I'm tired and I don't want to be here!

And so is everyone else, from what I can tell.

I read a couple of weeks ago that the MySchools website has shown private schools to perform better than government schools, even when socio-economic factors are taken into account.

I have no useful solution for this, but I do think this points out one aspect which doesn't correlate with results nearly as well as politicians would like us to think it does: Namely, how many weeks of the year schools run.

From what I can gather, private schools finished on the 10th of December and many of them had an extra week of holidays at some point during the year.. We're stuck here until the 22nd. We keep getting fed lines about how studnets MUST have x days at school each year, which was also why we had that stupid system where 3 of our 4 curriculum days happened before the kiddies went back to shcool (thankfully that's been ruled out from 2012). And yet, the schools that run fewer school days are outperforming us.

So CLEARLY, this is not the deciding factor. Clearly, getting an extra 3 weeks away from school will not actually do our students any harm at all. Clearly, I SHOULD NOT FRACKING BE HERE. Assessment is over. The exhaustiion around the place is obvious at a glance. We have tired teachers and tired students. We are all feeling unmotivated, and yet we're powering on.

Some classess are on to DVDs that are at least vaguely related to the subject, and some of us are frantically trying to do revision and consolidation (which most of them will forget by next year anyway). There is no point setting them holiday homework as we have no guarantee that we'll be teaching the same groups next year, so I can't really threaten to give them detention in their first week if it isn't done. It is utterly ridiculous.

I've emailed my local MP, the education miister for Victoria (Martin Dixon), and the federal education minster, Peter Garratt. If you are a teacher or know a teacher, please do the same. I'm tired of being a glorified babysitter.

Dear Primary School Teachers

I have heard from some of you (and from many of my students) that, in maths, horizontal working out is encouraged. By this I mean the following layout:

3x + 7 + 4x + 1 = 7x +8

PLEASE STOP TEACHING THEM TO DO THIS.

I have seen SO MANY school students try to fit 4 or 5 lines of working out onto just one line of the page. It is messy, they run out of room, and I'll be damned if anyone can follow their working out and tell where they made a mistake if they make one! Furthermore, if you add a substitution in, they end up expressing in a way that is completely wrong! We get things like this:


3x + 7 + 4x + 1 = 7x +8 x = 3 = 29

THIS IS TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY WRONG.

The most obvious wrong thing that expression tells me is that 3 and 29 are the same thing!

Working out should look like this:

3x + 7 + 4x + 1
= 7x +8

x = 3

7x +8
= 29

That is much clearer. I can follow exactly what they did, each step of the way. It also paves the way for when they are doing far more complicated expansions factorisations. They can require as many as 10 lines of working, and ALL of those lines are necessary to keep track of what they are doing!

If they can't show correct working for these simple expressions, they have no hope of showing it for more complex ones. Furthermore, when we get to middle secondary school, we care far less about the answer and far more about the PROCESS. The answer is worth 1 mark, the working can be worth 4 or more.

So please, if you are teaching your students anything other than vertical working out, STOP DOING IT. It is a complete pain trying to teach kids how to do it properly from scratch.