I just wrote on my facebook status:
Children should be encouraged to be bravely, un-self-consciously, actively creative in as many different ways and as often as possible… I love arts week. You see many of the children at their best, when sometimes, stuck behind their tables, you see them at their worst.
It’s true you know. it’s only Tuesday and I swear that line of usual suspects outside the headteacher’s office has been less.
Those children instead, I’ve spotted them dancing, not just in the hall with the dance tutor, but on their way to lunch, and in the classroom, stood up at their tables, cutting and sticking. I’ve heard someone else singing, constantly, and uninterrupted, while the class make masks. Someone else doodles… on the interactive whiteboard, then another child shows them how to duplicate what they’ve done and make a pattern. I watched someone totally absorbed in the ribbon like trickle of pva glue onto a piece of corrugated cardboard. I watched a child who usually is in 4 places at once, stare intently into a mirror and draw the reflection, for about 45 minutes. While I’m talking to one child, the boy next to him is beating out sycopated rhythms on his chair with a ruler. I manage to stop myself from being irritated long enough to realise how clever he is being.
It is clear that these particular children can concentrate. We’re just asking them to concentrate on the wrong things at the wrong time, in the wrong way. And as soon as they get interested in something, a bell rings and we ask them to move on to something else.
Recently I have been questioning the whole social control/bell related educational remit. Of course we need to teach children the rules of our society, that’s a no-brainer. But do we need to do all of it in the educational sphere?
