Not convinced that ‘fun’ is the correct emphasis here. Sometimes you just have to learn stuff because it’s important to know it. Not everything can be ‘fun’. www.thetimes.com/article/94e7... - ThreadSky

jim1902adams.bsky.social • 56 days ago

Not convinced that ‘fun’ is the correct emphasis here. Sometimes you just have to learn stuff because it’s important to know it. Not everything can be ‘fun’.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/94e7e52d-5819-4def-aa82-f358f1f1041b?shareToken=46da6ab92a010137905b7e2b41d09479

Comments

edfinch.bsky.social•55 days ago

Just pointing out that the only place the word 'fun' appears there is in the click bait headline. It isn't mentioned once in the article.

historylecturer.bsky.social•55 days ago

I've written 2 posts on this in the last 24 hours. Enjoyable, interesting, relevant. I suppose if I set up a debate, encouraged free reading or watched a video, critics might call it "mere fun". They were utterly wrong.

jameshandscombe.bsky.social•55 days ago

https://bsky.app/profile/jameshandscombe.bsky.social/post/3leqoe6clqk2w

philg42.bsky.social•55 days ago

They have no idea, do they? Politicians need to leave education to professionals. They think that they know better, when they know very little.

saltednuts.bsky.social•56 days ago

Of course everything hangs on what we mean by ‘fun’.
Multiplication tables in Primary Schools for example can be an absolute riot with huge and measurable impact

sammywright.bsky.social•56 days ago

The key question is what is it that is important to know. If the curriculum doesn’t speak to the way people experience the world, it disengages. Which is more important - knowing how to sing or knowing how to read nineteenth century non-fiction?

jameshandscombe.bsky.social•55 days ago

A good curriculum is self supporting - it creates its own world and enables students to experience it through its own lens. As a teacher you need to bring your class along with you, but you can go anywhere.

sammywright.bsky.social•55 days ago

Yes, I agree - but I would also stress that we need to be clear about the difference between each subject curriculum and the balance of the whole curriculum. It isn’t enough to have ‘good’ curricula in each subject - it’s also how children experience their day.

jameshandscombe.bsky.social•55 days ago

I think that’s fair - and really hard to moderate because it will depend on timetables and teachers.

sammywright.bsky.social•55 days ago

But there is a role for this in curriculum design. A lot of the new vocational courses at kS4 seem to me to have gone too far towards an intense grind of hitting coursework deadlines and AOs. They have become significantly harder, and squeezed the time for exploratory ideas based lessons.

jameshandscombe.bsky.social•55 days ago

“Vocational” education really struggles (at least partly because the students doing it almost never have a vocation for whatever it is that is being taught. We start off with a lie and never get our head round the purpose of it all).

sammywright.bsky.social•55 days ago

We switched from vocational business to GCSE because it gave more time for teaching and gave students a better classroom experience. And in an ideal world, I would mandate that all students did a manual subject - art, DT, food - to give that variety.

sammywright.bsky.social•56 days ago

Which is not to say scrap this or that. But we can’t just accept a value heirarchy that says knowledge is important only when it connects to an academic world. The error Gove made was not in pushing knowledge, but in defining a canon that feels disconnected from the world we actually live in.

michaelfordham.bsky.social•55 days ago

It’s a common error I think to assume that the content of our curriculum was shaped by Gove (or any government minister). The main outlines (and even a fair amount of details) of our school curriculum have not changed much over last 30 years.

sammywright.bsky.social•55 days ago

Yes, and no. The performance measures shape how the curriculum is delivered - meaning, for example, the decline in arts subjects. And in English, my subject, there is a very specific set of approaches and text choices that make it quite different now from how it was at the start of my career.

michaelfordham.bsky.social•55 days ago

What text choices are taught now that were not taught 10 years ago? (And I assume we’re talking KS3/4 here).

sammywright.bsky.social•55 days ago

The way one sees this in English is in the total absence of any media literacy - which used to be a big part - the absence of American lit, the presence of 19th c non fiction, and at KS3 the heavy emphasis on ‘ canonical’ literature. All specifically mandated by govt. (and not all bad)

michaelfordham.bsky.social•55 days ago

19th-century fiction or non-fiction? Because I definitely remember the former from the 1990s! And is Steinbeck not American Literature?

jim1902adams.bsky.social•55 days ago

Agreed. It’s just an opportunity for pot stirring. I don’t see anything too radical.

scottish-rocinante.bsky.social•56 days ago

Maybe not fun but interesting. We need teachers that aren't over worked and stressed to hell, who are teaching a subject they are competent in and passionate about.
Everyone remembers the good teachers in their life.

jameshandscombe.bsky.social•55 days ago

Yes - this needs to be the focus.

edfinch.bsky.social•55 days ago

The word 'fun' appears only in the headline. We know enough about how newspapers work to be sure that the journalist didn't write that.

jameshandscombe.bsky.social•55 days ago

This is fair - I think you can replace “fun” with “engagement” throughout and get something that remains true without fitting into the character count.

edfinch.bsky.social•55 days ago

Ha! Yes.

jim1902adams.bsky.social•55 days ago

It talks about enjoyable lessons and ones that are liked more than others. The thing that really boils my blood is the implication that disadvantaged children are incapable of enjoying lessons in the same way non-disadvantaged children do.

jameshandscombe.bsky.social•55 days ago

Yes, that’s absoute nonsense.
I think the things we need to grapple with on disadvantage/curriculum intersection are
1) One advantage of advantage is seeing (and having adults who see) the long term value of education and help you keep going with hard bits, and

jameshandscombe.bsky.social•55 days ago

2) Disadvantage can mean there are gaps in learning and curricula that build on previous knowledge (all good ones do, but some more than others) penalize gaps harshly - the new content is inaccessibly difficult and so the gaps multiply whilst the experience becomes more miserable.

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