I've just spent two hours on a Sunday night changing and proofreading each of my student's OAL (Other Areas of Learning) from the 1st person, in which they were initially told to write them, to the third person because somebody read something else and changed the initial instruction. The majority of them also had to be rewritten to correctly articulate
which one of the 'Key Skills' they fulfilled in each of their achievements. So, now all the boxes are ticked and the students will get something or other for achieving key skills they never knew about. "Success". What an inspired system. This is not a once off - this is the new culture of, eh, "learning" that permeates this "reform".
This, and so many other aspects of this so-called Junior Cycle reform, reminds me of the JCSP about 10 years ago where the teacher, under pressure to actually teach, would choose to teach rather than waste classes filling in the waffle "statements" and so on. It was a much smarter use of time to get students to write in set sentences in the
'Statements of Learning' and so on in as few class periods as possible. In fact, the parallel between the current "reforms" and the JCSP is painfully obvious and I'm surprised nobody else seems to be pointing it out. It's an unadulterated box-ticking exercise, in its truest sense. There is zero learning going on. Zero.
This dumbing down of learning is not merely going to end in tears; it's unequivocally starting in tears. Every time I think of the official silence on the faults of this "reform" that Danish story,
The Emperor's New Clothes, recurrently springs to mind. Back in the 1960s the catchcry of John Healy's famous book on the death of a rural town,
'No one shouted stop!' could be just as easily applied here. Far too many silly, vacuous waffle "awards", not to mention the relentlessly expanding list of extracurricular activities interfering with our educating, and not enough learning, inspiring and enlightenment going on in our classrooms. As a teacher I feel that as a spiritual loss. God help the bright kids who are screaming for a challenge. They really are being sold a pup here and it's a pity we don't have any national parents' council worthy of the name to speak up for these kids.
"The Emperor's New Clothes" (Danish: Kejserens nye klæder) is a short tale written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, about two weavers who promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that they say is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent – while in reality, they make no clothes at all, making everyone believe the clothes are invisible to them.
When the emperor parades before his subjects in his new "clothes", no one dares to say that they do not see any suit of clothes on him for fear that they will be seen as stupid. Finally a child cries out, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!"
What examples of waffle and blatant box-ticking exercises have you had to endure today? Let's start recording them in their inglorious superficiality and hope that somebody picks up on this thread and the backside-covering, educationally pointless rubbish that is being sold as "educational reform".
