Credit BBC.co.uk

It’s all well and good for Kenny Dalglish and Liverpool’s officials to spend Christmas and New Year defending their club from claims of racism, but when thousands of fans choose to sing the name of a racist (Luis Suarez) to a man who is upset about receiving racist abuse (Tom Adeyemi), I’m afraid much of the good work is undone.

I think a lot of people were already pretty unhappy about the way in which Liverpool had defended Suarez over the whole incident – it’s not good enough to say “his personality is not like that” … when do you ever hear someone say “yes, he is a nasty piece of work actually”? – and now it’s apparently given a large group of their fans the impression that they can use Suarez’s name as a taunt.

What do you think?  Watch and make up your own mind:

The FA did a curious thing this week – they made a correct decision.  Hard to believe, but it happened.  Luis Suarez was given a hefty eight match ban (which will probably be reduced on appeal, because let’s be honest, they’re still the FA) for what he said to Patrice Evra in Liverpool’s match against Manchester United  in October.

But what’s muddied the waters has been claims that in Suarez’s native Uruguay the word he used may be socially acceptable.  And those who muddy the waters this way are wrong.  Anyone who saw the game would know that Suarez and Evra were really getting into it with one another, and so when Suarez said what he did, it was done with the intent of angering Evra by insulting him – using his ethnicity pejoratively.  There is no doubt that Suarez was being racially hateful, at the very least to gain psychological advantage in that game.

Meanwhile, over on Match of the Day, Alan Hansen celebrated the FA’s decision but warned against complacency in the fight against racism, saying that just because some of the best players in the Premier League are “coloured” doesn’t mean there isn’t room for  improvement in ridding the game of racism altogether.

Watching it at the time, I did have to double-take when he said “coloured”, but let’s be honest – Hansen’s intentions were good.  He was backing the action taken against Suarez and saying that just because racism is a smaller issue now than it used to be doesn’t mean it’s been stamped out altogether.  And, predictably, enough people jumped on him on Twitter and on the newspaper sites that he’s now had to ‘apologise’ for using the word.

If we really want to deal with racism we should be going after the people who seek to refer to race divisively, to insult and to defame.  Save the righteous anger for those who deserve it.  Jumping on people like Hansen, whose intentions are good but whose language is a bit outdated, will only serve one purpose – to give extra ammunition to the actual racists out there.  So let’s get our priorities right, and go after the people who mean harm by what they say, eh?

This feels like shaky ground, so I’ll keep it brief.  Goodness knows I don’t need the new head of Ofsted on my case. (If you’re reading this, politicians and quango chiefs of the day, this isn’t my real name.)

Sir Michael Wilshaw

The last report from the chief inspector showed that 50% of lessons observed were graded good or above – “that means that 50% were less good,” Sir Michael said. (BBC News)

‘Satisfactory’, remember, is a technical term.  It’s used as a judgement in lesson observations where the teacher is doing everything that is expected of them – students are making progress in line with their abilities and both the teacher and students are aware (through means of formative assessment) what that progress is.  It’s no mean feat in many schools, where to convince some students to take pen to paper in a lesson is no minor achievement in itself.  A ‘good’ lesson represents stronger than expected progress, excellent behaviour management and very strong differentiation for students of different abilities, amongst other things.

In stating that half of all lessons are less than good, Mr Wilshaw has lumped everyone who is doing their job well in with the handful who aren’t, and comparing them all with those who are performing above expectations.  Hardly a constructive approach.  He is demeaning our teachers and discrediting his own inspection framework to group us in this way.  It is either satisfactory or it isn’t – “satisfactory” must not be allowed to mean “not good enough”, or the term is self-contradictory.

But he goes further – he says that the difference between a satisfactory lesson observation and a good one is a matter of whether the teacher is ‘coasting’.  Wow.  So it turns out “satisfactory” actually means “lazy”.

I don’t know how many teachers are personally or professionally satisfied to be adjudged to be satisfactory.  We aim higher than that, we really do, and it borders on offensive for Sir Michael to accuse almost half of us of not putting in enough effort.  But if all of our students were to achieve their target grades, a satisfactory performance, we’d be delighted with them, and so would Ofsted.  So why demean teaching which does everything that is required of it by lumping it in with those poor souls who are really struggling with their jobs?

Michael Gove has already made it clear that he thinks Victorian-style schooling is the model to be used for the 21st Century.  Michael Wilshaw’s track record, where he has been given the funding and freedom to act unilaterally, seems to be beyond reproach.  But as Gove’s own education and upbringing continues to show, one example of success is not enough to form a national system from.

Sadly, it seems the stream of divisive, demeaning and blinkered policies that come out of Gove’s office (hey!  Great idea – let’s tell kids who’ve got an A that it wasn’t a very good A!) seem like they will find a natural partner in Ofsted’s new chief.

(Please don’t fire me, Mr Gove/Wilshaw.  You’re my favourites.)

This would be an uncomfortable way to blog.

It’s been a long time since I posted on my blog.  I became quite conflicted as I wondered why on earth I was publishing to the web and what the purpose of keeping a public sandbox for my thoughts even was in the first place.

Undoubtedly it’s self-aggrandising to do as the social media people do – give yourself a fancy ‘job’ title and pick a subject on which to proclaim yourself a specialist – but that wasn’t really my thing.  I never claimed to be an expert and have never written in expectation that anyone would actually read my thoughts anyway.

So why was I spending time blogging?

To answer, I had to be without.  At first I was writing for other websites, to do with my business or to help out with someone else’s, and so I had an outlet for the part of my brain that’s constantly forming sentences which have too many words and clauses to be used verbally.  But having less of that recently I’ve noticed some strange things happening.

Firstly, I’ve started spouting half-baked and comedically-intended social theory to anyone who’s nearby, whether they want to receive it or not.  Only today I came up with a theory that links socio-economic group with how aggressive you sound when shouting (inverse proportionality, in case you’re wondering.  Blue collar is angrier-sounding, and posher less so, even with the exact same words.  Hey it’s only a theory).  Instead of doing the decent thing and getting that out on my blog, which in a meta-blogging way I am now doing/have done, I unleashed my theory on a baffled and sceptical friend.  It’s not a serious theory.  Everyone knows that it’s teeth that are the real indicator of class.

Secondly, I’ve been posting longer and longer ‘witty observations’ on Facebook.  Extended prose is not really suited to a site where the most posted status update of 2010 was “HMU”.

It’s clear I’ve needed an outlet, and I bet other people do to.

It’s easy to look down your nose at web-obsessed social media junkies who live out their every moment online.  And you probably should.  They’re weird.  But what about someone who just wants to exercise their writing muscles or empty a few tangled thoughts out of their brain, so their daily communication is a bit less scatty?  If catharsis is “cleansing”, then writing as catharsis is basically cleaning my head out of whatever’s festering up there.  It really doesn’t matter whether anyone reads it or not – though it would be ideal if anyone who did found it at least partially enjoyable.

So yes – blogging generally is highly self indulgent.  But not necessarily in the way you think.  It might not be someone talking themselves up, or trying to expand their advertising revenue (I’m looking at you, Adam Piplica!), or a sign of a pitiable lack of social connections in the meat world.  It could just be self indulgent in the same way that watching TV is, or a glass of red after work is; it could just be a way to relax.

Image: Just2shutter / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

“Parents who push their children to work hard at school have a bigger impact on their child’s academic success than their teachers, research suggests.”

- BBC Education News

I can’t help but sigh.

I see students for a maximum of three hours per week.  Even the worst parents probably manage that, plus they’re, well, they’re their parents.  Of course the vast majority of their work ethic and aspiration levels are down to their parents.  Any teacher will tell you that a kid with interested parents is 99% more likely to succeed than one whose parents collude with them in evading schoolwork and planning to drop out at the first opportunity.

Either this is one of those pieces of research written specifically to get a Professor’s university in the press, or this is one of those articles written specifically to spark arguments where at least one of the participants repeatedly uses the term “common sense” in relation to the thrust of the story.

If you’re a parent reading this, though, don’t miss the point, however obviously common sense it may be.  Kids whose parents push them to do homework and take their future seriously really do work out a lot better than ones left to their own (usually electronic) devices.

It turns out you can force creativity after all.  I was recently an innocent bystander to the new version of controlled assessment employed in GCSE Music, where students are basically locked in a room with a bunch of instruments and equipment and told to compose music that will form a significant percentage of their final GCSE grades.

Emile Heskey: People who do most of the work but never actually finish can be pretty useful

This wouldn’t work for me.  I currently have about a dozen half-written posts for this blog, totalling around a thousand words, that I can’t finish.  In fact, I’m a two-thirds finished sort of person.  I guess lots of us are like this, the difference between people like me and those school students is that they have to force those last few per cent out or their teachers, parents and consciences will be on their cases, whereas I only have my conscience to deal with.  People who come up with ideas and get them nearly finished before moving onto the next one are actually pretty useful, we just need to be teamed up with people who are good at tying up details.

My own Music GCSE composition followed exactly the path you’d expect – mostly done in a matter of hours, followed by weeks of trying to tweak it to perfection.  I finished less than one percent from an A*.  In those days, an A* was a pretty big deal!

I’m not sure what my point is – that I should be locked in an exam room and forced to finish my blog posts (or house decorating or lesson planning for that matter) or that we should change the education system to take account of different personality types; I have, predictably, lost focus and am going to finish right here.

At least I managed to finish this one.

Ahead of the inevitable rants about the spending review being announced as we speak, I’ve decided to change the look of my little site.  Not sure it’s quite right yet, but I’ve gone for something that reflects the blue sky nature of my thinking, mixed with the peeling, wooden nature of the blog seeing as I only update it about twice a year.  Hmmm.

So it’s time again for the traditional media storm that follows the inevitable yearly rise in GCSE results.  How should we respond to the so-called ‘grade inflation’ that see a majority of students achieving above what is traditionally average?  The usual arguments fall into several familiar camps:

Exams are easier

The classic argument follows that courses and examinations must be getting easier.  It is usually supported by helpfully ignorant comments like “some of what my child is learning at A-Level was in my O-Levels”.  We should apparently assume that children learn everything modern, including all of the technological skills needed to obtain employment in today’s working world, alongside the already jam-packed curriculum of previous decades.

Teaching has improved

Or, more likely, teachers have got rather more efficient at preparing students for assessment.  Years of pressure has led to an approach that focuses primarily on what will achieve grades and very little on what will spark interest or prepare for life in the real world.  This is a favourite of teaching unions and anyone else vaguely sympathetic towards the education system.

Kids work harder

A sister argument of the above, something observed more at Post-16 where students are apparently aware of an increasingly competitive market for university places.  A teenager stared at me with incredulity when I told him that less than a decade ago you could get into high-flying redbrick universities with grades BCC at A-Level.  You would be fortunate to get onto a worthwhile course at one of the former polytechnics with those grades just a few years on, and students know that without four A grades they will not get the place they want.

Of course, none of the above arguments are close to adequate.  A colleague of mine suggested to me that exams perform the same role they always did; they provide a gateway to progression at Post-16 and university.  Yes, grades may have ‘inflated’, but they still rank students, with the brightest and hardest working still at the top.

This view feels more tolerable to me.  Yes, I may have to swallow my pride and accept that the grades I achieved only a relatively short time ago don’t equate to the grades achieved now, but this is a product of incessant government targets in order that statistics may be produced to show how well our taxes have been spent.  Such a trend will not be reversed and it is surely only a matter of time until the introduction of a faintly ludicrous A** grade.  You know, for the very brightest.  Because parents, politicians and education managers will not accept a downturn in results any more than banks and homeowners will allow a 100% drop in house prices (common sense says both would be needed for a return to sensible levels).

In the meantime, perhaps it would be possible to show a little more restraint all round.  I’m looking at you, callers to Radio 5 Live.  Your tedious annual repetition of inaccurate generalisations does nothing to move the discussion forward.  The problem is far more involved than you give credit, and your complaining is the fuel that fires the witless ‘traditional values’ promises of our politicians.

Oh, and well done to all who achieved what they wanted this year.  Even those of you who put my grades to shame.

Maybe.

…is to make sure it looks different every time your readers visit. Keep it fresh and give the impression there are dozens of busy little web writers constantly updating it.

I haven’t exactly been doing that here.

Seriously, though, lots has been going on and this blog isn’t a priority just now. But that’s OK, because I write this for myself and actually have no audience, at least not deliberately.

I do have another Michael Gove rant brewing, though, and some thoughts on my new side project – building successful websites.

I have no idea what the second rule is, by the way.