Don’t feel depressed about American kids, parents. British children are entering school with Neanderthal skills, according to the chief inspector of schools, David Bell. The Sun reports:
Mr Bell said: “Many children cannot sit still or take instructions and have no idea about having a story read to them.”. . . Monica Galt, head of King’s Road primary school in Manchester, said today’s five-year-olds have too few social skills.
She said: “It is not just verbal skills. They seem to have no notion of danger or idea of how to sit still.
“Many can’t fasten buttons or use a knife and fork. We start them with spoons and wean them on to other cutlery. Some children have never sat at a table because their parents let them eat their tea sitting on the floor in front of the TV.”
Meanwhile, students on a reality TV show set in a 1950’s-style boarding school bombed the old-fashioned O-levels. All the students had earned top grades on the current tests. The Telegraph reports:
. . . after four weeks of intensive lessons the teenagers failed half of the 120 O-level papers taken in maths, English, English literature and history. Five of the teenagers failed every paper. Only five pupils gained top scores - grade one out of nine - in all the exams. By comparison, many of those who got poor O-level grades achieved a string of A* and A grades in their GCSEs this year.The pupils defended their contrasting achievements. Harry Elgood, 16, from Wimbledon, south-west London, failed all his O-levels but scored an A* in GCSE English literature and drama, an A in history, classical history, French, maths, science and English language, and a B in geography.
He said yesterday: “In the O-levels we were expected to be far more precise. Everything had to be perfect. You were not allowed to be vague. In history GCSE, we were made to analyse things, whereas in the O-level, we were just made to learn a list of dates and facts and just put that on the page. As GCSE students, we found the O-levels hard, but I also think that O-level students would have found the GCSEs hard.”
Students also complained they weren’t allowed to use calculators on the O-level math test.
Actually, I can sympathize with the student’s argument about memorization; I never did all that well at it myself. But english? Math? Anyone who can write well in the language ought to do fine in english, and anyone who’s practiced it ought to do fine in math. Hmmm….
From the article, it seems like they only had to do arithmetic without calculators. Last year, my math teacher made us do a fair amount of calculus without calculators, and half of the Calculus AP Exam must be done without a calculator. Either the article is slightly wrong, or British kids are a bunch of wimps.
a character in ‘girl from the south,’ joanna trollope’s most recent novel, says british children are likely to seem like anarchists to americans. i was amazed when i saw that, but i suspect i was taken in by the tradition _ the myth? _ of british public schools from tom brown to harry potter. this makes it look as if things are really as bad as they’re supposed to be.
Call me a fogey, but when I lived in London during much of the Eighties and half the Nineties, I found British schoolkids a kind of scarily primitive and warlike tribe. They seemed not to have any idea of how to relate to their surroundings or to adults (they seemed not to notice we existed). As for the calculators, they are considered a basic tool in the UK; you don’t start with simple arithmetic because computers do that. I find young people now simply cannot do simple mental calculations at all. Adding, subtracting, basic multiplication are just mysterious to them.
I remember when I was in school calculators always seemed like more of a hindrance than a help. Problems always made more sense when I wrote them out on paper than if I just pounded keys, and this seemed to be even more true as the difficulty level grew. By the time the PSATs rolled around, I found I worked faster and more accurately without the calculator than with it (yes, mine was the first year they allowed calculators on the PSATs).
Incidentally, I wonder if that was the reason for the difference between my PSAT and SAT scores. I took the SATs early - just a month after the PSATs - because they were changing the format of the test the next year. I wound up getting a 1460 on the SATs, but a 1220 (I think) on the PSATs. I can’t remember my PSAT breakdowns, but my math score was in the 500s.
i need help coz’ i’m doing my O-levels myself & am not sure but a few things. if possible plz help