W:
www.ie-today.co.uk
the other subjects – I hate physics, but I have to get the A*, so that is where my time goes. Any other approach would be stupid.” Ah. The pursuit of the full hand, the 10 A*s. Or, for
less able students, the five grades C or above, including English and maths. Can you make an essential exam quick and easy? Yes, you can. So why wouldn’t we? The exam board gets lots of passes, the customers flock, the kids do not strain, the teachers enjoy life and much success – the hell with Jane Austen. A young maths teacher in a state comprehensive
later confirmed the pupils’ view. I thought it cynical, he thought it practical. “My school risks going into special measures if we do not get the right numbers over the ‘five Cs including English and maths’ bar” – all of our jobs are at stake. If we thought one of us was teaching a long hard text when a short easy one would get the
same result, making kids spend more time on his subject than on ours, or more time when they didn’t need to, and they really need to spend time on maths because it’s hard – I think there’d be a lynching. We work together to meet the government targets.” “And the hell with Charles Dickens?” “Absolutely.” So why should you study hard texts for GCSE
English lit? Because you can. Because not to do so produces no differentiation and results for all not worth the paper they are writen upon. Because it does us no good to dumb down everything to the lowest possible common denominator. And because Michael Gove says so. Yesss!
Hilary Moriarty is national director of the Boarding Schools’ Association W:
www.boarding.org.uk
ABOVE: "Why would you bother doing a hard text or even just a long text?"
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