Backseat Teachers

While I ate my lunch today, I was astonished to hear the four hags on Loose Women discuss classroom management like they knew what they were talking about. And while I'm at it...the response in the papers and across TV media to the story about students putting their thumbs up instead of their hands has been nothing short of infuriating.

I don't know whether you know this or not, but teachers don't just make stuff up. A great deal of time during teacher training degrees is taken up with learning about classroom management. And let me tell you, classroom management is a science. Oh, of course, it didn't used to be. It used to be very black and white when kids knew that if they didn't behave, or if they spoke out of turn, or if they didn't engage, they would get the slipper or the cane or have a blackboard duster thrown at their head. It was easy then. It was easy when the teachers had all the power because they ruled through fear and loathing. But that, my liberal friends, is no longer the case and I'm not suggesting for a minute that it should be.

I'm pretty sure, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that those of you whinging and complaining and huffing and puffing in a 'how ridiculous' display of exasperation are pretty against going back to the Dickensian days of beating and battering. So, how about you let teachers i.e. the experts, get on with it?

Yes, raising hands in class has been around forever and it's never done any harm - so why change it? If we were to stick to that theory we'd still be washing kids' mouths out with soap, sending 14 year olds down the mine and washing our teeth with twigs. Raising hands in class does still work but in a lot of schools it can actually be very disruptive. With class sizes rising and rising (most primary school and secondary school classes are at 30+ these days) it's not very useful to have the majority of those kids waving their hands in the air, straining to be the one picked and combining their hands up with monotonous and persistent calls of, 'Miss!', 'Miss!', 'Miiiiiiiss!' which is basically shouting out with your hand in the air.

On top of that, we all know that in reality, there's probably only about 10 of those students that typically raise their hands. The rest sit there either,

a) wondering what's going on
b) fiddling around with something they're not supposed to be fiddling about with (but they can because they're hidden behind a sea of waving hands)
c) desperately hoping that no one picks them

Putting your hand up can be quite exposing. There are lots of children who may be much happier raising a thumb - who are you to say?

Hands in the air is a very out-of-date teaching method and more and more you find schools that are encouraging alternative methods. For example, and please tell me if you think this is crazy, but there are a lot of teachers using their classrooms to develop conversational skills in classes - skills such as turn taking for example. I know I've sat in training sessions, meetings etc., as an adult and managed to conduct conversations amongst large groups of people without having to raise our hands. Is it that unthinkable that we should try and teach our children to do the same thing? Thumbs up instead of hands up forces children to look around, to consider other people, to see whether someone else has something to say in a way that hands straight in the air doesn't.

And let's face it, kids need to be entertained. If I had a class full of over-excited primary school kids, desperate to please teacher in the first few weeks back I may try to come up with some original, engaging idea that avoided the whole straining hands and screams of 'Miss!'. The kids may actually be enjoying the challenge, they may even think it's quite fun. Heaven knows, any teacher can attest to the fact that kids are always eager to play the painful classroom game 'Thumbs Up Heads Down'. If you're not a teacher, you won't know what that means....which sort of nicely brings me back to my original point.

Those of you with no knowledge of the creativity and originality and thought that goes into managing a classroom full of children should really think twice before you criticise those who spend day in and day out trying to think of creative, original and thoughtful ways to educate your children. Perhaps if children were taught to respect teachers and education and rules and other people then teachers wouldn't need to keep inventing new and magical ways to keep children engaged. I wonder...how do we fix THAT problem?