I’m a some-time reader of this blog for a few months now and it scares me.
I am not a teacher. I am currently doing a Masters and being a Dad to my 2yr old girl. I was considering looking into the PGCE, but, coupled with my experiences in junior and secondary schools (and one 6th form college), this blog is helping me look for an alternative.

I’ve taught a few workshops and have run a few arts/creative projects in these institutins and it was bloody hard work to get anyone to do anything because of the hurdles described in the above post and others that have gone before.

During the course of my MA, I’ve seen the antics above every week.

It is very, very sad. Degrees are becoming worthless almost due to the ubiquity of them, same with A levels. The student’s feelings of entitlement are joy to behold when witnessed first hand. They really are.

I don’t want to come home and feel like I could write things such as Mimi’s comment (’I can’t take another day like today’).

Good luck all of you – you deserve better.

Bocz

The education system is sick and needs help before it gets worse (if worse is even a possibility–after one of my lessons today, I somehow doubt it). And I’m deeply saddened to hear that higher ed is going down, too. Though, with such candidates as the Typical Students mentioned here, I guess there’s really no other option.

In the US a Bachelors degree is only slightly better than a high school diploma due to the dumbing down of courses. I would hate to think the same is happening here.

So how do we change the system? Please tell me, in six easy steps, because I can’t take another day like today.

I never cease to be amazed at your capacity to believe that when people’s experience does’t match your ideology, then it must be their experience that is mere “opinion”.

I only dip in every now and then, but it seems to get more and more reactionary and opinion has so overwhelmed fact as to render it mostly ficticious.

The dumbing down at university is one of the reasons I left HE and became a Secondary teacher. I had become disillusioned by students with A-level maths who could not do maths (although, in fairness, the top students were still very good). It was only when I got down here in the thick of things that I realised it was, to a large extent, the system of getting students qualifications, rather than teaching subjects, that was failing the students and giving students false expectations.

With regards to tuition fees it needs spelling out to HE students that they buy an opportunity to read for a degree, it doesn’t buy them the degree.

The sad result of all the dumbing down, of course, is for a degree to now be needed where before A-levels were and a Masters where a Bachelors would have done. For example to become a chartered engineer now requires a MEng or MSc for the fresh graduates, when I graduated, not so long ago, all I needed was my BEng(Hons).

I’ll stop ranting now.