At the chalkface Noddy’s greatest hits
GOT THE winter blues? Is that Seasonal Affective Depression acting up? Or that Not-Top 8th year? Well, don’t despair. Help is at hand. The Noddy Gove Experience! All the hits! Live on video and YouTube and endless fun for all the staffroom! Take your pick of the great sage’s thoughts on academies, riots, streaming and why unions and media studies and comprehensive teachers are so often rubbish and “ideologues happy with failure”! And don’t miss the essential, slapstick romp “Michael Gove Falls Over”. Who needs Norman Wisdom? The recent Radio
4 turn – “Sack Bad Teachers” – is bracingly forthright. By what criteria? Because the head says so? How many? Who knows? Gove doesn’t. Most? The lot? Why not? There are no jobs. The Lost Generation could get just lost. Infant paupers could sweep streets or chimneys or stack shelves or deal drugs or become squeegee boys on Shepherd’s Bush roundabout. Not for Nod any caring,
modern nonsense. He wants 1950s discipline, control, Latin, English kings and empires and terrible haircuts. Not easy. You may fear this is quite beyond you. Fear not. Just watch his latest and greatest hit – his address at the Haberdashers Aske’s Hatcham College Academy of January 4. His theme is the fiscal implications of the infrastructure multi- academy trusts. My goodness, he
can make a dull topic entertaining. It’s more fun than the “Falling Over” caper – a pantomime of perfectly pitched Pedagogy. This is How To Do It. There he is, perky at a lectern, piping away at the little vessels with a facile, well-honed condescension that doesn’t come easy. In less than a minute, Noddy has tots nodding off into an intense reverie. You could almost mistake it for a profound slumber, a savage boredom. A whole line of girls seems lost in the deep contemplation of fiscal strategies. One girl
wakes out of her trance and is caught giggling with shock. Marvellous. All the Govian pedagogical virtues are present – a
pin-dropping silence, an impeccable control and a scarcely credible rapport – rare with your modern
comprehensive teachers. Workshops throughout the land
could do worse than acquire this masterpiece. Some commentators have
been less than dazzled. The tedious whistleblower, Tom Watson, has observed that Noddy is “a miserable pipsqueak”. He also suggests that Nod’s recent wheeze to buy a big boat for the Queen for £60 million is ill-advised and that the minister of education is a buffoon who should better spend these millions on the nation’s schools. A typical killjoy comment on a prompter of so much mirth, who is becoming a national treasure.
• Ian Whitwham is a former secondary school teacher.
News
Heads up: The obsevatory at Long Eaton (above) was unveiled last week (inset) Students stare into space by Emma Lee-Potter
Students at a Derbyshire school are being encouraged to stare into space these days. The Long Eaton School is
one of only two state secondary schools in the country with its very own on-site space observa- tory. It was officially launched last week and is already having a major impact on science teaching and learning. The £60,000 observatory,
clearly visible on the local skyline, will be used by the school’s 1,300 pupils, staff and the Long Eaton community.
Long Eaton prides itself on the
way in which it has enthused stu- dents about science over the last few years – and the new observa- tory will help even more. Astronomy is hugely popular
at the school, which was awarded specialist science college status in 2003. Around 20 students are cur- rently taking astronomy at GCSE and the subject also features as part of the A level physics course. In addition, all key stage 3
pupils will now get the chance to use the observatory as part of their physics modules. Instead of simply reading about the solar system in textbooks they will be able to see it for themselves.
Headteacher Neil Calvert said:
“The big thrust here has been about raising aspirations and the observa- tory is helping to encourage more students to do science at university and beyond. “Physics has gone from being
the least popular science a few years ago to the most popular sci- ence now.” The observatory, which was
funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Royal Society and took 18 months to design, plan and build, features a four-metre steel dome and a 16-inch diameter research quality telescope. The observatory was opened by former chairman of governors
Malcolm Parry (whom the observa- tory is named after) and Anu Ohja, space academy director for the National Space Centre. Luckily the sky was clear on
the opening night, which meant students, staff and visitors got the chance to view Jupiter and its Galilean moons through the main telescope. Other activities included pres-
entations by Long Eaton pupils who visited the Russian space pro- gramme last year and an exhibition of space-themed art by year 12 art BTEC students. For more information about
Long Eaton’s observatory, go to
www.mpole.org.uk
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