Schooooools out… for… four weeks!

All good things and all that. Today was the last day of my initial Induction Period and it was a shame to be leaving, in all honesty. Once more it was quite busy and once more I picked up a few more hints, a dollop more information and a huge amount of potential job satisfaction.

I’m starting to get more of a feel for the politics involved with teaching, both internal to the school I’m in and around the subject in general. Budgets, departmental cutbacks and policy changes are all whinged about to a huge degree by everyone. However, the one thing all these whingers have in common is that they are only complaining if the end result is likely to affect the standard of education offered to the kids.

Okay, this won’t be the case in every school. I’m sure there are some bad eggs out there who are only miffed that they won’t be getting a pay rise this year. As I have probably said before on here, the school I’m placed at doesn’t seem to have anyone with that attitude in place and for that I’m glad.

I was working with one young pupil today, and have actually spent a bit of time with him in random lessons over the fortnight. I’ll call him Ben for the sake of narrative. Ben’s somewhat behind on his reading and writing. I’m not sure if he’s got a learning disability or if he just needs to play catchup for other reasons. What I do know is he’s generally attentive, very bright and one of the most helpful children of his age I’ve ever seen. Polite and pleasant.

The problem is that his lack of reading and writing skills slow him down a lot, and frustrate him. In Computing, he’s having to plod through a computer-based learning package which is accompanied by a text book and a pile of worksheets. For any child, this is a little tedious and impersonal. For him it’s like climbing a mountain using strands of cotton instead of rope.

He goes through the exercises on screen quickly enough, but comes a cropper when the instructions tell him to read a chapter of the book. It’s simply too time-consuming. Likewise when he has to fill in a worksheet, he can really only manage to write it out slowly. I spent most of today’s class sat with him as a “scribe”, doing some of his writing for him. He gave the correct answers most of the time so he’s definitely taking things in but his patience is limited.

I was speaking to his class teacher afterwards and she was grateful for the help. When she doesn’t have someone to assist with Ben she has to spend a lot of her own time with him and as a result, the other children don’t get the time and attention that they need.

With a better budget, Ben would have a semi-permanent assistant to take the load off the teacher and to assist him in boosting his own language skills. Instead, due to staff cuts he doesn’t – and as a result both he and his peers are suffering. However, not one of the teachers I spoke to has an issue with him. Nobody complains about dealing with the “slow kid” or how he’s making things difficult.

Instead, they grumble about the fact that they can’t help him. Because that’s what all the staff want to do – give him the education he deserves. Sadly in this economic climate, unless some kind souls donate their time freely, that’s just not going to happen.

As I said, though, the end of the two week placement and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it. I only wish I could thank the school and staff by name on here. They deserve the praise!

Back to college on Monday for a week, then October Week “off”, followed by two more weeks’ study then back to school for a whole six weeks in the lead up to Xmas. I’ve just worked out how much paperwork I have to do and my pen-holding hand is complaining in advance.