Mad moments in Education

I remember the stupidity that was ITA. I taught English in a secondary school and I could always tell by the pupils' spelling whether they had come from a feeder school using ITA or one using a more traditional system.

Cousins and I, all retired teachers, were discussing handwriting yesterday.
Marion Richardson - great except for those lower case bs and ps IMHO.
Italic - lovely as calligraphy but not for 'everyday'' use!
Infant 'ball and stick' - no possibility of flow
SATs' '- with the letters 'must be ALL. be joined' dikatat. Not all letters do, joins were forced whether naturally there or not. I even marked a paper where the poor child had obviously written the piece in print then gone over it again inserting joins!
Copperplate - lovely Victorian relic which appeared at least into the 1960s in chalk on railway station notice boards, especially on snowy days.

Asking a 1960s pupil what page they were on in their reading books and the sad reply being 'the words at the back'!!
Big books - 9 year old studying one archaic page of Treasure Island and thinking they had 'done'
15 years ago my DGD had no idea her class hadn't 'done' ' Diary of a Killer Cat' when I showed her the book. They had looked at the first chapter and thought that was all there was. Sad they were missing out.

Seeing a TA peeping through the windows in all the classroom doors with a tick chart. She'd been dispatched to check that everyone was on exactly the designated timescale of the Maths Strategy!

I'll stop!

Now there's the best idea since sliced bread .... TAs. Never had the luxury of one in my career (though infant classes Key Stage 1 did)

Yes, all of those in the OP I remember and am happy to declare them 'MAD'

I was taught using the ITA method which probably accounts for the fact that I am am hopeless at spelling. In fact my (very bright) 8 year old DGD could beat me hands down in a spelling bee !

I was an excellent speller until I taught ita then suddenly it all went to pot. Sometimes I couldn't remember which way a z went because there was one sound where it was written backwards. I realised immediately that this couldn't do children much good, but our head was insistent and what a head said was done.(sorry gillybob )

Maybe the fact that I can't spell has nothing to do with the "ita" really trisher maybe I am just thick but it is a very good excuse.

The (dis)integrated day.
Death by workcard: SMP Maths. SRA.
Binca.

I agree about ITA reading. But I want to a small primary school that was vertically grouped and really loved it.
They also had 100% passes at 11 plus, but that's another debate!

Elrel 1960s "the words at the back"
I was a 'peripatetic remedial reading teacher' in those days, and one school I worked at had the Janet and John phonic scheme books. The last pages were lists of phonically spelt words, and you couldn't go on to the next book until you had read all that boring stuff.
Maybe people thought that ITA was a way out of that?
My main memories of my last years as an EP (I retired in 1991) was the increasing emphasis on assesment and record -keeping. And constant changes of demands on the poor teachers 'at the coalface.'

I've just had to Google ITA reading. I could not read the text shown.
Thank goodness I didn't have to learn this way.

I can also remember - those wooden board rubbers some teachers used to throw at you
I worked at a school where they had ashtrays in the classroom for the teachers
I also worked at a school where a lot of the teachers used to go to the pub at lunchtimes
Not all changes are bad!

I remember the board rubbers that Mrs Morris used to throw at us. One time she picked up the ink pot and threw that instead (not at me)!

The open-plan progressive schools where pupils wandered around, not having to work if they didn't feel like it. DS didn't feel like it very often.
The same school thought children learnt times tables by osmosis and put a few random examples on the walls.

The fact that my BF retired early because they thought that nearly 80 nursery age children was fine for her to deal with (half in the morning, the other half pm).

My friend's DD's school taught by the ITA method, luckily my DD went to a different school which didn't use it. And she was a primary school teacher so taught her DD at home herself.

Ooh er! My DD2 learnt to read by the ITA method when we lived on the IOW. We moved back to Hampshire when she was 7. At her new school she had a reading age of 10. It must have worked for some!

DGS had a reading age way ahead of his when he was 9 - so wandering around not working must have had some effect.

Although it may have been the change of schools when he was 7 that did the trick

DD was taught ITA and has never been brilliant at spelling. By the time her brother started school they had stopped it and gone back to normal English. He has always been much better at spelling than his sister. I remember someone saying "If you want to teach children to read English why would you start by teaching them Bulgarian?)

On the other hand GS1 is currently in a class where they do a lot of moving from table to table and is getting on very well with it. His ADHD is much less of a problem if he isn't stuck with something he hates and he doesn't get into as much trouble.

A so called 'expert' would come to address us at an in service training day to tell us about this teaching method that would solve all problems for the children. I muttered to my friend that we had tried this before and it hadn't worked then. I got a telling off from the head. ( I suppose it was a bit rude) But when you have been teaching for over twenty five years, you really have seen it all and I could have put that time to better use. I wouldn't want to be a teacher now but I wouldn't have changed it for any other profession.

National Curriculum and technology. How to destroy creativity in one easy step.
When it first reared its ugly head all 200 technology teachers in the area were invited to a full day meeting to tell us how to teach this new subject. It was so exciting that I have no idea what we did (probably talked at) in the morning but the afternoon was BRILLIANT !!! All 200 of us sat around a 20" television to watch a video. The 'expert' talked to us in a quiet voice and every few minutes fast fowarded the video. Fortunately our little gang had rightly assumed that the afternoon session would be as mind blowing as the morning so chose seats at the back. We had to wake one colleague from his slumbers when it eventually ended and the rest of us planned a few lessons and made our shopping lists.
Future courses had to be better than that one but not much and more often than not a waste of time and money but we were expected to attend.
Can I also add in 'Baker Days' !! They should really have been called 'How to earn more than your Granny by teaching her how to suck eggs days'

I remember Baker days - as a parent!
I used to have to take a day off work and would sometimes see the teachers from DD's school in the supermarket at 12 noon - all finished for the day having been taught how to suck eggs for two or three hours that morning.

Meantime, another day of my holiday entitlement used up.

My eldest son learnt ITA. It was brilliant. He could read before he went to school but enjoyed learning this new system. He is brilliant at spelling, too, so that's not down to ITA.
What it meant was that he could use the system to spell any word he wanted to without worrying. He was also the first one in his class to transition to TO. Again, no problem.

The maddest thing of all was the National Curriculum. That's when I got out of teaching. I knew what was going to happen. Can't have a national curriculum without testing all the enjoyment out of teaching and learning.

It might be a coincidence but I did pass my 11+ despite being taught using the ITA method in primary school J52

Can any teacher or ex teacher tell me what an "in service" day is and what it is/should be used for ? During a recent meeting the LEA said they did not count in service days as days when the teaching staff were in school. My answer was then they must be extra holidays . This was dismissed but I am still non the wiser.

I liked ita but I was already reading by the time I started school and both my parents were teachers so I suppose I saw it as fun. I loved Marion Richardson writing; the patterns and the special lined notebooks

ita - an LEA used to advertise for teachers to 'cum teech in waerly' or similar. It helped early reading but many pupils found transition difficult.
Ashtrays - when my top infants had their introductory morning in the junior school classroom they came back very impressed 'Miss, in the juniors they have ashtrays in the desks!'
Elsewhere a successful sporty tracksuit clad young teacher was always ' just sprinting down to get some fags' except when he sent a trusted pair of 10 year olds. Oh dear! ?
Those Baker and inset days. One head booked a day at a local hotel starting with breakfast muffins. Just for us to learn first aid and lifesaving techniques from the St John Ambulance. Same woman boasted about a head teacher's training weekend at a Stratford upon Avon hotel. She was especially proud that other rsispdents had complained about the noise in the early hours.Also dodgy in many ways. Stellar SATs achieved, odd that ?
Another school, another head, Infant and junior schools amalgamating so all staff had a Friday night at a local Hilton for a Saturday of psychological processing. She did not reign over the larger school for long, some 'MH problems' with financial symptoms ...
Mid 80s, some union action necessitated all staff leaving the premises for the pub, every day, yes, every day.

An infant teacher was moved, towards the end of a 40 year career, to comment at the the end of a day course. It was entitled on 'Realisation of recycled materials or some such pomposity. She stood up to remind the perpetrator ' This is the Junk Modelling we've been doing since the 1960s, isn't it?' They didn't like it.

gillybob I was referring to vertical grouping not ita. Sorry, I should have phrased my sentence better.

With regard to the I T A , the Robin comic had a paragraph written using the I T A . My infant age daughter read this paragraph straight through although she had been taught to read without benefit of the I T A. When she had finished she looked up and said," Mummy, was that French?". Made me smile!