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IT & National Curriculum 
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JJW009 wrote:
I did primary school projects on Wales and newts, which involved going to Wales and keeping newts. I think that's illegal now.


I do hope not, I'm still in Wales...Am I allowed to go back to England? :/




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Fri Mar 22, 2013 1:40 pm
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forquare1 wrote:
I'm still in Wales...Am I allowed to go back to England? :/


I'm afraid you've been in Wales too long now. You're tainted. I'm not sure you'll be allowed back, unless you sneak in via Liverpool.

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Fri Mar 22, 2013 3:28 pm
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ShockWaffle wrote:
paulzolo wrote:
In primary education, a teacher is expected to be an expert in all of these fields:
Maths
English
Chemistry
Biology
Physics
History
Art
P.E.
IT
Modern Languages (apparently, according to the new Curriculum, this includes Mandarin, Latin and Ancient Greek)

I'm sorry but you are exaggerating wildly.


No I’m not. Whilst I am not a primary school teacher myself, my wife is, and she teaches on one of the highest flying primary schools in Essex. My parents were both teachers (now retired) - my mother being a primary school teacher, my father having taught in a secondary school. As well as family members, it goes that friends of parents and the wife are also teachers. I have also done time in schools in a support capacity, so I believe that I have a good observational knowledge of the demands on primary teachers and how those have changed over a number of decades.

I know my fair share of teachers. I do not believe that I am exaggerating wildly.

ShockWaffle wrote:
You don't have to be an expert to teach key stage 2 in any field, you just have to be more of an expert than the child is. If you had to be an actual expert, you would need 7 bachelors degrees to teach infants.

Primary education goes up the age 12 - that’s more than infants. What you appear to be saying is that as long as the piano teacher is one lesson ahead of the student, then all is well. That’s great until you hit something complex by Rachmaninov, and you become unstuck.

While I agree that they don’t have to have a degree in every subject, I have to contest that they need to know a lot more about a subject than the brightest kid in the class. How can you explain something quite complex at a level that a child will understand if you don’t have a good understanding of the subject at hand? To engage and push children, you need to be able to be confident about what you are talking, and to be able to draw children into the subject. At some point, you have to deal with the question “why?”.

ShockWaffle wrote:
Everything else you mentioned is just the background noise of teaching and applies just as much to home economics classes as it does to ICT.


I can understand teachers being afraid that their charges won't comprehend the material, but I am not impressed if they are worried that they too will fail.[/quote]
What we can not do is drop someone into a situation where they will be expected to teach something which they have had no experience or knowledge of. That would be utter folly.

Either:
1 - we keep primary education as a broad, non-specialised foundation form of education which the Secondary and Tertiary sectors and build on with each teacher in each class teaching everything to a standard that you may regard as sub-par

or

2 - we shift teaching in primary schools, with teachers being subject specialists taking that subject to every child in the school - much like secondary schools

either way, you’ll find that at some point, you’ll need outside support for some subjects - either in the form of literature, training or visiting teachers.

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Fri Mar 22, 2013 3:46 pm
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HeatherKay wrote:
forquare1 wrote:
I'm still in Wales...Am I allowed to go back to England? :/


I'm afraid you've been in Wales too long now. You're tainted. I'm not sure you'll be allowed back, unless you sneak in via Liverpool.


That's right prech (ala Stella / Ruth Jones)

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Caz is correct though


Fri Mar 22, 2013 4:18 pm
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jonlumb wrote:
ShockWaffle wrote:
paulzolo wrote:
In primary education, a teacher is expected to be an expert in all of these fields:
Maths
English
Chemistry
Biology
Physics
History
Art
P.E.
IT
Modern Languages (apparently, according to the new Curriculum, this includes Mandarin, Latin and Ancient Greek)

I'm sorry but you are exaggerating wildly. You don't have to be an expert to teach key stage 2 in any field, you just have to be more of an expert than the child is. If you had to be an actual expert, you would need 7 bachelors degrees to teach infants.

Everything else you mentioned is just the background noise of teaching and applies just as much to home economics classes as it does to ICT.

I can understand teachers being afraid that their charges won't comprehend the material, but I am not impressed if they are worried that they too will fail.


Then you clearly know nothing on the subject of teaching children. I suggest you gain some experience of the subject before sticking an ill-informed opinion in again.

Really? So what counts as an expert in history to you? Someone who knows enough about the subjct to teach 9 year olds about kings and queens, or somebody who has researched extensively in archives to find out the facts about those kings and queens?

What's an expert in biology? What do they teach little children about? My ex was some sort of biologist - she did AIDS vaccine research and has a PhD in the subject. Is a primary school teacher equivalent to these skills?

Primary teaching is not for experts, that claim was just a rhetorical trick to fool the inattentive. Give up on it.


Fri Mar 22, 2013 10:09 pm
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I want a primary school teacher to be an expert in the subjects of child development and child education. Those are the tasks actually at hand. The content matter actually being taught; well, I'd maybe want them to have some level of knowledge of the subject - say some secondary school level education maybe - but there's no absolute requirement to know tons of stuff that's outside the curriculum as defined. The idea you need (say) a maths degree to teach 9 year olds maths is fatuous. You need to be a good teacher to teach nine year olds pretty much anything nine year olds need to know. Because the fact is any reasonably educated adult is going to know more about pretty much everything than a 9 year old.


Fri Mar 22, 2013 10:17 pm
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You might still require a decent level in the subject you are teaching. Every now and them you get a bright spark who is far more capable than even the teacher. If the teacher gets corrected by a student it goes down badly.


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Sat Mar 23, 2013 6:05 am
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ShockWaffle wrote:
Really? So what counts as an expert in history to you? Someone who knows enough about the subjct to teach 9 year olds about kings and queens, or somebody who has researched extensively in archives to find out the facts about those kings and queens?

What's an expert in biology? What do they teach little children about? My ex was some sort of biologist - she did AIDS vaccine research and has a PhD in the subject. Is a primary school teacher equivalent to these skills?

Primary teaching is not for experts, that claim was just a rhetorical trick to fool the inattentive. Give up on it.

I think you are being a bit obtuse. Yes, you don't need PhDs in all topics.

What you need is a generalist. Somebody who has a VERY GOOD understanding of each topic. Somebody who can talk about every theme in the curriculum and surrounding topics (i.e. if they have to talk about chlorophyll, they must also be able to talk about cellular structures, osmosis etc. as the children will often push for more information beyond the exact topic being discusses. They don't need to be able to know the subject to molecular engineer levels, but they do need to have a very good knowledge of the subject.

And that across all topics they must teach. Are they PhD level experts? No. Are they "experts" compared to the average man on the street, probably in 8 out of 10 subjects, yes. By that, I mean that the average man on the street probably knows a lot about one or two subjects, but their knowledge in many other subjects probably doesn't even reach Primary level any more... I've met a lot of PhDs in certain subjects, who can run rings round me for hours on a specific subject, but have no knowledge outside their chosen subject, many barely have enough skills to actually "live", without a partner or parents.

My mum used to work with a geophysics PhD, he was highly paid and was a real genius at finding oil in seismic surveys. But my mum used to organise his life for him and sign all of his cheques to pay his bills! This isn't uncommon, I know a lot of Mensa members and a large number of them are very intelligent and can talk on certain subjects, but on general knowledge and common sense, they get an F.

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Sat Mar 23, 2013 7:57 am
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My ex is a nursery school teacher. She has a degree in early years learning, it was a lot of hard work, in my view, not commensurate with income. However, vital to fully understand what they are trying to do for our children. Incidentally the degree was a requirement of the job which I was quite surprised by. But it shows that teachers are still the unsung heroes of education. My Art teacher friend has an MA and A levels in maths and english too. It doesn't do to knock the teachers we have today.


Sat Mar 23, 2013 9:18 am
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I think most classes have a few children that are way smarter than some people on here give credit for.

When I was at university, there was a 12 year old in the year below me. I bet she was pretty smart when she was 9.

When I was at primary school, I probably knew more on certain topics that were favourites of mine. I happened to really like maths and physics, so I read a lot. When I asked questions, I was generally told to shut up and stop being difficult.

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Sat Mar 23, 2013 11:49 am
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big_D wrote:
I think you are being a bit obtuse. Yes, you don't need PhDs in all topics.

Sure. All I did was introduce an excessively high standard for expertise in order to contrast it with absurdly low one presented. Now we move the line.

If we were to draw another line representing what level of subject expertise is required to teach primary school children, we will inevitably end up somewhere near that required of secondary school children. So, a PS teacher needs a bunch of GCSEs. Everybody has a bunch of those.

So the line that delineates an expert will never come down to the level that defines the expertise required of a primary school teacher in the subject they are teaching at any given minute unless we are willing to redefine the requirements of those teachers to a level that none of them actually meets in real life.

I'm leaving a little wiggle room if somebody really wants to put up a fight. But we will end up back at my starting position which is that the only people who need to view a primary school teacher as any kind of expert are those who most recently learned to tie their shoelaces.


Sat Mar 23, 2013 5:33 pm
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JJW009 wrote:
I think most classes have a few children that are way smarter than some people on here give credit for.

When I was at university, there was a 12 year old in the year below me. I bet she was pretty smart when she was 9.

When I was at primary school, I probably knew more on certain topics that were favourites of mine. I happened to really like maths and physics, so I read a lot. When I asked questions, I was generally told to shut up and stop being difficult.

I was banned from the school library by the time I was seven. I had already read every book in the school library by then.

When I was 15 I went to a talk on Quantum Mechanics at Sussex University by some Oxford lecturer and asked a question about the apparent contradiction with another theory. They speaker could not answer it, though it did take me three days working through Feynman diagrams to work out that there was no conflict.

So I know what you mean. I was even dragged in to the principle at sixth form for upsetting a biology teacher over a correction. Though with bright pupils they need to be allowed a bit of free rein so that they can progress at their own speed.

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Sat Mar 23, 2013 11:33 pm
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Amnesia10 wrote:
I was even dragged in to the principle at sixth form for upsetting a biology teacher over a correction.


This is what I found so refreshing about uni, you could turn around to the lecturers and tell them they were wrong. After some reasoning the lecturer was either wrong, or you were, or both sides went to read more about it.


Sat Mar 23, 2013 11:39 pm
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forquare1 wrote:
Amnesia10 wrote:
I was even dragged in to the principle at sixth form for upsetting a biology teacher over a correction.


This is what I found so refreshing about uni, you could turn around to the lecturers and tell them they were wrong. After some reasoning the lecturer was either wrong, or you were, or both sides went to read more about it.

Yes but my teacher was upset that I made her look stupid. The principle did say although I was correct there are better ways of handling such an issue.

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Sat Mar 23, 2013 11:42 pm
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'Expert' is a nonsensical term really, it's completely relative. There is no standard unit for 'expertise'. By holding slightly more knowledge than the person in front of you, you are in their eyes a de facto 'expert'. Just look at the talking heads that pop up on the TV giving comment.
Certain contributors to this topic are holding forth opinion that they're keen to dress up as fact. They appear to think that a trained chimp could teach, but haven't actually got any teaching experience to back that up, nor have they apparently spent any time with a member of the profession and witnessed what actually goes in the class room since they left it.
Either that, or they're afflicted with a heavy dose of academic snobbery of the worse kind.

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Sun Mar 24, 2013 1:10 am
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