Drilling a hole into a teacher’s heart. The spreadsheet fairies have a new tool to destroy my subject, says Kate Sawyer
There is a new idea that has sprung fully formed from somewhere, like Athena from the head of Zeus. It involves ‘drilling’. Now to me drilling is something you do with potatoes, or roads, or teeth. It should not involve children. The only exception is, I suppose, a fire drill (I’m trying to be fair). But the way the great educationalists have reacted to the pressure put upon us by the more rigorous GCSEs is by leaping for their drills.
It made me cry the other day. A couple of years ago I wrote a scheme of work on poetry for some top-set year eights (12–13-year-olds). It involved Wordsworth and Coleridge, but also some more modern works – ‘City Jungle’ by Pie Corbett, for instance. We went out onto the playing field and had time to ‘stand and stare’. The children finished by writing a response to an unseen poem. So, to me, this was excellent: they were taught some analytical skills, engaged with a variety of poetry and wrote some of their own. The work had to be adapted for weaker bands, but the core was there.
