Sham Science

Slowing waaaay down

2009-06-07T19:25:26Z

I'm kind of bored of this blog. There's seldom much exciting and new to report anymore. I'll do a news digest once a month or so, unless there's something more urgent. First digest later this week...

Sod

2009-05-03T19:47:12Z

Sunday nights are horrible these days. I realise nobody looks forward to monday mornings and the end of the weekend, but I really object to my current system. Spending weekends at my parents' place is fine, I can take it or leave it. Friday afternoons, I don't really mind where I am, but since my entire social life is up north, it's just more convenient. But that then means that Sunday night, just as I'm getting used to the good life (with fodder I don't have to pay for!), I'm suddenly ripp'd untimely from my mother's house and thrown into the cold, dark night, there to drive along the N1 south (which is not much fun at that time of night), and into a house which is fine, but still not as nice as home. And then I STILL have to go to bed early and wake up before noon. So sod it.

Buzz buzz buzz

2009-04-30T14:14:03Z

Been playing with the van de Graaff generator all day. It's working great now, and I've been stung about a million times already.

Unfortunately, there wasn't anyone else to enjoy this with me, as we ran out of time with 11F & 11G, and then 11A didn't show up because someone decided the school was closing early today, without bothering to tell me about it.

Meh.

On the plus side, the damn exam revision is now out the way.

Harumph

2009-04-26T21:38:02Z

Why must EVERYONE else be so optimistic about my teaching prospects? I don't generally like to mindlessly follow the crowd, but I do feel a little defeatist when nobody else seems to think that the situation is as hopeless and pointless as it seems to me. All my colleagues, all the kids, all my friends who're teachers, all my family and anyone who knows anything about my situation, tends to agree that it's rather shitty, but also seems to think that if I only did X or just gave Y a try, then all would be well again.nI makes me wonder what I've missed.

Also of interest, my independent sources within the Department of Education tell me that the department is just as unhappy with Teach SA's training programme as we teacher-trainees are. However, their demands are a little unrealistic: They want us to be supervised by a qualified teacher all the time. If there were any teachers to spare for that, then we wouldn't be needed in the first place.

My Current Position

2009-04-18T14:48:40Z

This is a copy of a letter I've just sent to Kevin Fleming, probably the most approachable person at Teach SA. I repeat it here because it's probably the most coherent version of my usual bitching about working at Landulwazi and it makes my current position as clear as I'm ever likely to.

Hey, hope you've enjoyed Cape Town.

I really don't know what to think at the moment. I don't want to just abandon my kids, but all the evidence and all my training in development is telling me that teaching them science in this context with their backgrounds is pretty damn close to hopeless.

The pass rate for the march exam was 2%; 3 kids out of 147 passed, and that's only at the lower national pass mark of 30%. Nobody reached the district's pass mark of 40%. The average mark was just a smidge over 10%. The same group of kids ALL failed maths, and the results for the other grades look pretty similar, so it's clearly a school-wide problem.

So things are bad, but I knew they would be, even if this is even worse than I expected. What's really bugging me is that I can't see a way out of this mess that one teacher alone could manage. I think there are 4 major roots to the problem:
1. Inadequate support at home. We knew that was inevitable.
2. Poor attitudes and teaching from previous teachers. Not all my colleagues are bad, and some are really quite good. But the shit ones spoil it for everyone else. They don't teach properly and give the kids free marks (the school is officially aware of this, and the deputy principal gave a speech condemning it yesterday, but I don't think they've ever taken the unfair marks back), so that kids get pushed forward without being adequately prepared for the next grade. The kids also learn from these teachers that it's ok to be absent and lazy and disinterested and self-serving, which is not all that useful.
3. The system is rotten. I'm sure you know that the district has stated that it doesn't really care if teachers give students the exact answers to parrot in exams. My in-school mentor (Henry Shongwe, definitely one of the better teachers we've got) has complained to me that he's constantly under pressure to artificially inflate students' marks, and it's been implied by my superiors that I should do the same. So it's no surprise that some teachers are perfectly happy to push students forward when they don't deserve it. There's virtually no oversight within the school or from the district, and what little there is all seems to be concerned with making sure we've done all the right paperwork to cover our asses when things go wrong; nobody's interested in knowing whether I can actually teach or not.
4. The syllabus is problematic. The district has ignored its own work schedule, by putting questions in the march exam based on work that's only supposed to be covered in april, or in a couple of cases, work which was deemed optional. Even worse, I discovered to my horror yesterday, is that the 2005 syllabus change scrapped whole years' worth of stuff that I was taught prior to the work we're covering now. We were told by Sipho (or someone at Days Inn) that the GET Natural Sciences covered a mix of physics, chemistry, biology and a bit of geography. Instead, it's almost entirely biology. I started doing basic chemistry as far back as grade 6 or 7 and basic physics not long after, and I still struggled with the grade 11 and 12 work. My kids only started looking at chemistry in grade 10, and they're still being expected to do almost the same grade 11 work as I did. It's just insane. My kids mostly aren't even sure what an atom is, after I've tried explaining it in every way I can think of. They shouldn't even have been allowed into grade 11 without knowing that.

The bottom line is that I've got a bunch of kids, almost all of whom have no work ethic and no interest in science, even though they presumably volunteered for it, who effectively know nothing that I need them to, because they've been promoted every year for no good reason. Even with extra lessons during break and after school nearly every day, I'm struggling to find enough time cover all the prescribed work (and forget any of the so-called optional stuff, even though it will most likely keep coming up in official exams). I don't have time to also teach them the 3 or 4 years of prior knowledge that they need to understand the current stuff. But obviously if I don't go back to the basics, they'll never understand the prescribed work. We're screwed either way. And that's with only 3 classes, which I'm told will soon be increased to 6.

I have no idea what to do about this, and problem-solving is supposed to be my speciality. If I had the authority, I could clean the system up nicely from the top down and make it work better for whatever kids pass through it in the future. That kind of big institutional development is exactly what I've been studying for years. I know how to deal with that.

But from my humble teacher's desk? I can try to show a good example, for what it's worth. I can concentrate on the few most promising, interested kids and try to help them achieve their best. But with all the problems listed above, I can't take all 147 kids, most of whom don't really want to be there at all, and push them all hard enough to make up for so many lost years of education. Most of them need to go back to grade 10 (or earlier), rather than wasting their time in grade 11. There is not enough I can do for them to make them pass this year, short of helping them cheat in exams. (And frankly, they're so bad at cheating that it might not be enough anyway. I frequently catch them with cheat sheets and such with the wrong fucking answers on them!)

As I said, I don't want to give up on them. But unless there's a reasonable, viable solution to their almost complete lack of prior learning, then I simply can't do my job and I'd be wasting my time by staying.

>:(

2009-04-17T20:38:48Z

It's not been a good week. I couldn't even face the prospect of going in on wednesday, so I took a sick day. I gather Eric wasn't at work that day either. At least that gave me plenty of time to finish marking those exams, so naturally I played games all day instead. Ended up staying up til 03:00 marking papers, and just about managed to drag myself out of bed on thursday morning. 11F and 11A both bunked, which suited me fine. Just dealing with 11G and their discontent over the poor marks was enough for one day.

The final results? Of 147 kids, 3 got over 30%. None reached 40%. The average mark was 10%.

What was I there for last term? What am I doing there now? Can anything be done to improve things? I don't know.

After that, Teach SA wanted to have a meeting with all of us, and I don't really remember what the point of it all was. Something about how they couldn't sort out our SACE registration, and a lot more talk suggesting that they still don't have much of a plan for us. I pointed out that the biggest problem I have is that my kids are missing about 3 or 4 years of learnng that I need them to have in order to teach my own work properly. They avoided the topic.

Then today I found out that a big part of the problem is that the big syllabus change of 2005 essentially removed all physics and chemistry until grade 10, instead focusing on basic biology (plants and shit). That's utter bullshit! I started basic chemistry (and physics too?) in grade 6 or 7, and I still struggled with the higher level stuff. How can the department honestly expect today's kids to do the same stuff I did in half as much time? It's complete bullshit.

Time to break out the old destructo-ray and the plans for blowing up the moon. Pity. I quite like the moon.

Despair

2009-04-14T15:29:27Z

I'm seriously considering getting out of teaching as soon as I can. I enjoy it, so long as I've got the kids under control, but I'm apparently not very good at it. Apart from 1 or 2 bright sparks (who don't really need me), my kids are all doing dismally. The median mark for the March exam is somewhere around 10%. Part of me hopes that Teach SA falls apart in disarray (which should be pretty likely, with the likes of Nalini Reddy running things, but realistically there are just too many high-ups with too much invested in it to let that happen), just so I can leave early but honourably.

This holiday has shown me a few things:
1. I really like doing nothing all day.
2. Early mornings are bad for my health.
3. Living so far away from all my friends really, really sucks.
4. Being away from my kids makes it much easier to consider abandoning them.

I'm not sure if my current mood is just an inevitable post-holiday depression, or if I really am as miserable about all of this as I feel. I have definitely made no impact on these kids at all. I know that one rushed term is not exactly enough to judge on, but I've seen no evidence of progress at all. The eager ones are still eager, but not doing well. The rest are still uninterested and not doing well. I have changed nothing.

I'm not going to hand in my resignation tomorrow morning. (I'm still not even officially an employee of the education department, so that formality might not even be compulsory.) But perhaps I should start looking at job ads in some other field, preferably closer to home. And I'd really love to work somewhere where people can actually understand what I'm saying.

If you know of such a job, feel free to tell me about it.

What I did on my holidays...

2009-04-10T20:16:58Z

Short answer: Fuck all.

Long answer: I did as little as possible, once the training got cancelled. I've still got to mark almost all of those exams, and my plan to move the last of my furniture out of my parent's place has come to naught, cos that would just have been a lot of effort. And I've got a bed, so what more do I really need, really?

I did attend some of this year's UPCON, the geek convention of the University of Pretoria, and it was nice, but quite limited compared to ICON. And... that's about all I can claim that was at all out of the ordinary. This weekend probably won't be any different.

In hindsight, the long answer wasn't that long.

The Mutiny is Complete (Yaarrgghhh!!!)

2009-03-31T12:42:33Z

All parties (including De La Salle) have agreed that our observation there has been mostly fruitless, and so it's been officially called off. Unfortunately, it seems that Nalini Reddy has thrown a tantrum and cancelled the unrelated maths and science afternoon training sessions, which pisses me off greatly. That would have actually been very useful to me and my sciencey colleagues.

On the plus side, more time off. Maybe I can get some work done on my masters.

The Great Training Mutiny (in progress)

2009-03-30T17:14:48Z

Today was, as feared, a bit of a wank.

Not a hell of a lot of teaching happened, due to a combination of legitimate factors (which do not reflect poorly on De La Salle in any way), so we didn't get to see much. But the little we saw led all of us to a common conclusion: Classes with 12 or 13 kids in them are the way of the future, and something we're never going to see at our schools. More than that, these classes at De La Salle were so different to our own that there's virtually nothing we can learn from these teachers, because they just don't face any of the same obstacles as us.

I was assigned to observe a Karen van Wyk, the senior science teacher, and she was pretty good. She told us that she had some similar teaching experiences, and even had a little good advice for us. But simply sitting at the back of her class taught me nothing useful.

So my colleagues and I had a meeting and agreed that we weren't willing to put up with a whole week of this; originally we meant that 1 day was more than enough, but after it was suggested that today was the worst possible day for us to base our judgement on, we agreed to give it one more day and then see.

In short, today felt more like a cruel tease than a training exercise.

I should also bitch a lot about Nalini Reddy, our incredibly arrogant, incredibly incompetent training manager, but fuck it. I really can't be bothered to spend another second thinking about that old windbag.

Plan for Training Week

2009-03-29T18:03:19Z

I've been saying that I'll go to this week's training, unless and until it proves to be a waste of my time (as a lot of Teach SA's stuff has been). So I thought I should set down my criteria for what a good training session should include, rather than letting the whims of the day (no doubt shaped by my desire to get more holiday time) determine what I do this week.

So let it be known that the following are my (semi-binding) demands for this training:
1. I've got to actually learn stuff.
2. It's got to be stuff I can use to help my kids learn stuff.
3. It's got to be stuff that I couldn't learn more easily or more efficiently on my own.
4. I will not allow it to interfere with the special roleplaying session I've prepared for my friend Alex's birthday, to be played on wednesday evening.

I'm also not inclined to stay there all day long; if there's any sitting around and waiting to be done, I'd rather spend it at home, preferably sleeping. So we'll have to see how the schedule looks.

I've also been invited to spend most of the week living with my friends, Arran and Sarah. Sarah teaches at De La Salle (the school that's hosting our training), and reckons it only takes 5 minutes to get to work from their place. And since my alternatives are staying at my place and taking on the worst morning traffic for about 45 minutes or more, or staying at my parents' place, where there's no spare bed for me, I'm thinking I might just take them up on their offer.

Survival part 2

2009-03-28T09:37:20Z

This week was not much fun. I started by invigilating a grade 12 class, and they were fine. But every class after that got worse and worse, until I had a grade 9 class where I had to actually run after a kid to keep him from leaving early. I had to prioritise the rest of the class, though, so he got away. And I was supposed to be free that day; I got conned into it by some asshole teacher who's never getting another favour out of me again. The rest of the time was spent bumming around my lab and preparing and giving an emergency extra lesson on stuff I hadn't taught the kids yet, because once again, nobody told me about it.

My kids wrote their paper on friday morning, and afterwards most told me they thought they had done well, although a few said they'd run out of time. I've only looked at the first 10 or so, and so far nobody has passed. A couple were just shy of the 40% pass mark, but most are closer to 0-20% so far. I need to mark all 140-odd papers by the 15th, when school starts up again.

I'm also really pissed off with the district. Not only did they include stuff in this test that they specifically said wasn't really part of the syllabus, but they also cocked up the marking memorandum for it. There are answers they've given us to mark with that are simply wrong. I also only got a copy of the official policy document regarding that practical investigation my kids had to do (on Charles's law) this week, showing that I'd not approached it in at all the right way. It's all utter cock, and a thorough waste of my time, and more importantly, a waste of the kids' time.

But I'm free now! Sort of. Still got that marking to do and all of next week is training with Teach SA at a school called De La Salle. But just the idea of term-end feels great. First thing I did when Eric and I got in the car to go home yesterday was put on Alice Cooper's School's Out. What a relief, however fleeting, to get out of the grinder.

Survived!

2009-03-27T23:44:43Z

I have survived term 1. More details later, cos right now, I'm exhausted.

Things to do

2009-03-22T15:14:10Z

1. Check the science paper, when it finally gets delivered, and see if there's anything I still urgently need to teach my kids. I won't have time for more than 1 extra hour per class, but I'm reasonably certain we'll still be a little behind.

2. Write my fucking master's proposal. I formally applied to start it in July 2007.

3. Get some furniture.

4. Look through all the marks I've got and see which kids need the most attention next term.

5. Plan out everything I need to teach next term, even if it's only in very vague detail.

6. Plan, budget and book my trip to the US in July, for the Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas.

7. Pay the rent.

I Live!

2009-03-20T16:05:19Z

I've managed to survive my first term as a teacher, just about. The march pseudo-exams started today, so my teaching finished yesterday, officially, and next week will just be a lot of standing around and doing nothing while I invigilate classes and subjects I don't teach. The physical science test will be next friday morning.

The bulk of this week was taken up with preparing for the practical investigation they had to do on Charles's law, or more accurately, me trying to push them all along, and 95% of them doing fuck all work. The few who did honestly try to figure out how to solve the problem struggled along on their own, but only those who stuck around for my advice right near the end got nudged into designing a workable experiment. And of those, about 2 people actually showed up for class to conduct the damn thing. The whole exercise was a wash, and what was so much more important than science? Bloody fucking life orientation, the most useless bloody subject ever. Well, that's not quite true; it could have been homeopathy class, or something of that calibre. But life orientation (life skills, as we called it in my day) is still mostly a big wank. I unofficially dropped it when I was in grade 11 or 12, together with my friend, Nali, and we would spend a few periods every week roaming the school, talking crap, while everyone else completed forms about their favourite colour for socks. Good times.

The trouble, it seems, is that the education department decided that life orientation should be upgraded into a real subject, for real marks. So now it's easy marks for the kids, and they'd rather get cheap success there than struggle to pass a real subject, like maths or science. Apparently, Eric tells me, he's been advised that many of his maths kids have never actually passed maths, but have still been promoted, because you have to fail a certain number of subjects to be held back at all, so they just ignore 'tricky' subjects like maths and science, and pass on the strength of easy subjects like life orientation.

The irony, of course, is that maths and the 'hard' sciences are the relatively easy ones*, once you get to tertiary education. They have fairly set methods and nice, clear-cut answers. Doing something more vague, like most social sciences, and doing it well, is a much trickier proposition, because there often isn't a single, clear answer, or even a good way to objectively study a problem. But few people (and probably hardly any of my kids) ever reach that level of formal study, and so the maths-based stuff keeps a popular reputation for being the tricky stuff.

* I would like to take this opportunity to mock anyone with a BCom degree. That stuff's just silly.

Come on holidays, hurry up

2009-03-13T20:49:30Z

It's been a long week, and I haven't had time until now to get to my parent's place to abuse their internet (nor the time to set up my own connection).

Not a lot of interesting specifics, but the broad picture of this week is interesting. First off, I ran a pair of "mini tests" on monday, and they were still pretty fucking disastrous. I need my kids to do well for a change, just to get their morale up. When kids tell you that they want to be drug lords when they grow up, it's pretty important to get them thinking about other options in a positive way.

Discipline and attention are also clearly starting to crumble, as the holidays approach and everyone gets more and more sick of the school routine. They clearly have no idea what a real routine is like. In my day, we had to actually work at school, for the full 5 days every week, through 10m of snow, in the blazing sun, uphill both ways. Granted, I still didn't work all that time, but I was a bit of an exception, and I suffered the relevant consequences. And I do really want this term to be over. There are 2 weeks left, and the last week will be nothing but exams. Apparently that'll be really boring for the teachers, as there's fuck all to do except the occasional invigilation. I can't wait to take a nice, long break, but I also know that I still need many more weeks to get my kids as far ahead as they officially need to be.

One cool thing is that there's an assignment this term where the kids have to design their own experiment to test if Charles's law (temperature-volume relationship of ideal gases) is true. I think that's a fantastic idea, and I wish we had had chances like that when I was in school. That's so much more exciting than the prescribed practicals we had to do. I just wish I had been properly briefed on this before yesterday, so that I could have devoted enough time to it. I'm actually a bit pissed off that nobody bothered to explain this new system to me. Makes me wonder what else I need to know about that I haven't been told.

Yesterday I also had heaps of fun trying to drive the 15-20km from my school to Erasmus Monoreng high school in neighbouring Vosloorus. It took me over an hour and 15 minutes just to find the place. I really hate navigating through areas where there're hardly any road signs. But it was interesting once I got there. Monoreng is where Meurial, one of my Teach SA coleagues, teaches. She was taking the first turn to host our science training sessions with Peter Glover, our shared mentor, and it appears to be a very nice school. The training session was also pretty decent, but thanks to my tardiness, we didn't get much time before they needed to lock up the school grounds. Most likely, the next session will be hosted in my lab at Landulwazi, probably during exam week. The third science teacher in our group, Mafor, probably won't host any of these sessions, because apparently there just isn't any space or any facilities at her school (Phumlani high, I think?),

But what really caught my attention was something Peter pointed out: The measurement 'mass' actually represents two different (and somewhat contradictory) properties of matter: inertia (the ability of matter to resist changes in motion) and gravity (the ability of bits of matter to attract each other). None of that is strictly news to me, but I hadn't thought of mass that way before. I suppose we generally think of measurements as representing only one thing at a time.

Dramatic Teaching News!

2009-03-05T18:51:01Z

My lab got cleaned! In all the time I've been there, it's only been cleaned once before, by special arrangement with paid cleaners. And ever since then, it's just been getting worse and worse. Not just a natural build-up of dirt, but also mountains of packets and papers and other crap the kids leave behind. At Landulwazi, the kids are responsible for cleaning their own classes, in a special 'cleaning period' which consumes half of friday (and steals my lesson with 11G), but since I have a special side class, I have no kids officially assigned to me during cleaning period, and so nobody's bothered to clean it at all. My attitude has been that the kids need to learn about living with the consequences of their actions, including making a mess, so I've left them to stew in it. And for weeks now, they've been bitching at me about it, and I kept saying "you're welcome to come during break and do something about it", but they either wanted to clean only as an excuse to not do work, or they just wanted to bitch about it.

But today, a couple of guys finally took the initiative and cleaned the place for me (or more accurately, for themselves and their colleagues), and pretty well too. It hasn't helped that we didn't have a bin in my lab at all, so this afternoon I went out and bought a very nice one. I may regret spending so much on something that will be horribly abused, but I'm hoping that it will show them that I do really care about the cleanliness of the class.

Teaching-wise, not much news. 11A and G have done re-write number 2 of the test, and a lot more have passed now (enough to satisfy the district, I think), but it's total bullshit that I had to literally give them all the answers on a silver platter before they could get that far, and then they still can't all pass, let alone get 100%. Granted, the test does appear to have been a little too tough, at least for now. But still, I gave them the fucking answers!

The new plan is to run little 5-minute mini-tests every monday, to see how well they're keeping up. That way, they're under pressure to keep up with me, and I won't get a big surprise when it turns out that nobody's heard a word I said.

Getting on top of things (gradually)

2009-03-03T18:03:50Z

I sat down today to work out how much of the syllabus I've covered so far, and how much I still have to push through, and things don't look too bad on paper. We'll still have to keep up the extra lessons for the rest of the term, but at least I should be able to teach all the prescribed stuff. What still worries me, though, is that at this pace, not much is really getting through to most of the kids. As evidence, consider the re-write of class test 1: Most marks only went up by 1 or 2 points, not enough to get the vast majority up to a pass mark (of only 40%, I remind you). So most them will be doing an open-book re-write, with marks capped at 40%. Not entirely sure if that complies with school and department policy, but fuck it. I need them to get through and it's not fair to give them higher marks than the people who passed well the first time around.

I'm also eager to finally make time for some practical experiments and stuff. Chalk & talk is all good and well for making me feel like a real teacher, but it's not the way to excite the kids, nor even the best way for them to learn. Poking things with sticks yourself is far more instructive than being told about hypothetical stick-poking. I've tried to liven up a lot of my lessons with what I call 'live-body demonstrations', wherein the kids represent different objects or atoms or whatever, and they can push and pull each other around to see certain phenomena in action. But that's still not the same as seeing real reactions with real substances, especially when it comes to the chemistry stuff.

I also want to clear up a small misconception from my first post. I think I unfairly suggested that Mr Shongwe, my mentor, was lazy. Rather, he was willing to abandon his maths classes because he was told to, and he does what he's told far more than I would. He does in fact work as hard as any teacher I've ever had. Unfortunately, not all the other teachers at Landulwazi can claim that distinction.

Long day again

2009-02-25T20:05:09Z

Today just dragged on and on.

The teaching part was ok, as always. It's just everything else that kills me. I organised an extra lesson timetable with my classes, and now I have to stay an extra 30 mins later every day but friday. Fortunately, we managed to keep the lunch-break lessons to a bare minimum, and I've dogded the saturday-class bullet for now too.

I'm also simplifying the hell out of my lessons. Rather than trying to cover as much as possible, in as much depth as possible (as I'd prefer to be taught myself), I'm limiting each lesson to one super-basic concept, plus a little, related class exercise. Hopefully this minimalist approach will make the concepts stick in their minds better.

Then Teach SA convened an emergency meeting, which turned out to be just more of windbag Nalini yammering on without much point. We (the Landulwazi people) got there 30 mins late, and I was hoping we'd missed the bulk of it, and yet we only got out 2 HOURS LATER!!!! I really can't stand that woman.

Bottom line: My job officially ended at 14:30 today, and I only got home after 18:00. Tired.

Science class test 1: A bit of an utter clusterfuck

2009-02-24T19:43:53Z

Monday, I ran the first class test I'd prepared for my kids, and the results were terrible. Out of 147, only 30-something reached the government's minimum pass mark of 30%, only 24 of those reached the school's goal of 40%, and a mere 6 scraped over the 60% mark, my personal minimum requirement. Even the kids who were trying to cheat (my system made it so easy to spot them) still weren't getting any correct answers.

I have failed completely so far. The few high-performers look like they would have made it this far without me, and they really haven't come that far at all anyway. The highest mark of all was a mere 67%, from a student who's always working super dilligently, always asking good questions and generally out-shining even the other top-level kids. She's got varsity written all over her, but so long as she's under the illusion that 60-odd percent is something to be pleased about (which she was), I don't think she's going to get anywhere near her full potential.

Plus I'm under pressure from the district facilitator (who talks too much) to do a heap of stupid paper-work, plus I'm now forced to give my kids extra lessons, beyond the normal timetable (possibly including saturdays!!!) just so that we have any chance at all of getting through all the prescribed work for this term.

This job just keeps getting tougher and more unpleasant as time goes by.

I'm giving them all a re-write of the same test on thursday and friday, so hopefully they can do better when they know exactly what's expected from them. But that still doesn't help me much when we get to the next test. I can't expect them to re-write everything I ever set for them.

Demonstration ideas

2009-02-21T07:19:38Z

For future reference:

http://www.whynotchemeng.com/uk-and-ireland/teachers/top-ten-flash-bang-demos

Maths test day

2009-02-20T16:22:57Z

Eric borrowed my lab twice today, once for 11A and once for 11F, so that they could write their maths tests there. I supervised both times, and those kids don't seem to know how to write an honest test. Well, that's not quite fair. Most of them probably were just trying to write the test to the best of their personal ability, but so many were behaving extremely suspiciously, and a few were caught red-handed trying to cheat, that it's hard to take a positive view of my first experience of test-writing at Landulwazi.

There seemed to be two main strategies: Directly looking at another person's work, and passing of notes. Direct copying is easier to discourage, but you can only detect it if they're being stupid about it. Notes are trickier to intercept, even when they're being read right under your nose, since they like having heaps of scrap paper for "rough work" and it's not always easy to tell who's paper is whose. But twice I caught kids with notes that were very obviously not in their own handwriting, or even in the same colour ink. But it's worth noting that they love "sharing" calculators and rulers and such, and it's difficult to refuse that, since most of them don't have anything more than a pen. But such equipment passing is almost certainly the basis for much of the note passing.

On monday I'm running my first set of science tests, and I think I've managed to block off a few of their cheating methods. Rather than bringing their own writing paper, I've left space for them to write on the question paper, and no calculators will be needed. As a result, they shouldn't need anything on their desks other than my paper and a pen. Anything else, I confiscate til after class. I'm also limiting their writing time to 30 minutes, rather than a full hour, so that I can remain more vigilant and they have fewer opportunities to cheat.

I got my friend, Damon, to print the test paper out for me, and he and his dad, Brenj, had a go at it. And it was fun seeing that they, a.) couldn't remember half the stuff I'd included, and b.) claimed that my answers were mostly wrong in the remaining cases. And while they were technically right, it just serves to highlight how many lies we have to teach kids so that they have stepping stones to higher levels of understanding. But it's not just kids who get taught wrong as a joke. Just as Brenj mocked the simple explanation of orbitals I'm using, so too, I'm sure, would Michio Kaku mock Brenj's level of understanding. And Michio Kaku still doesn't have all the answers.

Finally, though this was a nice idea, even if the format is a little drab:
http://whyscience.co.uk/

Lots of pressure, but not much heat (my volumn must be increasing)

2009-02-19T15:25:29Z

Yesterday was interesting. After school, I drove to The Hill, a suburb not too far from the halfway mark between Tokoza and my home in Randburg (which is just about as far from Tokoza as anywhere in Joburg). There, I met an old colleague of my mom's, and his wife, who live there. They have a garden cottage that I'll now be renting from March onwards. It's just been refurbished and it's really nice. Very convenient for getting to and from work, and not too much of pain for getting north again for social stuff. So that's good news, and yet I'm still not looking forward to it too much. I've spent decades getting my current home exactly the way I want it, and I'm loathe to have to start from scratch again.

Today I finally got around to looking at the work schedule the district office has told us to follow, and I'm soooooo far behind. I've been struggling so much the last couple weeks to just get everything up and running semi-smoothly in my class that I haven't even thought about how fast we're getting through the work. So it looks like I've got to really start pushing the kids now, which sucks. They're NOT going to learn properly like that, I'm going to have to explain things over and over again during every fucking break, every time one of them realises they didn't really understand what I meant, and none of us are going to have any fun.

The pressure doesn't feel too serious yet, but then I don't really believe they'll do more than scold me if things go poorly. They need me way more than I need them. I'd have to fuck up most horribly for them to kick me out. But the kids will suffer the consequences if I can't sort out a reasonable compromise for them. They'll suck in the short-term, which increases their chances of sucking in the long-term, and in the words of Prof. Wartooth, I's gots to have the leastest suckiestests kids.

Looooooong Day

2009-02-17T18:37:18Z

Teaching went fine today, had a lot of kids coming to me at break for extra lessons, which is both a good sign & a bad one. Good in that it means they're taking an interest in the work and making sure they're up to date, but bad in that it means I didn't get through to them the first time round. And I'm not sure why.

In addition to all that, I got plenty of books in today for marking (again, both good and bad), and all of this together meant that I had virtually no time to myself. Didn't even eat my lunch (1 banana). And then immediately after school, I joined my HOD, Mr Nkhosi, in a visit to a nearby school, for a subject cluster meeting, i.e. all the gr.10-12 science teachers. Except it wasn't all of them, because it's not just me & Mr Nkhosi who fit that description from Landulwazi. But whatever. It was a long, boring meeting that didn't teach me much. Mr Nkhosi told me last week that these cluster meetings seldom last as long as an hour, but this went on for over 2 hours, and eventually somebody had to tell the guy from the district office to shut up and let us go home. All I really learned was that I need to give my kids a lot more class tests that we don't have time for, if I'm going to comply with departmental standards. Balls. And we have another of these meetings next tuesday. Double balls.

Driving home was also a pain. Went pathfinding through Alberton, because I'm probably getting a flat that way, which was perhaps not too wise on the day that I only left Tokoza after 16:30. But the real trouble was static traffic on the N1, between the N12 and Maraisburg, all because one toss broke down in the left lane (and didn't roll 50m down the hill to where he could safely pull off the road), leaving everyone on that route to squeaze through the one lonely lane that left free. Harumph. And now I've still got to mark workbooks for 11F and 11G in time for the start of school tomorrow. Double harumph.

Tertiary-level education in Bullshit

2009-02-16T16:55:29Z

Look what I've just discovered:
http://www.uj.ac.za/Default.aspx?alias=www.uj.ac.za/homoeopathy

My own bloody alma mater, teaching people how to be quacks! It's bad enough when primary and high schools push questionable things like religion, and perhaps worse that you can study utter crap like homeopathy at all, but when a *cough* respectable institution like Uj is teaching it then... Harumph! It annoys me.