The Times and The Sunday Times
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The lessons we can learn from 100-year-olds
Are we living in the age of the “oldie”? Recently, many “old people” seem to be thriving. This is particularly striking in the entertainment world. At 76, film-maker and comedian Woody Allen is enjoying his biggest commercial success, 74-year-old Ridley Scott has just directed one of the summer’s most expensive blockbusters, Prometheus, and, in the […]
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Is coursework a fair way of assessing pupils?
A version of this article appeared in the Times, Tuesday 8th May. When a pupil of mine, Gerry, presented me with his English Language A level coursework, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was A* with knobs on! “Blimey, Gerry, how did you do that?” I asked, “Your last piece scarcely scraped a D grade.” […]
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Yoga for all pupils, and other alternative schools
Schools with a difference are enjoying a renaissance — but what sort of education do they offer? Yoga, meditation, gardening and learning through play — not your traditional school fare. But “alternative” education has never been a hotter topic for many parents in Britain. Tired of a diet of uniforms and exams that many schools […]
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A teacher’s view of the protests
Children should be in school, however they feel about the tuition fee rises I think it’s highly irresponsible of teachers to condone, tacitly or explicitly, pupils walking out of school. It indicates that they don’t see the primary importance of education in the classroom; if they don’t believe in that, why are they teaching? It’s […]
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Hey kids, leave that teacher alone
As a teacher, I felt distinctly uncomfortable watching Channel 4’s new show, The Law of the Playground. But maybe that’s the point. This seven-part series is about all the stuff a phalanx of trendily dressed, tedious twenty and thirtysomethings got up to at school: the silly pranks, the mindless nicknames, the cruel imitations, the ritualised […]
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A class struggle for Jilly — Francis Gilbert’s review of Wicked! A Tale Of Two Schools
This romp opens with Janna Curtis — a young, flame-haired, attractive deputy head — being appointed to take over Larkminster, which is threatened with closure because of its appalling results and the behaviour of its pupils. The school is on Shakespeare Estate, a shameful pocket of social deprivation in the prosperous, historic, fictional Cotswold town […]
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TEACHER ON THE RUN: True Tales of Classroom Chaos
Teachers in the state sector, many would agree, are troopers, Trojans. Undervalued and underpaid, they have almost no strictures on their charges and little support from parents, the state or its politicians. Impotent, they face the anarchy and hedonism of our times on the front line. Gilbert teaches English in a London comprehensive. With this […]
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Paperback Review Of ‘Teacher On The Run’
Authors usually write about their working lives in order to escape them, draining them of the juicy bits (carefully changing the names and hair colour of key players), then tossing away the husk to enter the glam of literary life. Not Gilbert. This young teacher chronicled his earlier career in ‘I’m A Teacher, Get Me […]
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Why do they do it? It’s a yobbo power trip
Last Sunday I spotted trouble when I was returning home along the City Road in Islington, north London. At first sight the men looked harmless enough: they were white, well dressed in jeans and designer jackets, with shiny leather footwear and nice haircuts. They were not your typical hoodies at all. But I knew I […]
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The Times’ Review of ‘Yob Nation’ — Diary of a plagued society by LEO MCKINSTRY
FEAR OF CRIME CASTS AN increasingly dark shadow over modern British society. We seem to be beset by problems such as binge-drinking, drug-taking, antisocial behaviour, aggressive mugging, and gang warfare. Many liberal commentators have argued that this perceived decline in social cohesion is an illusion, fuelled by a reactionary press and nostalgia for a mythical […]
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Unsentimental education — Book Review
IS THERE ANYTHING new to say about public schools? Some great books have been written about them, most notably Evelyn Waugh’s hilarious and devastating satire Decline and Fall (1928) and William Golding’s fable about public school morality, Lord of the Flies (1954). These classics, and a raft of others, portrayed these revered, eltitist institutions as […]
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A Window on the Heart of Africa
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s website was not encouraging. It advised against all but essential travel to the state I was now rattling through in a beat-up Nissan taxi. I was in Bayelsa, in the Niger Delta, a remote region of Nigeria: taking hostages for ransom had occurred here. Near by, local youths had invaded […]
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Who examines the examiners?
SHAKING HIS HEAD IN exasperation, my pupil, Nicolas Christodoulou, 16, asked if he could write an e-mail of complaint to the exam board, AQA. It was a bleak February morning and my English class had just read the “pre-release anthology” issued to all candidates studying GCSE English. The idea was for students to read the […]