exam stress and politics

I've been reading Brookfield's Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher over the past couple of days. It warns of how our own experiences as students can inform our affect our approach as teachers. Although we all have various learning styles, we have a tendency to assume that what works or not for us, is applicable to all our students.

Today I got smacked up by my own personal educational histories and my aversion to exams. I remember being taunted by the horrific spectre of the HSC from the moment I entered year 7. Teachers would threaten our disobedient selves with this ghoul that would come and get us if we didn't behave, just as parents of bygone days worried their offspring with the bogie man. There was to be no life after an unacceptable HSC score and as the years wore on the pressure mounted until those fateful three weeks that would decided each of our futures. After under performing in my exams and being banished to Newcastle University for 12 months, I avoided all subjects that required final examination for my entire uni career.

Over the past couple of weeks we've been talking about the new Victorian education curriculum for P-yr10s and its utopian ideals of cross curriculum learning - a post structural theorist's paradise where basic skills are interwoven across disciplines instead of boxed up and compartmentalised. Today we had guest speakers come in to talk about the VCE and newer vocational sibling the VCAL. We got into that always fun topic of scaling, which supposedly is fairer than in "my day" when those who wanted high TERs focused on 4 unit maths and science. There's an additional practice now to iron out anomalies between schools. If, for example, one school does much better in its assessment than another, but then worse in the final exams, the assessment tasks results will be modified to fall more in line with each other. However, they're also doing that with individual students. If your assessment results aren't reflected in your exams, the former will be pulled down into line with your exams. So the whole moving away from exam based assessment has just been reversed. Have a stressed out bad couple of weeks during exams and say goodbye to two (or twelve depending upon your perspective) years of hard work. No system's perfect defended the guest lecturer.

This had me up in arms, probably to my peer's dismay as I derailed the discussion. We have a class that is far too big for the discussions we need to have, trying to get into meaty debates is impossible with a group of 74; and our tutorials only split us in half. What is happening is that the same students are voicing their opinions, me included, in these discussions and half of us are frustrated we don't have the time and scope to explore the issues fully, whilst the other half wishes we could just stay away from the side issues that keep cropping up and stick to the curriculum.

All this comes down to funding: the lecturers and course conveners know that student teacher ratios are far too big but have their hands tied behind their backs. Tutorials aren't even tutorials in the true sense of the world and are usually used to introduce new material rather than discuss the stuff from the lectures. Basically, the online blackboard is the only place to field in-depth discussion, but online discussions have never really worked for me.

There are other issues too: many of the people in the course have serious listening skills deficiencies. A couple of people are forever talking over others, including lecturers, and the classroom becomes a stadium for ego battles. I find this especially worrying within a course where we are supposed to be learning to install some value system into our youth; this is quite emphatically defined within the new Victorian curriculum. So where does the responsibility for teaching values to our teachers lie? This is much more subtle than inflicting our world views directly on students. How we treat our peers and students sends such a strong message to our students than I am beginning to think many of my peers may understand at an intellectual level, but haven't really taken on.