24th July 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Really started tackling the intimidating job of categorising disciplines last week. The work with Laura in the previous week made me think that it won’t be as bad as I thought, and in subjects that I know reasonably well, that’s been true. At the moment all the work we’ve done is on pieces of paper, and transferring it into the database isn’t too hard, but I’m working on a clever way to suggest other disciplines that may be linked to the ones I enter. For example, when recording that mechanics is part of maths, I would like our system to suggest that it might also be part of physics (because of other relationships between maths and physics). This isn’t actually too important right now, but as time goes on, I can see us missing some relationships if they’re not suggested by the system.
I had an interesting conversation with my mum last week about a mutual friend whose kids are just starting at my old primary school. Our friend had told my mum that she’s slightly concerned about the number of children beginning primary school who can’t speak any English; it’s as high as 10 students in some classes. I should explain that this is because Wembley (where I grew up) has recently had an influx of, mainly Polish, immigrants. In many ways I think it’s had a very positive effect, and has made the area even more multi-cultural than it was before, but I kind of agree that it creates problems at school. My best friend was actually in the same situation, coming to the UK from Mexcio when he was 6 without being able to speak much English. For him, and, I think, for everyone else in our class, it was a very positive situation. We all had to communicate with someone who struggled with the language (something English people are notoriously bad at), and my friend’s English quickly became fluent, due to necessity, albeit with a weird Australian/South African/American accent. I’m really jealous of his ability to speak both English and Spanish fluently.
Now, I suppose I thought that education authorities have always carefully planned how to place kids in new schools, ensuring that there are never more than 1-2 non-English speakers in any class. My opinion is that the main benefit of primary school is for kids to develop their social and language skills through playing and talking with each other. It works so well when there are only one or two children whose English is bad because if they want to play (and they do) they have to learn to communicate. However, having nearly half the class being unable to speak English creates a real problem. Teachers become EFL teachers, and spend almost all of their time with a small proportion of the class, and the English speaking students have less interaction with fellow English speakers. Am I alone in thinking that the whole situation seems incredibly poorly planned, and a dilution of primary school education for English speakers?