April 27, 2017 3:02 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
Good news at last on the education front. The latest classroom development, announced by the Daily Mail of 15.04.2017, ‘Union members refuse to teach unruly pupils.’ For too many years teaching staff, inadequately equipped to deal with consistently recalcitrant children, have faced knives, abuse and standoffs from a spattering of young thugs. Again and again, day after day one child’s truculence has resulted in an entire lesson being disrupted or lost for the rest of the class. Quoting from the above article, ‘Some (teachers) are refusing to teach out-of-control pupils who have brought knives into school or threatened to set staff on fire and some as young as eight have been allowed to stay in lessons despite the risk they...
March 19, 2017 2:13 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
Once again Grammar schools are on the agenda and once again, with the predicability of a snowflake melting in hot sun, all those dangerously divisive voices have been raised in protest. All I can say is that this country needs its brains and if your child has the chance to go to a Grammar it will be a golden opportunity to receive the best education leading to the finest opportunities life has to offer. Above all, Grammar school placings must be won on merit alone. My Primary school was tiny and many, many miles from the city. The parents were predominately dirt poor farm workers, the school library a shelf of very old books and attendance random at best. The...
November 11, 2016 3:55 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
From the Times Educational Supplement of 5 November 2016, the headline: ‘Schoolgirls suffer in silence about their struggle to read.’ Leaving aside the emotive verb ‘suffer,’ more accurately applied to children in war zones, the writer is referring to the fact children, apparently girls in particular, thanks to phonics can now read every word but not comprehend every word. As my readers will know I have trumpeted phonics for 57 years, but in today’s parlance it is a no-brainer that phonic excellence goes hand in hand with dictionary skills. I would have assumed any school worth its salt would be providing dictionaries/iPads to enable their pupils to achieve excellence in both text understanding and analysis, plus word knowledge. In fact,...
