This afternoon I was forced to endure three hours of the most boring and pointless "training" that it has been my misfortune to attend. The topic was supposed to be Individual Learning Plans. For the uninitiated (most likely everyone except arnie) these are documents that we are supposed to put together individually for every student to record his/her learning needs and set SMART targets to ensure that those needs are met. Almost everyone who teaches (as opposed to almost everyone who inspects teachers) agrees that this is a near unworkable process. To be of any use they would need about thirty minutes per student to update after every lesson. As I have eighteen students each three hour lesson would be followed by a nine hour tutorial.


However I digress. The first thing our trainer did was to ask us for our "emotional response" to ILPs. She struggled around eliciting answers like "frustration", "impatience", "dislike" etc until she came to me. My answer was that I have an emotional response to attractive women, cute puppies and rainbows but that a piece of paper that I have to fill in in class has zero emotional impact on me but that my intellectual response was that they were an unworkable waste of time and effort. This seemed to baffle her altogether.

Was I being a bit hard on her? She was only doing her job (albeit not very well) but I ask you, an emotional response to a bit of paper? Does it strike anyone else as a rather ludicrous question?

Honestly, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It seems she was just asking for your opinions in a strange way.

I think you're being typically male-brained . She's not asking for your emotional response to a piece of paper, but how partaking in the whole stupid process* makes you feel. My intellectual response would be the same as yours, but my emotional response to having to spend hours of unpaid overtime to the extreme detriment of my social life and physical health would be resentment, stress and misery.

Maybe simply asking for people's opinion in the past has led to bland, formulaic answers so they're trying to elicit a more personal response? It could have been better worded though, I agree.

*To clarify, I don't think ILPs per se are stupid, but the way they currently are as in Bob's example makes them logistically impossible, and adds to the teacher's already over-burdened workload - which means both teacher and student will suffer.

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but that a piece of paper that I have to fill in in class has zero emotional impact on me but that my intellectual response was that they were an unworkable waste of time and effort. This seemed to baffle her altogether.

I agree with Cat on that...it's strictly a male response. I would have at least played her game and said something like "angry" or "frustrated." I have to say, though, they should listen to your very scientific analysis of it. Can't they make changes? I mean, isn't that what education is about?

I am reminded of a "Shoe" cartoon a few years ago which showed a computer lying mangled on the ground. The boss is peering at it while the computer user says, "Late twentieth-Century technology just met early fourth Century RAGE!" Perhaps this is what you mean, Bob?

I certainly had an emotional response to the training but she made it very clear that she was asking for an emotional response to the ILP itself.
Incidentally (excluding my answer) the most positive answer she got was "a necessary evil" which in my view is an intellectual response rather than an emotional one.

Surely the ILP isn't just a piece of paper, it's the concept. It's the waste of time and energy in completing the thing that causes the emotional response, not the thing itself.

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Originally posted by arnie:
Surely the ILP isn't just a piece of paper, it's the concept. It's the waste of time and energy in completing the thing that causes the emotional response, not the thing itself.

Can I consider that to be an official ofsted quote? (Just kidding!)

I think most people would agree that the idea of the ILP is a Good Thing. Where it falls down is in the execution of the idea.

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Originally posted by arnie:
I think most people would agree that the idea of the ILP is a Good Thing. Where it falls down is in the execution of the idea.

Seriously, I find it difficult to imagine any practical way in which the idea could be implemented. It's rather like "world peace", a fine aim but a practical impossibility.

Bits of the training were unintentionally funny. We were, for example, shown two samples and invited to comment on which was better. A glance told me all I needed to know about the expected answer. One was a single sheet, not properly filled in, with aims such as "The student will complete whatever work is set for him to the best of his ability."
The other was a twelve page document which was filled in in meticulous detail and on which we were expected to believe that a literacy student had written for himself aims such as "I will read and compare a series of tabloid and broadsheet daily newspapers and prepare a contrastive analysis of their differing treatments of a current news story. This analysis will include summaries of the major points and the styles in which they are presented."

Leaving aside the obvious comment that anyone capable of writing that clearly shouldn't be on a literacy course and that whoever placed him there should be "retrained" in how to do their job, the point was being made with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer blow to the back of the head.

This time I wasn't the only one to refuse to toe the party line. While most of the teachers nodded and said that of course document B was better, two others joined me in pointing out that if the working week was a hundred hours long no-one could use it and that in fact although document A had been badly completed it at least had the merits of clarity, brevity and usability. By then the trainer was getting a little tired of the hostile reception and just ignored us completely to focus on the more cooperative members of the audience.

I like your style, Bob! I've long held that most childreen are NOT educated (From Latin educere, to lead forth,) but "etrahated," i.e. hitched to the brainwashing machine and dragged face-down through the process by a bunch of poorly programed automatons passing for pedagogues.

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etrahated

Amazingly some of us reach self-awareness and enlightenment in spite of a classical education ... My theory, at least in junior high or high school, was that school taught you how to learn what the folks in charge wanted to hear and repeat those simple samples with the least amount of sarcasm, but hey I had way too much fun in school ...

I never mastered the "just enough sarcasm," and had no fun at all! As my profile says, being a curmudgeon from age four caused me myriad problems with the society in which we live.

edrihated ... believe it or not, this Ph.D. educated person, who is a resource to educators from around the country, actually looked it up. I guess that says it all about us educators!

I don't know where you looked it up. I couldn't find either etrahated or edrihated in any dictionary or on the web.

Tinman

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Originally posted by tinman:
I don't know where you looked it up. I couldn't find either etrahated or edrihated in any dictionary or on the web.

Tinman

Good question! Neither word gets any Google hits.

Please note that I put "etrahate" in quotes. I coined the word to describe the situation that obtains all too often wherein a student is hitched to a system and DRAGGED (traho, trahere) not LED (duco,ducere) face down through the brainwashing system, then falsely declared to be "educated." Maybe it's not in dictionaries yet, but since the bots do search Wordcraft, I hope it soon will be!

I put "etrahate" in quotes.

The word already exists, but it is extract.

"Extract" uses the same root, but its implication is different.

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"Extract" uses the same root, but its implication is different.

Sorry, I know this is a joke, Asa, but like another e-word around abouts here, it's just plain ugly and wrong. If you want a high-falutin', fifty-cent, Latinate word for education gone horribly wrong, then you should try hard not get get it wrong in its original language. You could coin the word transtract perhaps, for a dragging through, which is slightly less ugly than your e-word-2. But since I don't really agree with your premise about the ultimate meaning of education, I guess we can just agree to disagree. (Actually, as far as made-up words go, I'd opt for the more whimsical edumacated.)

edumacated.

Hmmmm... Considering how people are chewed up and spit out, maybe edumasticated? ;-)

I had assumed that your word, etrahated may have been your own coinage based on your Latin knowledge, Asa, but Kalleh specifically mentioned that whe had looked up the word edrihated, unless I misread her post.

Tinman

I think that Kalleh's post implied that she felt fooled by Asa's coinage, and, as an educator, she was ashamed of that.

Yes, Zmj is correct, Tinman.

Too often I take whimsical and humorous posts to be true, and I look everything up and then feel like a fool. That happened in this case. Perhaps it's the literalist in me.

I guess I interpreted your post literally, too, when you said you looked the word up.

Tinman

To get back to Bob's original comment, I think this whole re-training process we teachers are made to endure is part of today's tendency to document, standardize and quantify everything. After teaching for 27 years and talking with other teachers, I can say most of us make mental individual learning plans for our students. We assess their weaknesses and strengths and try to address them taking time constraints into account.

As an UCLES (University of Cambridge Language Examinations Sydicate) oral examiner, I was dismayed a few years ago when examiners' loosely planned conversation with the candidates to assess their accuracy and fluency when speaking English was revamped into a strictly monitored, timed and scripted Q & A session, all in the name of standardization. With this new-fangled procedure, if candidates wanted to say something original, they just plain couldn't fit it into the conversation anymore.

I think Bob's experience smacks very much of young whippersnappers waltzing into training sessions to show off all the new EFL techniques they've just learned. Patience, Bob. They'll get over it. I remember when the new Director of Studies at the Athens British Council sashayed into a group of highly experienced English teachers and asked them to imagine if they were a car, what kind of car they would be! One of the teachers went Vrrrooooooooommmm! I wonder how that response would be classified?

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I think this whole re-training process we teachers are made to endure is part of today's tendency to document, standardize and quantify everything.

I completely agree, Muse. We were at a meeting one day where we were reviewing the results of surveys we had sent to all our members. This was just after a focus group (1 month) of our members' assessments of our services to them, and that was right after a survey of all our employees! I made the comment, "I have never seen a place that evaluates itself so much!" Needless to say, many of my compatriots snickered and heartily agreed...though I got a sour look from our boss!