Recently I have been reviewing what we are teaching the Y11 as GCSE revision… Well, it all sounded very familiar. After a little while I couldn’t help thinking: one could pretty much take this (Foundation) revision list, re-label it and call it the Year 7 scheme of work. Or the Key Stage 3 scheme of work. And no one would notice! Or would they?
Anyway, by coincidence I came across the suggestion to include driving lessons in the syllabus at secondary school. A whole range of good reasons for it were listed (I will publish them here at a later stage, for now think for yourself). Great, I thought, but where are you going to find the time for this? Everyone is keen on getting teaching time for their subject when it comes to timetabling. Eyeing geography and other departments jealously when they take chunks out of “curriculum time” with their field trips…
But! Hang on a minute! What do you think? Is there any reason to believe we could axe entire terms of repetitive work and much rather fill the time with practical skills? Such as the driving lessons? Or taking KS3 students up and down local hills until their map reading skills are top notch – and with it “bearings”, “reading scales”, bits of ” unit conversion “, “angles” and possibly even “trigonometry”. What about all sorts of household skills: gardening, fixing anything from lightbulbs to locks, bike tyres. Light decorating, general handy work.
Is there a chance that once they have succeeded in such skills and grown as a person, they would be more “ready” to attempt more academic learning? A bit like a “Steiner” philosophy where children are taught to read when they are ready to read.
I don’t want to limit this thought to Waldorf ideas though. My issue is that there seems to be too much repetition in the current secondary syllabus. Is their space for reduction of the current content? What could we fill this new void with? So that rather than almost out of reflex asking for more of the same, we were looking for a different approach. Quality instead of quantity.
Or is this not correct? Is the brain or mental muscle that needs to be exercised regularly and repeatedly? Just like one spends hours honing physical strength and stamina through (structured) repetition.
Does our brain need to work on pretty much the same a number of times for it to become routine, i.e. for us to become good at it.
Over to you, what to do about our curriculum!
UPDATE – UPDATE – UPDATE – UPDATE – UPDATE – UPDATE – UPDATE – UPDATE:
This gives some further food for thought: http://chemreview.net/blog/?p=384
Maybe there is room for some repetition and hence memorization of key techniques in maths?
griphuseducatio 