My Uncle and the Secondary Modern

My Uncle on his bike
My Uncle on his bike

My Uncle Pete died a few weeks ago. The picture is one I painted for him when he had a motorbike. He was a bit of a loner and a hippy as I wrote in the poem that I read out at his funeral.

When I talked to my Mum about his life it became clear that his schooling had had a profoundly negative effect on his life. Not academic enough for grammar school and not sporty enough to fit in at the secondary modern where he was sent, he was bullied terribly.

Uncle Pete painted. He wrote poems. He was writing a book. He was philosophical, with interesting views on a wide range of things. He was gentle. He died with a smile on his face.

Yet I feel his creative talent was never fully fulfilled. Instead of being nurtured and allowed to develop at school, his talents were bruised and crushed by those around him. He first ran away from home when he was sixteen or seventeen and disappeared at other times throughout his adult life. Whether it was the teachers, or his peers, or the system itself, I will never know.

But what I do know is that Uncle Pete would have had a better chance of doing well in the current secondary schools in this country. Yes, I know it would not be certain, but our secondary schools nurture talent when they identify it. Far fewer students slip through the net into failure.

I wonder what Uncle Pete would have thought of the current debate on Grammar Schools. I didn’t get to ask him.

Teaching computing to a blank page

At my school, I’m on a journey of learning how to both lead and teach computing. I wrote about a planning framework previously. These next 2 posts are about lessons.

In some ways it’s easy teaching computing to children who have had no prior experience. Children at my school, whilst they are strong in IT and digital literacy, have had minimal experience of what used to be called the ‘control’ strand of the ICT curriculum, and is now called ‘computer science’. They are very much a blank page.

I am aware of the damage that can be done to blank pages. When teachers-who-know-a-little misteach, it makes teachers-who-know-a-lot despair. A criticism of much primary science by secondary science teachers is that children often do the fun stuff without really understanding it at primary, so that by the time they’re ready to do the fun stuff and really understand it at secondary, the students dismiss it because they’ve ‘done that lesson before’. Obviously without Bunsen burners. We don’t have Bunsen burners in primary schools.

Another example is algebra. @oldandrewuk was telling me recently how he would prefer it if no algebra teaching was done at primary, because it would make his job teaching algebra in secondary maths so much easier. Non-specialist maths teachers can’t help but teach misconceptions with a complex area such as algebra and thus it would be better to leave it to the specialists.

I’m aware that computing may be similar and I would be interested to know what secondary colleagues think about the computing teaching going in primary schools – do they expect to have to correct children’s misconceptions? Would it be easier to start from a secondary school blank page? Or is some knowledge a good thing?

Either way, I’ve taught three hours of computing today to a class in my school who were very much ‘a blank page’ and I’d be interested for people to pick apart my teaching and consider what is helpful and unhelpful to their long term progression as computer scientists. I’ll write about my lesson in my next post.

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