February 20, 2017 4:44 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
Recently it was reported that parents are going back to school, not to begin or complete degrees, but for an even better reason. They want to catch up with their children. Education has changed, it has leapt forward dramatically in an effort to repair the damage of past years. During those years I taught English to Italian and Spanish teenagers who could spot an adverbial, define a gerund, write a perfect complex sentence and parse it with ease. Their knowledge of our language was astounding while our teenagers had barely progressed beyond the very basic nouns and verbs. As we move forward to catch up, parents are feeling left behind. Well done those mums and dads who, instead of complaining...
December 18, 2016 6:44 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
After a hiatus of 4 weeks I am back. While Grammar Schools continue to divide political parties, such reasons being given by nay-sayers are not even remotely near the mark. Their argument centres mainly on the fact that bright pupils from the community are needed to form the top stratum of Comprehensives/Academies. They claim those very bright children will inspire the slower pupils to achieve. Of course this is nonsense. Our country needs its bright minds and those bright minds, indubitably, develop and flower more vividly at Grammar Schools. These establishments give clever children from poor backgrounds an opportunity to reach the top fruit on life’s tree. Grammars have teachers as committed to excellence and attendance as those found at...
October 1, 2016 4:39 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
School scraps homework, ‘to help staff plan their lessons.’ And there was I believing teenagers were the ‘snowflake generation.’ I make no apology for believing this to be one huge cop-out. Teachers have good jobs, well paid, secure and by and large, undemanding, while at the same time providing enormous job-satisfaction. They also have perhaps the most generous holidays of any profession. Even their in-service training is carried out in school time as an adjunct to their holiday break. And now the principal of a very large school (1650 pupils) has called time on homework. The reason? Marking homework was taking up too much time for staff. She thinks her teachers need more time to plan lessons. As teachers we...
August 6, 2016 2:14 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
You have seen how simple it is to begin your child’s reading future. Let us examine the next easy step. When he can easily read. ‘Ben and Pip put rags, pegs, hats, figs, mugs and maps in a bag and jump on it.’ Now add the following sight words. You, the, they, I, me, no, little,your,we, beautiful, come, go, to, be she, saw, my, house, was, do, for, he. Twenty-two words which are excellent link words but which, in the main, cannot be sounded. Treat them as you did the letters of the alphabet. Each should be printed clearly in red felt pen on white filing cards. An excellent way to learn the words is to hold up each card,...
May 26, 2016 1:24 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
My family was spread out. The youngest, Kerry, is 20 years younger than myself. When Kerry was 8 years old I was a trained teacher with 6 years’ experience. When I helped her with her spelling one day and insisted, like for my own class, that the spellings were correct, she burst into tears and said, ”Mrs Plum says we only have to get the words nearly right!” That was 1964 and that year began the rot in education. From then forward hippy, creative, avant garde thinkers began to change education. Phonic reading was dropped in favour of reading books with 4 or 5 words relentlessly repeated, ‘Look, come, go,’ etc, until the child could ‘read’ the book from memory and almost...
May 22, 2016 3:53 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
Two events occurred in the last few weeks, juxtaposed events that speak volumes. Firstly a teenager I know was invited to spend a week or so teaching in Africa. Other teens had described to me their disbelief when they had, on their first visit, seen how several family members would share one uniform, getting a day or a half day’s learning a week. Often they walked miles to and from school, so highly prized is education. The second thing that happened was a newspaper trumpeted the success of a father winning his battle to extend his child’s holiday into term-time in order to get cheaper travel. This ‘good news’ was duly passed around Facebook as as a ‘Yippee’ ruling. How...
