Poetry. Exams. Target. Tuition. And more poetry.

Today is National Poetry Day. There you go: another DAY! Soon it will be difficult to find an ordinary day. Anyway, here is a link to an article in the Guardian, offering poems for all sorts of occasions.

That link led me eventually to this poem by Brian Patten, someone whose poems I used to read long ago:-

When I was a child I sat an exam.
This test was so simple
There was no way I could fail.

Q1. Describe the taste of the Moon.

It tastes like Creation I wrote,
it has the flavour of starlight.

Q2. What colour is Love?

Love is the colour of the water a man
lost in the desert finds, I wrote.

Q3. Why do snowflakes melt?

I wrote, they melt because they fall
on to the warm tongue of God.

 There were other questions.
They were as simple.

I described the grief of Adam
when he was expelled from Eden.
I wrote down the exact weight
of an elephant's dream

Yet today, many years later,
For my living I sweep the streets
or clean out the toilets of the fat
hotels.

Why? Because constantly I failed
my exams.
Why? Well, let me set a test.

Q1. How large is a child's
imagination?
Q2. How shallow is the soul of the
Minister for exams?

I thought that poem was particularly relevant in view of the fact that Phil told me about a report that some parents, anxious for their offspring to go to grammar school but afraid that they might not pass the exam, are sending older, presumably already successful, siblings to sit the exam in place of the younger ones. Some schools are now having to demand photo ID from candidates!

I wondered how the younger siblings feel about being considered incapable of sitting and passing their own 11+ exam. It must not do much for their confidence and self esteem. And then I questioned their ability to keep up with the level of work once they got to grammar school. Ah, but, said Phil, that is where the private tutors come in!

Apparently huge numbers of schoolchildren receive extra tuition in a huge range of subjects to ensure success in exams. This has always gone on to some extent. A relatively small number of my primary school classmates received extra tuition before the 11+ came along. Phil says large numbers of his classmates received that extra tuition.

Most of us got through O-levels, as they were then called, without a series of cramming sessions with private tutors though. And the school did not put on extra revision sessions after school as happens at the school our sitting-GCSE-exams-this-year granddaughter goes to. She could be in a revision session every afternoon. We are finding it hard to make a slot where I can give her some help with Spanish.
Yes, we have decided, after she declared she was not making progress, that she needs a bit of encouragement in that subject. Initially keen, her enthusiasm for the subject waned as she had constantly changing teachers and she was clearly not enjoying it. Mind you, language lessons where some of the learning takes place on computer, where little actual talking in the target language goes on and where a majority of the students take no notice of the teacher are not really conducive to good progress. Of course, I only have her word for this and might be doing a hardworking Spanish teacher a great disservice. Whatever the truth of the matter, I am trying to do some, hopefully entertaining as well as useful, remedial work with her.

It does seem to me, however, that there is something wrong with an education system where so much outside help has to be sought by parents for their offspring. And, indeed, where a school has to run so many catch-up revision sessions to ensure that they meet their target pass rate.

And the target pass rate seems to be a big part of the problem. Just as some parents go to great lengths to ensure their offspring entry into grammar school, so some schools and teachers go to great lengths to ensure that targets are met. At least on paper! And sometimes the target setting leads to rule-bending, if not actual cheating.

Our daughter has a new class of eight-year-olds: many of them cannot write on lines correctly, despite supposedly having achieved that target during the previous year. One child reads at the level of much younger child, but he has been assessed as reading at the correct level for his age. Someone, somewhere, has fudged the paperwork on these children. Our daughter is seriously considering finding the time to reassess them, before she is judged to have made no progress with them this year. She too has targets to meet!

That’s enough moaning for one day. It is still National Poetry Day and before we know it Hallowe’en will be upon us.

And so here is an extract from Neil Gaiman’s “Witchwork” to finish us off:-

The witch was as old
as the mulberry tree,
She lived in the house
of a hundred clocks
She sold storms and sorrows
and calmed the sea
And she kept her life
in a box.