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Anorak News | Salad Days – Ad-Dressing Education With Roy Keane

Salad Days – Ad-Dressing Education With Roy Keane

by | 5th, February 2007

“ALL change as schools rip up the timetable.”

So says the Times’s front page. And we read of “Ten-minute lessons” and “week-long projects”.

Such are the plans to restructure the Key Stage 3 curriculum. Mick Waters, the Qualification and Curriculum Authority’s director, says schools need to find new ways to enthuse the kids.

So subjects could be linked. Says Waters: “We have to show students the link between the subjects so that leaning makes better sense to them.”

For joined–up Government, read joined-up schooling. But not with joined–up writing – not since the computers were introduced and everyone copies and pastes their homework from the Internet.

It would all be new and thrilling. Who needs French and maths when you can have maths in French, or Fraths.

Look on as sex education is combined with Latin and students are invited to conjugate herpes and recite the ablative for gonorrhoea.

The Times says some combinations of lessons would work well. It, doubtless, remembering that schools rarely if ever keep things simple, especially when Mr Smith the English teacher is off with a stress-related sickness and Mr Hart from Chemistry is taking his class.

Says Mr Waters: “Wouldn’t it be lovely if the PE teacher turned up in history lessons to show examples of how great sportsmen through the ages have exercised leadership and control?”

Nice idea. Here’s Manchester United’s legendary captain Roy Keane (15-year-old Jake Smith) standing over a stricken Alf Inge Haaland (Mrs Jones-Biggs) and reading aloud from his diary: “I’d waited long enough. I fucking hit him hard. The ball was there (I think). Take that you cunt. And don’t ever stand over me sneering about fake injuries.”

Perhaps it is the teachers who may have most to learn from such masterclasses in leadership?

And you can throw in some home economics, too. Here’s Waters on the front page: “Imagine the programme of study in a school as the ingredients in a salad.” Oh? “The way you put them together to create the salad is the crucial bit in making it appetising.”

We’re with you, Walters. Salad… Salad is good. Go on: “There is nothing to say that a school has to offer 40 minutes of tomatoes, followed by 40 minutes of lettuce, followed by double onions.”

For sure. There must be room to for beetroot, carrots and French dressing. How much simper life was when it was all turkey twizzlers.

But the point has been made.

Flexibility at school is the byword. And we support it. But why not go further and make school shaped to an individual’s needs? Why not garnish the salad with the student’s initials spelt out in flaked nuts?

And why not make the school day part of the greater day, enabling students to include getting to school (traffic management and pollution studies), eating school dinners (recycling studies) and watching TV at home (media studies).

If things go to plan, students will only need to actually spend five minutes a day in class, and then only as part of their social housing module in German… 



Posted: 5th, February 2007 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink