Foreign Perspectives

After a bit of arm twisting I managed to persuade Wendy to take up both an English and a maths class at school.

Although the primary school has organised them basically so that the parents attending can in turn help their children with the homework over the coming years, they’re at a much higher level than the kids will reach in that school with the highest level currently on offer going to GCSE equivalent. The Essential Skills classes that they’re doing come in two levels with the first starting at a very low level and it’s only the second level that gets to GCSE.

English was the most popular class going by those signing up for it last week and Wendy reckoned that there was a fairly full turnout this morning. She also reckons that there’ll be quite a dropout over the next few weeks as, by the sound of it, a fair number of those attending weren’t expecting to actually have to do much thinking. Having said that, high drop out rates are par for the course for open-entry courses with 40% being quite typical. That might seem like quite a high rate but there are all kinds of reasons for it and more than most apply to this course: there was little information in advance about course content, it’s open-entry and there was a lot of peer pressure to sign up.

The little information about the course meant that people could easily have expectations about the course which were wildly out of line from what it actually covers. For the English course, that probably means that a number of people will be expecting to read novels for the course but it’s a course about the language rather than the literature so they’ll not be reading novels at all. Being open-entry means that people who’ve had little or no effective schooling will be there along with those who’ve had quite a lot of effective schooling and that’s already causing problems with a small group who never learned that they need to keep quiet in class and particularly so when the teacher is interacting with another student. Finally, the peer pressure means that some people are there who don’t really want to be which will be causing problems too.

Worst of all though she’s got homework so that’s three lots of homework that I’ll need to check now?!?!?!