By: Blonde Two
The Two Blondes had a great day out on Dartmoor with our Ten Tors youngsters yesterday. They were all lovely, some starting to show some navigation promise, some showing their willingness to walk straight through mud and puddles and others being prepared to swap a pork pie for a scotch egg when necessary. All good and very pertinent qualities when it comes to team selection.
We gave the newbies a measure of independence but also did a fair amount of navigation training (you can never learn too much about maps and compasses). All tried hard but inevitably, the training was more successful with some than with others.
One lad who, I think it is fair to say (I have been proved wrong in the past), will never be the team navigator, struggled on the moor but made us all laugh when, spotting a massive orange building on the way home, he suddenly piped up, “Now I know where we are, we are by B&Q!”
It is all in the training you know!
Daughter High Horse (teacher) frequently reminds me of a jargon phrase in the profession: multiple skills, or is it multiple intelligences? Whatever, it recognises that we all have a strength somewhere and it is better to identify and develop it rather than try and force failure on someone who hasn’t a hope in hell of getting a D GCSE mathematics.
It is multiple intelligences and one of my favourites. I have a feeling High Horse and The Blondes would get along very well! Please could somebody mention the idea to the government?
Speaking with some feeling, as one who hasn’t a hope in hell of doing much more than writing my name and the date on a GCSE maths paper, when it came to teaching, they always gave me the bottom maths group – and I could always see the children’s problems – after all, I had struggled through them all myself!
I am ever wary when I hear claims that someone or other “can’t learn” the hard stuff. I became a journalist because (a) I wanted to, and (b) I was convinced I wasn’t fitted for anything else. But then came National Service and I faced an eight-month course (5½ days a week, 8 am to 5 pm – almost the equivalent of taking a university degree) on electronics, starting with the structure of the atom and ending with fault-finding the radio altimeter.
I was shocked. “I can’t do this,” I said. “I’m liberal arts. I read Evelyn Waugh and listen to Brahms. My poor little brain…”) But this was the RAF not Bradford Grammar School. The penalties for failure were cruel and ingenious. Soon I was putting aside my library books and grinding my way through the hysteresis curve. During the eight months I took about 25 separate exams with a minimum pass level of 60%. Some were multiple choice, others were as searching as could be devised: sitting at a small table with a complex circuit diagram between me and the examiner. He saying “Describe the signal flow.” – and waiting. Eventually I emerged, one upside-down stripe on a fiver a week. Which was much more than if I’d become one of the RAF’s myriad clerks.
Yes I know you can’t torture kids in this way. I know what you teach is voluntary and the atmosphere civilised. But that process of conversion was a revelation. In journalism I went for different jobs, even dabbled with the USA (one of my liberal arts ambitions). And I still read Waugh and listen to Brahms. When push comes to shove we can be shoved into all sorts of thing it seems.