I’ve just come back from the Parent-Teacher evening for children #2 and #3. This is not a gripe about the school at all.* They are both doing well and being taught by very good teachers.
#2 is in Year 5, almost a year away from SATs. However, this is already on his teacher’s mind. He’s an engaged boy, very interested in the world around him, and very turned on by what interests him. He’s prone to day dreaming, like many children of his age. This makes him struggle to concentrate for extended periods of time. It’s a difficult balance, he clearly needs to learn to do this, but I just worry that if the need to concentrate is required to do well in his SATs he’ll not learn the value of focusing for its own sake.
#3 loves maths and is already being pushed by the teacher into doing complex arithmetic. Again, this was placed in the context of his SATs. But he’s fascinated by numbers, surely he could be stretched in different ways, in ways that teach him about the world that maths can paint, rather than learning how to do ever more complex multiplication. I worry he’s going to get bored too.
And it isn’t the school’s fault, it’s our political masters wanting to test everything. I realise that this is a commonplace gripe about the managerial tendencies of our political classes. But these two small, back to back incidents at school rather brought home the insidious effects of it to me.
*Slightly worried that if and when this diary hiding in plain site gets noticed people will begin to work out who I’m talking about. The school has done a great job, it’s really been turned round over the past 3 or so years. The teachers are great and our children are doing well. This post is not a criticism of them at all.
Picture credit: Christiano Betta
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