Not for the first time, I'm grateful for the day 40 years ago when I finally quit the teaching profession and said goodbye to 15-hour working days and 24-hour worrying. (Yes, we had threatening parents even in those days, and some pretty nasty violent kids as well.)
But the flak that teachers get these days must be more than demoralising. And all those cheery people insisting that teachers (obviously!) have nothing to fear from the Covid virus, because the kids are somehow immune from passing it on to others, must be properly flattening. No, I don't know what can be done to repair the damage that Covid is wreaking on the nation's schoolchildren, but I suspect that Private Pike isn't it.
Bminusrob wrote:I remember when I took my 'O' levels, I got distinctly average grades, but raced ahead for my 'A' levels and did very well, geting a place at a very good university. Moving forward 30+ years, one of my (twin) sons also got very average GCSE grades, but hit the ground running for 'A' levels.
Amen to that, with knobs on. In teacher training, we were required to read Piaget's theories on children's mental development, which weren't always right but which did come up with some essential truths. Not the least of which was the idea that a child's developing brain needs to have reached a certain physical stage before certain disciplines suddenly "snap" into place.
Thus, we learned, a ten year old has no developed sense of history, and the subject simply won't make proper sense until he's twelve or maybe fourteen - or, in my case, maybe 18. (I got a grade 9 fail at history O level, which was quite funny in retrospect because I've written a few books about political history since then.) Maths is a subject that you either 'get' at age twelve, or much later, or maybe never at all. (I barely scraped an O level pass, for which I was eternally grateful, but in later life I found myself doing fancy statistical stuff for commercial clients. I was never that great at forced-speed structured learning.)
And don't even get me started on spelling punctuation. Most normal kids have a light-bulb moment at age thirteen or thereabouts, when spelling suddenly falls into place, but it can be much earlier or much later, and it generally happens almost overnight. (Punctuation may come much later, if at all.) The developing brain is a peculiar place.
So yes, the prospect is always there that this year's disruption might block a future career avenue if a "late developer" pupil is locked into a historical perception of his abilities that doesn't hold water any more. In practice, I suspect that these anomalies do eventually come out in the wash during later life, but that won't console everybody.
BJ