Peter Viney's Blog

The end of term … 

A rant. This comes from speaking to my grandkids and the discussion widening to include my kids. I apologize to my colleagues if it offends. I spent most of my teaching experience in Private Language Schools for English Language Teaching. I also did part-time lectures in film studies and  then I did teacher training in secondary and tertiary education. ELT may be considered a poor relation by some, but in fact we taught every minute of every lesson. We taught intensive courses of four to six hours a day, just in the one subject. We couldn’t mark homework in class or ask students to read silently for more than 4 or 5 minutes,  or “research the topic on your phones” (one my grandkids get).

When I was at secondary school, a selective single-sex state grammar school, the “end of term” was the last couple of hours of the very last day. After exams, we simply started the next day on the next year’s syllabus. The same at university, where we  stayed up to the last week of June. After first and second year exams, we just rolled straight into the next year’s syllabus. After Part Ones, we selected our Third Year courses, and while lectures didn’t begin, the reading list was issued, with a strong suggestion that selected titles should all be read before the autumn term. I did too.

At my grammar school, even after A-levels in second year Sixth form, we had to come in to school. Yes, it was a waste of time. I was in a party assigned to re-glue and repair library books, and we resented our free labour but our headmaster was explicit: I will be doing your references and reports. Absence (he called it “truancy”) would be noted. To be fair, much was repairing altered titles. So that every copy of A Tale of Two Cities had the C in Cities replaced with a T.  Shaw’s Man and Supermanhad two balls under “man” and three balls under “Superman.” Great Expectations had a pregnant tummy below the title. Some of our glueing and binding party may well have been culprits in defacing works of literary merit such as Hemingway’s immortal (seminal?)The Old Man and The Semen.  Then there was War and Peas, Moby’s Dick, Fart of Darkness, Fartland: A Romance of Many Dimensions(OK, they were schoolboys), A Study in Harlot and Madame Ovary. The Turn of The Screw lost the first three words of its title, blue ink eradicating gold lettering.  Three Men in A Coat wasn’t even rude. I could even name names and grass them up, but half a century has passed and there must be a statute of limitation. So you’re safe, George. Whoops, sorry.

That was a week of my life largely wasted (the chatter was fun), and A levels done I could already have been selling ice cream on the beach for real money. But in general, the end of term had been the last day. In the summer term, we would get just one excursion trip per year. Winchester Cathedral, Portsmouth for Portchester Castle and HMS Victory, then Salisbury Cathedral are the ones I recall. They were all history-based. We were amazed at the explicit notices regarding venereal diseases in Portsmouth public toilets.

In retrospect, what I learned most from those excursions is (a) all sailors apparently have multiple afflictions from VD which includes your nose falling off (b) If it rains on St Swithin’s Day it rains a lot afterwards – St Swithin is buried at Winchester Cathedral (c) the words to a number of rude singalong “rugby” songs which our teachers turned a wise blind eye to us singing on the bus, though the line was drawn before The Good Ship Venus. Karen, at the neighbouring girls grammar school, remembers no trips except a trip to the Esso oil refinery at Fawley with talks on catalytic cracking. She says it was a careers trip. Commendably non gender-marked for a 60s girls school.

We would also have a couple of added sports days, one for the school, and one the annual competition with King Edward VI school from Southampton who had been evacuated to Bournemouth in World War II and shared the premises … which is why I can say Benny Hill went to my school.

My grandkids reckon the last month at their various schools after exams has been “winding down” with the last two weeks meaning no substantial work at all. Yes, the kids know that the teachers are just passing time. Glorified childminding. At one school, they seemed to have left the last couple of weeks to the sports department for athletics. Great for the sporty ones, agony for kids who like me at their age spend June with streaming eyes and nose from hay fever. Let’s have them spend a week on freshly-mown grass trying to run. Throwing the javelin with zero instruction on technique gave me a back injury that still twinges today.

One of my grandkids had an excursions week. Four days out. This included a Safari Park and a Motor Museum. This is a selective grammar school. Let’s be classist. Because of the way selective education favours the middle classes, or for those who see themselves as working class, the educated classes, this is not a case of a holiday trip for deprived kids. My grandchild reckoned every single kid in the class had already been to the Safari Park multiple times (it’s not far away) and the motor museum at least twice. That’s with their families. To be fair, many of the class were away on the French trip so it wasn’t worth moving forward, but then the kids left were the ones doing German and Spanish. Not much point going on the French trip if you’re doing GCSE Spanish.

Do they get work out of it? We had preparation lessons and follow up work. What do you learn from watching a few bedraggled lions in a field or monkeys ripping off car aerials? In my opinion, it’s also a stressful day for the teachers who have to take them. Yes, it has other values of bonding, doing something together off the school premises, I know.

Which brings me to video. I spent twenty-five years writing educational video. You use five minutes of film and develop work from it. At school, we had films in the 1960s but they would be 20 minutes from Esso on catalytic cracking, obviously a popular 1960s topic, or 20 minutes  film on “The Cheeses of France.”  There were 365 one for every day of the year (this was before artisan cheese production). Oh, and the French for cheese is fromage. I learned that even though the soundtrack was mainly in English. Films were entertaining, but that was mainly the teacher cursing the Technical Assistant, Mr Miller, whenever the film stopped. In those days it took a teacher and a technician to show a film. We had geography films – sub-standard animations on volcanoes, but the geography teacher was young, soft-hearted and inexperienced and had a nervous breakdown as a result of what almost amounted to murder in the dark after an unpopular lad was skewered with a compass.  Our other teachers were mainly hard post-WW2 and Korean War bastards, and did not naively revert to switching off the lights with a class of thirty teenaged boys unless they really had to. Hand on light switch, they warned us of dire consequences to misbehaviour, and these included physical violence (already illegal) coupled with “I couldn’t care less if your parents sue me as a result. You’ll be the one with permanent deafness in one ear.”

Yes, educational video is different to “showing films”. Yes, David Attenborough and Brian Cox are better teachers than your average biology or physics teachers. But all my grandkids have watched whole lessons of Attenborough and Cox at school. I couldn’t justify more than a ten minute extract with on the spot follow up. Ever. But these videos appear in full at the end of term.

‘Do you want to watch Planet Earth, kids? ‘
‘No, seen it at school.’
‘Which school?’
‘Oh, we saw it at primary school and secondary school. And Mum and Dad put it on with Netflix at home.’

Exactly. At home. Best place to watch it.

Then Dad’s Army. I was talking about my dad and the Home Guard. My grandkids said they’d seen the sitcom. Two of them had seen it. At different schools. OK, that’s good for history. I wondered which episode they’d seen in history lessons. Six or seven of them, it turned out. Six or seven? Three and a half hours? True at both schools? Is there some History teacher trainer who goes round saying ‘20^thcentury history? Bung them Dad’s Army?’ That’s not teaching from video. Well, it was the last couple of weeks of term.

There are things you could usefully do. I know schools in Europe that have “an immersion week” in foreign languages – it means shifting the timetable a great deal, but a week (or even a couple of days) of only work in a foreign language has enormous results. The first ten minutes of each lesson is often lost with ‘switching on” to the foreign language when you have four or five lessons spread over a week. You get past that. But it has to be fun and varied. It can’t be watching long films or ploughing steadily through the regular course book based on Council of Europe mind-numbingly dull syllabuses. I’d happily spend 45 minutes teaching a classic or current popular song for example, or just telling them some interesting stuff about (France / Spain) … in (French / Spanish) preferably filled with anecdotes involving the teacher’s own experiences.  There’s a huge difference in listening to someone in the room telling a story who is reacting to expressions of incomprehension, and pausing, slowing, repeating and rephrasing based on that feedback. It’s so much easier to follow than a set recorded voice, or film narrative. A live “lecture” is infinitely better.

In English, you could again abandon everything and do a week or three days of doing nothing but intensive drama work on a single play.  With NO READING ALOUD AROUND THE CLASS. Not ever. Then I’d justify watching the whole play on video (as well as acting it out), though I’d also take a classic scene and show it in several different versions. That’s easy enough with the major Shakespeare plays … RSC, Globe, BBC, film versions.

Similar ideas for art and music spring to mind.

I’ve no idea what you could do in science, but that’s my ignorance of science. I only go up to the twelve times table.

In ELT we’re used to the value of intensive courses. Those last couple of weeks of term could be used, even on a small scale, for intensive immersion in a subject, even if only for a day each. It’s one hell of a job for administrators, I know. But in the summer I did a complete timetable for eight main course classes and ten summer course classes every other Monday. That was pre-computer days too.