The 11 plus, and a small education rant

[owl]

The BBC were running a mock-up 11-plus (standardised government test, taken at 10 or 11. The top 25% of pupils get entry into grammar school), to see would the population at large pass it. One of the questions:
What is the odd one out:
1. Dog
2. Cat
3. Television

The answer is 'Cat, because both the others need a licence.'

Really. Putting trick questions on exams is mean, don't they realise this? And it is a trick, because 'needing a licence' is an artificial distinction. the natural distinction is between living (dog and cat) and inanimate (television). I passed my eleven plus, and that was a decade ago or so. I knew a lot less stuff then. I'll bet that they just made up mickey mouse questions so that they could support abolition of the test.

I am, actually, in favour of academic selection, although ideally the seection would be between 'those who want to learn' and 'those who are only here because it's illegal not to be'. Nothing is more frustrating for an intellectual gifted child than the democratically applied education, where the whole class is held back to the lowest common factor. My classmates were still stuggling with long division while I was at an age capable of trigonometry and differential calculus (thirteen, incidentally). And conversely, it must have been humiliating for people who struggled and swotted to do stuff that I achieved with the minimum effort. There is no way that you can teach a diverse collection of children the same material at the same age without bringing the class to the standard of its lowest member.

I think that there should be more choice. Teach everyone to be literate and numerate, but by twelve or so, it's going to be obvious who's suited for academia and who isn't. What's the point of torturing fourteen-year-olds with Latin and Shakespeare when they're intending to be electricians? Why must all pupils do sports, even when they have the hand-eye coordination of your average zombie? (Exercise is all very well, but there's nothing worse for the purpose than organised sport if you're utterly useless at it. The opportunities for misery and humiliation are endless. And if there are six different sports on offer, then for pity's sake, let the child play the one it's reasonable at, instead of forcing it to suffer through all six!)

What, tell me, is the point of forcing tone-deaf kids to play the recorder up till the age of fourteen? What is the point of Eng Lit? Forbidding the books probably would be more effective than forcing children to write essays on them. (My experience was that being forced into precocious literary criticism killed all possibility of enjoying the actual book. I might have liked Macbeth had I met it outside a classroom, and my GCSE English Lit put me off Jane Eyre for years. The books I enjoyed most were the set texts of older pupils which I had cough borrowed cough from the store--I always did put them back, though--and read when I was meant to be doing something else.)

Comments

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

Dogs don't need licences any more.

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[owl]

Hah! They got it wrong then? Even in Northern ireland, they don't need a licence?

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[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

The Dog Licence was abolished in Great Britain in 1987; however a dog licensing scheme was retained in Northern Ireland pursuant to the Dogs (Northern Ireland)Order 1983. Did the question concerned specify where the dogs, cats and televisions had to be territorially located? I mean, shouldn't the question to be unambiguous have read:

Which is the odd one out:
1. A cat located in the United Kingdom;
2. A dog located in Northern Ireland (other than a stray);
3. A television located in the United Kingdom?
3

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[owl]

I don't think there's anything they could have done to make it totally unambiguous. Less stupid, maybe.

[diricawl.livejournal.com]

Since when do you need a license for a television? Do they mean, as in the programmes? Or the box that I have in my dormroom which displays those pretty pictures?

Merlin's beard that question is idiotic.

(btw, Love the Leia layout ;) Try saying that five times fast...)

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[owl]

You need a licence for the box, even if you're only using it to watch the Star Wars OT on videotape. It's because the BBC don't have advertisements. They need to get money from somewhere. (Not that I even watch the BBC, pack of left-wing biased nogoods.)

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[ravenclaw-devi.livejournal.com]

You need a licence for the box, even if you're only using it to watch the Star Wars OT on videotape.

Same in Germany, only with the difference that even the "öffentlich-rechtliches" TV (the one that the money from the licenses goes to) does have ads (though not after 8 pm).

On a different note - I like your H/L icon. Who made this fan art?

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[owl]

Kate, aka Leela Starsky. You can see her stuff here (some of it's R).

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

I don't necessarily agree with the rest of the rant, btw - at least, I think there's a strong case for segregating academically within a school but not the chopped off life or death thing that was the 11 plus. I did the 11 plus and it was mind-blowingly stressful knowing that the whole of one's future life depended on 45 minutes answering questions which were just as asinine as the one you quoted (my mother referred to them - to my headmaster, iirc, as "monkey tricks") happening one February morning at age 11.

I mean, it didn't deal with slow maturers, it certainly didn't work fairly as between the sexes (there were approximately the same number of places at the girls' grammar as at the boys, but, before correction, "sex-blind" grading of 11 plus papers put 2/3rds more girls over the "baseline" pass rate, so in fact in order to make the numbers work you had to score higher as a girl than as a boy to make the cut; this was because of relative maturing and the selection of 11 as the age).

And actually, I do know a number of electricians who attend Shakespeare plays for fun, you know. And what people want to do at 14 is very frequently not what they end up doing.

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[owl]

But by 14 it can be seen whether you're of a practical or a more academic bent. I mean, the whole point of my education seemed to be to get people into university. Which is fine, if that's what you want to do, but otherwise school must seem like one long waste of time.

As for Shakespeare, I don't think Eng Lit makes anyone want to attend Shakespeare plays. It puts it all into category 'school, therefore crappy' instead of 'fun, because I like it'. I mean, was there any point in my suffering music classes when I'd much rather have been doing maths?

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[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

Well, I might say was there any point in my suffering maths classes when I'd much rather have been doing Eng Lit?

Music I do have some sympathy about, though. My most prized school report came from my music teacher and read simply, "Her attitude borders on the contemptuous". My second favourite was the slightly kinder games report who said, in an effort to be charitable, "She has made progress on a trampoline "[to which I mentally added, "She was last spotted bouncing through Birkenhead and on her way to Wales"]

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[owl]

My ideal would be to stream each particular subject on ability, rather than say, 'Smart people to the left, thickos to the right', which is what the 11-plus tends to boil down to. Because even two people with the same IQ level can have very, very different abilities. I think everyone should be literate and numerate and have a basic knowledge of history, geography, science etc, but beyond that, let them do what they like and are good at (it's usually the same thing).

Don't think I'm a scientically trained boor who thinks fiction is a waste of paper. ;-) I read constantly as a child, I even read books of criticism for pleasure as a teenager, and
I like analysis. But for some reason I had an allergy to Eng Lit. The class killed all those pleasures because it forced them. I found some of my GSCE essays in the attic recently, and for an intelligent, widely read 15-year-old, they really are dire. (Macbeth is ambictious. You can see this by the way he wants to kill Duncan so he can be king. [Original spelling preserved, but fortunatly there's no way I can reproduce the handwriting.])

[manicwriter1271.livejournal.com]

I agree with you 100 percent, and the issues you mentioned are frustrating for teachers as well. In the States we have a requirement that all students have to pass Algebra I to graduate from high school. This requirement was instituted around the time I started teaching 11 years ago, and I remember the comments about it from my colleagues: "What equation do you need to use to flip this burger?" I'm all for academia and not dumbing down schools, but it is quite aggravating for both teachers and interested students to have other students in the classroom just taking up space (and I use the word "students" very loosely). My father is very knowledgable about history, but he said he would never teach it because he didn't want to deal with the "dumb thugs who don't like history". Sad.

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[owl]

I can't remember when we started doing algebra, but I'm prettty sure GSCE maths, which all 14-16 year olds had to take, included algebra of the sort 6x+5=17. There are times when having an unknown quantity is useful (diluting the orange squash, perhaps).
I think here it's good that you can leave school at 16 and still have some sort of qualifications, even if you don't want to waste any more years of life in school.

[snarkel.livejournal.com]

I agree with you on the idea of academic selection, but would perfer a more... ability-based track of education. I was certainly lowest common denominator in math/science, but above average in Literature and Art... Completely frustrating. Maybe allow the later grades (in America, high school) more freedom in selecting classes, or at least skill levels.

I actually had pretty good luck with math. In elementry school, my class was split up into three skill-based groups. In high school remedial and 'business' math was all I really had to take. But those kind of options weren't avaliable with everything, sadly.

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[carrole.livejournal.com]

That was one of the lovely parts of being homeschooled. As long as I did everything to pass the Kentucky high school curriculum requirements (4 semesters of math, 4 of English, 3 of science, 3 of social studies and at least 2 of phys ed), I could then study whatever I wanted, which was so much fun.

We did units on mythology, weird science, Latin, dinosuars, library science (interesting as I went to work for a library six months later), and pretty much anything else we found interesting. We went to the library all the time, and got to read whatever we wanted. America's dismal education system is part of the reason so many families are using homeschooling now.

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[snarkel.livejournal.com]

I went to a small private school the first eight years, only 30 people in my entire class, which accounts for why they could split us up. There were only about 6 of us 'hopeless' math types, which probably accounts for my ability to divide and multiply. Did it help me? Yes and no. The mythology unit we did in fifth grade was MUCH better than the one I did in 9th, but the public school had a real daily art class (in private school we had a nun who came in once a week, if we were lucky; music was about the same) and a brand-new computer lab. In 8th grade (1993), we were still using computers that ran off 5 and a half floppies. And the less said about their library the better.

High school, overall, wasn't that bad. It was actually a huge self-esteem boost to me, having more people around, and not being stuck in the same hole for another 4 years. But homeschool definitely has benefits, if you can swing it.

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[owl]

Daily art? I would have died of horror. I do hope that wasn't compulsory!

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[snarkel.livejournal.com]

Oh no. It was an elective class. Although there were plenty of goof-offs who took it because it was 'easy'... Even through all four years.

It wasn't the greatest art class (no photography, no design, only minor bits of art history, and I admit I was chaffing at it the last year or so I started getting into web design) but at least it was something.

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[owl]

I think streaming each separate subject on ability level would be a good thing. So I would have been in the top stream for maths and science, top of the middle for languages, and right at the bottom for sports and music.
I loved A-level (16-18) because I only had three subjects to study, and I chose Maths, Physics and Chemistry. No more geography...no more essays...

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[snarkel.livejournal.com]

I had an option my last year to go into the vocational program that was arranged among a few local schools. It wasn't EXACTLY what I was aiming for (layout and design) but a 'graphic arts' unit. They got to play with printing presses and screenprinting and such. But I decided against it because I wanted to take the college prep Lit course and work on the newspaper. You still had to take a few basic courses, though: Government, English/Lit, and something else I'm forgetting. But with all the other vocational kids, most of whom were not... umm... top of the class.

Still, it would have been nice to have some grounding in that kind of thing, since the bottom decided to drop out of the internet boom just before I graduated university. It sure would have been more useful in the long run than having to deconstruct Wuthering Heights and write silly speeches about Beowulf. Or maybe not. Oh well!

[ravenclaw-devi.livejournal.com]

Why must all pupils do sports, even when they have the hand-eye coordination of your average zombie? (Exercise is all very well, but there's nothing worse for the purpose than organised sport if you're utterly useless at it. The opportunities for misery and humiliation are endless. And if there are six different sports on offer, then for pity's sake, let the child play the one it's reasonable at, instead of forcing it to suffer through all six!)

Couldn't agree more (speaking as a person for whom school sports was suffering a lot of the time). Okay, I can see the benefit/necessity of having some sort of school program to make kids move their fat butts for the sake of their health (esp. if said kids spend most of their not-at-school time in front of the TV). But they shouldn't hand out grades for it, or if they do, the sports grades shouldn't be included in the student's grade average. Because (IMHO) it's just not fair to "punish" students for having a clumsy, bad-at-sports body.