Have just been sent this link by a long standing Internerd friend. It's a rather shocking open letter from a Secondary School physics teacher going by the name of Wellington Grey about the new "physics" that we're teaching for GCSE. I suggest reading it in full, it's pretty shocking really.
Update: Seems I am behind the curve on seeing this letter. Losing my touch.
15 comments:
oh. my. fucking. god.
It's not physics at all.
Holy shit.
I read a while ago about the new syllabus and the move away from pure (real) physics towards a focus on the sociology and politics of scientific issues. But I never dreamed they could take it this far. And without almost anyone noticing or DOING anything.
Appalling. Terrifying even.
I am stunned.
I commented on that at Finkelstein's page.
It's bad, but the real problem started quite a while ago (I am not sure for how long Mr Grey has been teaching in the UK, but this isn't even the biggest change for the worse).
I would, in passing, add that it's easy to pick parts of the course to make the whole thing look as bad as it can; whilst the truth is actually pretty bad, you'd have to read the whole course and look at the exams and then compare to other courses, etc, to get the best idea.
I am a few years out of physics teaching now, but still find the machinations of the boards and government vexing. The UK may have the worse education system in the Western World that isn't American.
Sweet Jesus that is a disgrace!
I always thought they made it easy enough by giving you a formula sheet anyway.
What can we do?? Who's got AQA's email address?
I feel rather guilty now that I missed it on the Fink's blog.
Marxists have been setting the agenda in education since the sixties, no matter what party has been in government, so no surprises there.
That's a disgrace, Dizzy! On the physic(al) front, it's nice to know that everyone is getting on well again at the Assembly. I was beginning to wonder if all the love went out of Welsh politics (big smile).
http://glamorganshire.blogspot.com/2007/06/will-plaid-cymru-risk-misleading.html
The reason for this could be that math is so weak by now that physics no longer is possible to teach?
No real story here. Physics teachers became extinct in the mid/late 1990's, so "Physics" was relaunched as NuFizix, Science Meedja, Coolstuff - so that untrained childminders could get small numbers of kids through GSCE-GTI (or whatever it's called).
I mean, Christ, you don't want any more proper scientists, do you? Destroying the planet and not voting correctly because they can "think"? Get a grip.
(Besides, anyone who needs to know what an amp is, should be speaking Polish anyway.)
Anon says: Marxists have been setting the agenda in education since the sixties, no matter what party has been in government, so no surprises there.
In 1984 (age 15) I sat “School Certificate Economics” (maybe NZ equiv to whatever comes first out of A and O levels).
One question consisted of 4 line-drawings. One of these drawings depicted a cow standing on the roof of a house. The house was surrounded by water. You had to draw a line to link the picture to the word “flood” in a list of words below the pictures. It was made, err, more difficult by the fact that there were 4 pictures but 6 words in the list.
“This is the kind of reading comprehension question I would expect in a primary school English lesson, not a secondary school GCSE.” Amen.
A year later, in the middle of an English lesson, our teacher boiled over with frustration. “What is wrong with you people? All the teachers agree that your entire year [that is, all sixth form pupils, not just our class] are de-motivated and apathetic.”
We looked at her in surprise. “But we are all going to die in the nuclear holocaust that is coming.” All our year were taken as part of lessons to see the film “The Day After”. The dangers of filling the heads of youth with disaster scenarios, whether it be nuclear annihilation, global famine, Africanised bees, Y2K, global warming or terrorism, eh?
The Register have covered this too.
from that register article:
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Meanwhile, the DfES says it is not responsible for approving exam specifications. It sent us a statement saying: "There is much, much more to physics than precision and numbers. we would be doing young people no service to undersell it to them by focusing solely on these aspects"
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JESUS FUCKING CHRIST - precision and numbers is what physics is all about!!!!
civitis news release
oh - and when it comes to something as important as education,civitas shouldnt be just hawking it for 12 quid.
its needs to be ONLINE in its entirity.
and it doesnt help Civitas if they keep important reports such as this offline in our increasingly blogified and facebooked world.
come on Civitis - release that report to the web.
I just posted something about this very issue, which turned out to be rather longer than I had anticipated. If anyone is interested, the link is:
http://thecrossedpond.com/?p=786
In essence, I think that Grey is right that things are bad, partly wrong about why, and has misidentified when it really became this way.
I suppose dumbing-down to such a degree is a neat way of recruiting more 'physics' teachers and then boasting about the numbers.
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