. (this is a generalisation, so anyone who works long hours *and* spends time with their children each day reading/doing other school work – well done).

Problem I had particularly with maths is that they’re taught to do it differently now – so my input tended to have to start with ‘how have you been asked to do division/multiplication etc’ to which the reply was ‘if I knew that I wouldn’t be asking you!’

How parents who are both working long days support their children through school is beyond me.

Or single parents for that matter. A friend is single with a disabled son, and is studying to become a nurse. Fortunately her mum helps out a lot, but still – her ability to pay her way, study and look after an intensively dependent child has me in awe.

they’re taught to do it differently now

true. I remember some of the very early maths homework with my lad was about number bonds to 10. I had to Google it to learn that all it meant was numbers that add together to make 10 😆

they were never going to find Chemistry teachers in Oban whent they could go live elsewhere and earn more money as Chemists

You’re assuming good chemists make good teachers. This is completely wrong. Being a good teacher is a skill in itself. You do of course need to know your subject but it’s from different perspective.

Being a good teacher is a skill in itself. You do of course need to know your subject but it’s from different perspective.

This.

I found this out while guiding. Guides that had been taught to teach made a far better job of it than me.

Similarly a good friend of mine was a basic training instructor in the RAF. He talks a lot about getting the message across, the delivery of which can be as important as the message itself.

Everyone has a teaching method they respond to, be it imitation or swotting from a book. The trick is to find that, then provide the teaching in chunks that person can digest.

Multiply that by 30 and all of a sudden you have a teacher’s job… 😯

Easy to pick on Gaelic teachers – I bet the jobs market is better for Gaelic grads than for sports and theology grads…assuming your only metric for measuring the value of study is what level of capitalist wage slavery it can get you.

because we are lucky enough not to live under a fascist regime we can’t just take the bad teachers out and shoot them

Is there a correlation between fascism and high educational attainment?

Parents Evenings are always a bit hit and miss but you really get to see who the switched on teachers are.

I was very impressed by the H of Classics who was determined to convince me that my son was not going to give up Latin! His passion for the subjects was brilliant. Unsurprisingly he gets great results and happy classes. Ditto, the H of Economics.

At the other end of the spectrum, the H of Maths.

HoM: THM minor not doing well at AS maths.
THM: What exactly is the problem?
Alarm, Alarm!
THM: Ok, what does he need to do to improve?
Alarm, Alarm!
THM: Ok, you have my full support – how can I help him?
Alarm – not programmed to answer
THM: Ok, and what are you going to do to address his specific weaknesses?
H of maths faints under the stress….

So, ERRATUM NOTICE: “I sat in front of 95% of the teachers in the room…” should have “I sat in front of 77.77 recurring percent of the teachers in the room…”

I’m still not happy with the answer….

You sat in front of 9 teachers. 7 of them (77.77%) made you want to go back to school; 2 of them (22.22%) you’d gladly have sacked on the spot.

The issue is that you claim to have sat in front of 77.77% of teachers in the room and wanted to go back to school as a result, which leads us to INFER that there were only 9 teachers in total. However; I’m suspicious given your previous inability to articulate yourself properly that there were actually more, and what you mean is, ‘Of the teachers in the room, 77.77% of the ones I sat in front of made me want to go back to school’. Not good for someone who works with words for a living 😉

And here’s my complaint. Without knowing how many teachers there were in total, we can’t tell whether you finding 2 bad ones is representative of the whole or a statistical anomaly. If there were 20 in total, I’d be inclined to accept your finding, but if there were 1000, it’s possible that you just found 2 bad ones at random and are basing your findings on anomalous data.

Good luck to Minicat in his GCSE’s, I’d suggest getting his mum to help with his revision from now on 😉

How parents who are both working long days support their children through school is beyond me.

was thinking about that this morning, mrs has been part time since kids were born but now wants a career change to something tiring with long hours, I work full time with an hours commute either end, kids are starting school, I’m hoping we’ll be able to make the time for this.

(I’m fairly confident we will make the time, just hoping it doesn’t feel like a burden)

I’m still not happy with the answer….

You sat in front of 9 teachers. 7 of them (77.77%) made you want to go back to school; 2 of them (22.22%) you’d gladly have sacked on the spot.

The issue is that you claim to have sat in front of 77.77% of teachers in the room and wanted to go back to school as a result, which leads us to INFER that there were only 9 teachers in total. However; I’m suspicious given your previous inability to articulate yourself properly that there were actually more, and what you mean is, ‘Of the teachers in the room, 77.77% of the ones I sat in front of made me want to go back to school’. Not good for someone who works with words for a living

And here’s my complaint. Without knowing how many teachers there were in total, we can’t tell whether you finding 2 bad ones is representative of the whole or a statistical anomaly. If there were 20 in total, I’d be inclined to accept your finding, but if there were 1000, it’s possible that you just found 2 bad ones at random and are basing your findings on anomalous data.

Good luck to Minicat in his GCSE’s, I’d suggest getting his mum to help with his revision from now on

Good analysis, but what if some of the teachers were part-timers, or just really short? Do they count as half-teachers for the purpose of statistical reasoning?

I think we need more data from the OP.