I've been spending a lot of time reading. Reading what? Well, more or less anything really.Firstly I have been doing my research. As usual, I got distracted; once I found this blog and lots of its subsequent links there was no stopping me. It seems I'm not the only one that loves to ramble about my life. But knowledge is power and it's probably a good idea to know what's going on a bit. Plus it's nice to read that other people who have what I may have are doing well.
A looooong time later I checked out To Miss With Love, where there was a good debate about streaming and setting vs. mixed ability. Personally, streaming/setting every time, at least with maths anyway. Totally agree that the concept of differentiation, whereby every child is learning at their maximum potential through personalised learning and appropriate pitching of a lesson, is a lovely idea, but a pipedream. It's practically impossible to effectively differentiate for thirty different 14 year olds; I certainly can't do it. Give me a set grouped by ability any time, at least then I am more likely to be able to reach most of them.
Read this great debate on CiF in The Guardian Online, about maths teaching and whether we should abandon higher level mathematical concepts and just focus on functional maths. Some good arguments there. I think that initially everyone should be given the chance to tackle higher level concepts, but that there's no point forcing some aspects of maths on some kids, they just won't be able to do it, for whatever reason. I'd rather have all my kids leave with useful arithmetic and functional maths skills than half of them struggle with GCSE maths and leave with an F anyway. I know maths is about teaching critical thinking and logic and all those types of skills, but it's not working for lots of our kids, so perhaps it's time to find a better way to teach those things?
And finally this from The Times. Again to do with society and education. Won't ramble about this article too much, except to say that this is the kind of stuff I'm really interested in researching. Strangely the article was located in the Women's section of Life & Style. Why??
Wow, I think it may be time for nap. To digest all these thoughts of course.
