The Cheerful Insanity of Me

Michael Gove wants baccalaureate qualification for England

The "English bac" would not replace GCSEs, but would be a certificate to reward pupils who pass at least five of the exams, at grade C or above, including English, maths, one science, one foreign language and one humanity. "If you get five GCSEs in those areas, I think you should be entitled to special recognition," Gove said.

So, what's the point of that then? What will it achieve?

When I was choosing my GCSEs, I had to do Maths, Science, English, a Foreign Language and a Humanity, everyone in the school did. A quick check on the Directgov website confirms it still works like that.

Having got those at grade C or above, I can easily tell people I've got them, and I have the GCSE certificates to prove it, so why would I need another piece of paper?

I'm all in favour of Baccalaureate style qualifications, but this seems to miss the point somewhat.

So, it's A-level results day today and so the news is filled with the usual stories of people arguing grade inflation. Only this year we get it more so as they've just launched the new A* grades.

It's strange that when you hear political discussions about A-levels the vast majority of the time they seem to be about grades and assessment. Is that really the most important thing about them? Surely that bit is stressful enough for students to go through without labouring the point?

It sometimes seems that if we could figure out a way to just do the assessment bit in a meaningful way without any of the awkward learning stuff, the government would jump upon it at a shot. Just imagine it, we could have vast education factories churning out kids with letters by the hundred and offer them as commodities to the universities. Wouldn't that be great?

Judging by the current portrayal by the media, they're not even worthy of consideration as being a qualification in their own right, but instead are more considered as university entrance exams. We then wonder where the incentive to choose alternative non-academically focused qualifications, which will always generally be looked down by the academic directors of the world no matter how good they are.

Somehow we've managed to develop a further education system based solely around the idea of academic competition, but what's competitive about learning to further your own knowledge and skills?

The A-level system seemed fairly antiquated when I took mine just over 10 years ago (part of the reason I very nearly didn't take them). Although there have been reforms since then, they all seem to have just been cosmetic, the qualifications are still essentially the same. Besides however much you change them, they will always have been better "in our day". How else can we continue to feel superior in the face of improving results?

6 years ago a government working group did come up with a proposal to equal the playing field between vocational and academic qualifications, simplify the system and reduce the amount of formal assessment in education for 14-19 year olds. Alas, we cannot have most of the suggestions as laid out in the Tomlinson report and A-levels look to remain the defacto standard for further education.

This is impressive:



(The RSA Opening Minds project)

One of the things I feel quite strongly about in terms of education, is that it should be more skills-based rather than fact-based and that children should be given more responsibility for their own learning.

I was quite impressed to hear about this therefore, especially where it's used in breaking down the traditional subject divides and, at least according to the RSA's own reports, seems to be being fairly successful in terms of motivating students.

I would be fascinated to see how the huge team-taught lessons at Bemrose (seen towards the end of the film) work. I wonder what they have been able to teach that way.

The height of incompetence that is the Student Loan Company, appear to have finally realised that, although they wrote 5 years ago, saying they were going to start taking repayments, they have so far failed to do so.

I guess this might mean they might actually start taxing me for some of it back. *is still shocked at how incompetent they can actually be*

Given past experience with them, I think I'd best keep a photocopy of this form with my employers details on and then send it recorded delivery, just to be prepared for them to lose it and try and fine me for ignoring it.

Since September I've been studying for one of the modules of the OU's MAODE (H808 to be exact).

Compared to other courses I've done in the past, this one seems to have been an awful lot more work. This may be partly because a lot of the course explored the use of e-portfolios and the one the OU provided (MyStuff, which is based around Moodle) is fairly newly implemented (i.e. full of bugs).

It was interesting to explore the software and hear the reactions of the other students trying to use it, but I seem to have spent so much time over the past few months twiddling my thumbs waiting for pages to load or tearing my hair out when it returns an error when I'm trying to save an item.

My final e-portfolio for the module was submitted yesterday at about 2.30, so it's now all completed and I've suddenly got quite a bit of free time back again which is bizarre and don't need to look at MyStuff again for now.

Am hoping to follow it up with some more modules in the future, but work are not prepared to fund any more at the moment (recession, etc, etc) and I can't afford to fund myself at the moment either, so it looks like I'm going to get a break for a bit first.

My use of the word understanding as in "A understands B as C" is that C doesn't necessarily have to be correct. In fact misunderstandings and misconceptions are just special types of understanding where C is wrong.

i.e. the sentence "Bob understands a banana to be a small green kangaroo with three legs and a big blue nose" would be perfectly acceptable to me (assuming that was what Bob believed) even though I know this isn't what a banana is.

Obviously omitting "as C" yields "A understands B", which then implies A understands B as a suitably correct definition of B.

It hadn't occurred to me that people may take there to be a implication that C is a valid interpretation of B in the first sentence until the past few days.

It's been quite interesting to see how the discussion of this post has developed. Most people took the sentence to mean something along the lines of A uses B to mean C and interprets B as C when they hear it used by someone else. The question of whether C should be a correct understanding seems a little less straightforward however.

I suspect I've picked up this way of thinking about understanding when I was doing a PGCE a few years ago, as I'm fairly certain it was used this way in some of the articles I had to read.

Anyway, just to round the discussion off. A poll:

[Poll #1157747]

...And for my next post I shall explain what I think the subject line of this post means just to continue the sequence...

...or maybe not as the case may be.