Rowena Hopkins

German state sets headscarf ban http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3591043.stm "On Wednesday, Berlin's regional government agreed to outlaw all religious symbols for civil servants, although the bill still needs to be approved by the regional legislature. Baden-Wuerttemberg's parliament - dominated by a coalition of the opposition Christian Democratic Union and liberal Free Democrats - backed the deal almost unanimously. State culture minister Annette Schavan was quoted by the AFP news agency as saying that headscarves had no place in schools as they were "open to interpretation", including a possible espousal of "Islamic political views". " What is the world coming to? Rowena

So would you teach them David Beckham studies if it got them into college?

The most impressive work I saw produced by students was done outside of the classroom. However I felt that setting homework was yet another hastle on top of an already busy schedule. If I set homework on the correct homework day it was often set for the sake of setting it but if I tried to set it on another day because something really interesting had happened and I simply wanted them to watch the news or do some internet research their response was, in unison, we don't have science homework on Tuesdays. Grrrr! If I then told them that there wouldn't be anything collected in so it wasn't really homework I saw them switch off. The homework diaries were put away. No-one watched the news, not even the interested ones because it wasn't proper homework:-( I do have a huge amount of sympathy for students wanting their homework set on the correct night as I do recall having 5 homeworks set on one night and then nothing for weeks. However, having been a tutor for both a year 8 class and a year 10 and checked their diaries for them I have noticed the trend that the setting of homework seems to reduce as the students move up through the school. They actually say things like 'we don't do homework now we are in year 10, thats for year 7's'. Not very helpful for those of us trying to prepare tham for 'A' level! Rowena

In New Brunswick there is technically no shortage of teachers as a result of there being so many supply teachers, and the reason there are so many supply teachers is that you MUST supply teach in order to be taken on as a full time teacher.... after about 7 years. Supply teachers earn about 118 canadian dollars a day, thats about 50 quid. They have no formal contract and therefore no holiday or sick pay and no gaurantee of work. I hate to say it but there are teachers out there worse off financially than those in the UK! IF you stick around long enough to get a permanent positions you could earn between 40 and 60,000 canadian dollars a year - thats about 17,000 to about 28,000 pounds. As for Rwanda, well the average secondary school teacher is paid about 100 pounds a month and a primary school teacher would earn between 30 and 70 pounds a month. It does go a little further than in Britian though! However, Development agencies pay translation staff about 200 dollars per week so teachers are leaving in droves to work for the organisations who are trying to help the country develop! Ironic huh?! Rowena

I think that either History teaching has moved on a great deal or that I was extraordinarily lucky to have an excellent history teacher. Either way I found that the main lesson learnt from studying the world wars was empathy, both with the British at the time and with the Germans. I came out of one lesson sure that had I lived in pre WW2 Germany I would have signed up for the Hitler Youth without a second thought. Thus proving that if anything I am not superior, just lucky to have been born when and when I was. As a result of my history studies I have always tried too look at situations from all perspectives not just the British one. I would say that was the ideal result of an excellent history education. Linguistically though, as a British person, I am challanged. In fact, I am linguistically stupid and that I can attribute to being British. When in the post office in Kigali, Rwanda I was asked a question in French and I looked utterly perplexed. The postal worker then said 'So, you are American', I laughed and she said 'no? British'. Guilty as charged! There is a danger when living in a supposedly 'great' country of expecting the rest of the world to want to make the effort to speak to you. Why then do so many Japanese, Germans and French speak English? I can understand why the Luxish try to learn as many different languages as possible grasping the fact that with Luxish alone they are not going to go very far, but Britain no longer has its empire and it is becoming increasingly important to be multi-lingual so why do we not begin to start learning a second language in earnest until secondary school? Because languages are still not being taken seriously enough. I have found myself tongue tied in too many different foreign countries to mention and while I think I can be forgiven for not having a working knowledge of Xhosa or Kirundi can I realy be excused for only being able to order an icecream in French or ask directions to the Bahnhof in German!? I think the problem can be summed up nicely when perusing advertisements for aid and development workers. A typical French, Dutch or Canadian advert will ask workers to be fluent in at least 2 languages, an American agency only asks for English even if the development worker is going to be sent to Mozambique or Congo. The attitude being that if you want our help, speak our language. Maybe we in Britain think we have that kind of power too. Whilst in Rwanda I felt that my students would have performed far better in their Chemistry exams if that had been able to read and write better English. My Programme Director, a Canadian, disagreed. If they can't read and write the language they are studying in then they are clearly not very bright. I guess I'd better put on my dunces cap and sit in the corner Rowena

When I was a school I hated studying RE becasue as an atheist I felt like I was being asked to study the works of Hans Christian Anderson and believe that they were all true! Thankfully RE teaching has improved a great deal right now to include all major faiths and in the interest of inclusion I would love to see atheism, humanism, animism, adventism, bahaiísm, also included in there. RE as a subject may have been devised as a way of getting the church to keep its nose out of state schools affairs but these days it should be used as a tool for inclusion and also for discussing ethics and morality. Ignorance of other faiths creates tensions and that includes atheism. A typical converstation with an East African begins 'So where do you pray?', to which my standard reply was that ' I do not believe in God but that does not make me a bad person'. They were still highly suspicious! RE should not be about indoctrination into any one faith, or indeed into any faith at all. As an atheist I have beliefs and a faith of sorts, some of them very similar to those held by Christians but I do not have to believe in a Christian God to uphold them. Students should be given the option of learing about all beliefs not just those with a figurehead and funding. Rowena

I live in New Bruswick in Canada. People here consider themselves to be Canadian, but the French speakers also consider themselves to be Acadian, or even French. As an English woman I consider myself to be neither Canadian nor Acadian but am doing my best to learn the French language partly for survival but mainly in a desire to be included. Were I to fly the Union Jack outside the house it would be seen as an overtly anti-french symbol, however the Acadian flag is seen throughout the province and it does not in any way offend me, in fact I see it as an important symbol of the Acadians cultural identity. The historical background of the oppression of the French by the English does however play a huge part here, though I do sometimes feel the need to point out that this all took place in 1755! The majority of the Acadians have never been to France. The french they speak is not the French spoken in France and their families arrived over here hundreads of years ago, but they persist in speaking French even though they all also speak English. They are also mainly entirely Catholic as a result of their French 'backgrounds'. One might argue in that case that if they want to really be Canadian they should stop being Acadian. I for one, however would think that a terrible loss. Canada is full of foreigners. The only people truely from here are the First Nations and the rest of us at some point arrived from outside. Each of these new arrivals have done their best to retain their cultural identity and I believe this makes for a more interesting society. A few weeks ago I was having dinner with a Swiss/Canadian friend who insisted that hijabs should not be worn in French schools and that the Muslims should try to intergrate more. This came from a man wearing Swiss clothes eating swiss food and listening to Swiss music! I listen to British music as well as Canadian and after 4 years in Rwanda, African too. I try to embrace as much as possible of each of the cultures that I have lived in but at the core I am British and will remain so until the day I die irrespective of where I live. I was born in England to British parents so how could I be anything else. My husband listens to Acadian music, speaks French at work and to his friends and each year we attends the 15 Aout - the ' celebration' of the deportation of the French by the British in 1755. We are each of us a product of where we came from and where we are now and that is something that should be embraced both in and outside of school. What we need is genuine cultural understanding, from all sides, and not only aqcceptance but joy that we live in such a diverse world. New Brunswick is a more interesting place as a result of its French and English roots. France is a more interesting place as a result of immigration of other french speaking people. Do not forget that most of the people arriving in France speak French because of living in past French territories. I do not suppose that the French, British, Belgians and Portuguese made any effort to assimilate themselves with the Rwandans, Angolans, Ugandans and North Africans. If anything they forced their religions, languages, systems of government and morality onto the people of the countries they inhabited. For as long as I lived in Britain I did not feel very british, but after 4 years in Rwanda I had unions jacks in the living room and a picture of the Queen above the mantleplace. In a foreign place you feel more of a sense of identity with your 'own people' even when working and socialising with your African colleagues. When I saw a white face and heard a british accent it filled me with joy that here was a person that I would be able to have a converstaion with that would be relaxed and easy because culturallly we would be very similar, I imagine a large number of immigrants to Europe feel the same way. Immigrants contribute a great deal to the communities they live and work in whilst having to cope with living in a culture very different to their own. On my return from Africa I smiled at strangers, talked to people on the train and touched people much more. It must be awful arriving in Europe and finding people so very cold and unaccepting and being so far away from everything you know. Obviously you cling to your own identity. Had I been told that in Rwanda I could not be British any more I would have curled up and died. Having been witness to the atrocities commited by Catholics, Protestants and Muslims alike in Rwanda, and heard stories of the wrongs done by Catholic priests in New BRuswick all within the last 50 years, I am not inclined to play the good religion bad religion game. Neither do I think the world would be better off without religion. And that comes from an Atheist! Rowena

I totally agree with you that those social skills are lacking in a lot of young people and that you manage to encourage them through your science teaching is admirable.... however one could teach them history, english or David Beckham studies and have the same results. Actually my current favourite study topic at an American university is 'Weapons of Mass Destruction Avoidance' but I digress... So, what is special about science appart from the fact that its the one subject that I'm qualifed to teach?! Well, supposedly its about experimentation, research, trial and error, having ideas, putting existing ideas to the test, all the things that we are supposed to be doing when in fact we're ploughing through the syllabus. If we are going to insist on teaching them things that they are never going to use again and simply helping them to jump through examination hoops then why not make those hoops about hits of the 70's, the history of fashion or the trials and tribulations of Manchester United. At least that way they might win a few pub quizes as well as being polite, tidy and perpetually on time. If science as it stands is 'useless' to the majority and all we are doing for the genuinely scientifically inclined is helping them to get into college then why teach them science at all....... And so we come full circle, Rowena

OK, I see we have totally different views on that one, but what about social resposibilty? Are we not socially resposible? What about life skills? And what exactly is wrong with a spot of anarchism when the alternative is blindly following the leader?

QUOTE I should add that I see the merit in all points of view and that individual circumstances clearly dictate ones opinions and methods and that under no circumstances am I denigrating other points of view. However I would argue that whilst my circumstances hightened my awareness of my social responsibilities, they are in fact irrelevant and that students in America would benefit from learning to questions authority as much as students in Rwanda as the psychological tests I mentioned argue. We spend too much time as Science teacher teaching 'Facts' which the students take to be true and never question. This causes problems when a a ) we make a mistake (none of us are infallable) b ) The scientific community makes a mistake. Thanks goodness there were people out there who didn't accept that the world was flat, that the sun orbitted the Earth or that objects with a greater density fall to earth more rapidly that objects of a lesser density. Cutting edge scientists are anarchists who break the mold instead of conforming to it. As for all those poor students who don't wish to become scientists but still have to study science, a huge number of life skills can be gained through the subject. In the same way that studying history GCSE is less about quoting the dates of the world wars and more about understanding about Bias, primary and secondary sources and learning from experience, science could be about questioning and seeking answers to questions, thinking about our results and their accuracy, thinking about bias....and thinking! Who needs to memorise Avagadros constant when they have it programmed into their computer? Rowena

Now I know that this is really going off at a tangent, but I believe it is relevant..... My baby sister is currently studying an NVQ in Travel and Tourism. Selected largely becasue it did not involve any testing - unlike me she did not derive much please from her test results at GCSE. A few weeks ago her class went on a Carribean Cruise for the experience. They spent a week on board the ship visiting 5 different islands. They had a mandate to compile enough information to complete a project about the Cruise Ship Industry on their return to Britain. Needless to say she had an amazing time, caught a brief glimpse of life on five different cultural diverse islands, learnt about the day to day life of staff of a cruise ship and established exactly which job was going to be hers in 2 years time! A couple of days after their return one of the parents announced that she would be writing a letter of complaint to the college about this pointless experience. Her major gripe? That they were not tested in any formal way about the knowledge and experienced gained during that week. Suggested questions. 1. Where is the stern of the ship a ) at the front b ) at the back c ) on the left d ) on the right 2. What are the dimentions of the ship in metric a ) 50m by 200m b ) 250m by 400m OK, so you get the idea. It demonstrated to me how utterly embedded in our culture testing has become. It isn't enough to complete a project, they must also be able to quote parrot fashion information which they could easily look up in a book or on the internet, provided that they have the right life skills...which sadly so many kids lack having got used to the information being delivered directly to their desks. This was an exercise in initiative. They had the choice of producing something amazing or something less so. Imagine that you run a travel agency. Would you rather employ someone who can demonstrate initiative, or someone who can quote the gross national product of the Dominican Republic?

I suppose that as a teacher working in a country post genocide I found it difficult to limit my role to that of purely someone who helped her students to pass exams. There are several reasons for this which I will try to list briefly. 1. Firstly I refused to allow my students to blindly accept what others told them. This is the standard format of science teaching in most countries. The teacher, as a leader, tells the students what to think. The students, as followers, accept it without question. Any student who does question the teachers judgement is deemed a trouble maker. Now if you consider the example of Rwanda, the people were followers who did, unquestioningly, what the leaders told them to do. This passive nature resulted in the death of 800,000 people. This is not something that could happen only in Rwanda. It can happen in any country where people do not question authority, even the United States. Psychological tests have been carried out to establish that people will inflict huge amounts of pain on a fellow human beings if instructed to do so by an authority figure. As teachers we do not simply impart information. We have a social role to play as well and I'm not prepared to overlook that for the sake of exam grades. 2. Secondly, the majority of my students would not get into university anyway. Thier english was poor, the exams were full of errors and the examiners did not know the answers anyway - I know I worked with them for 3 years- and most importantly bribes were more important than knowledge. How can I dedicate my life to helping students to pass exams that they will fail anyway? 3. Thirdly, and this is a bit of a combination of 1 and 2, we spend the vast majority of our young lives in educational establishments. This is the period of our lives when we should be learning how to be well balanced caring socially conscious members of a positive society. Parents play a huge role in socialising their children but in this day and age when kids get home to an empty house and watch TV the role of teachers 'in loco parentis' becomes more urgent. We can teach the kids exam technique, or we can help them gain important life skills through studying science, or we can do both. In Rwanda I tried to do both, but I dreamt of a day that I could throw the exams out of the window and focus on helping the kids grow up strong and confident and able to cope with post academic life. 4. Fourthly exams stigmatise and put emphasis on skills which are not important out side of the classroom. Will the 'brightest' kid always be the most successful in life? Will they have a great career and a happy homelife? Why should some kids live with being labelled 'geeks'and 'spods' whilst other get labelled 'stupid'. Take the exams away and these roles don't get reinforced so strongly on such a regular basis. 5. When I started writing tests in Rwanda I tried to make them probing of the students understanding of the subjects. They all failed miserably and I spent literally days marking their depressingly awful work. As time wore on my exams became less probing and more styalised. I spent less time marking, my log book was full of data and the students marks improved. I wasn't dumbing down the content, just using more multiple choice and short answer questions. Were the students getting smarter? Well, on the one hand it may have been a better idea to use this kind of testing with students studying in their second language. Just becasue you cannot express something clearly in the examiners language of choice does not mean that you do not know or understand the answer. However, I would suggest that were I to set the essay style questions in Kinyarwanda they would still have flunked their exams. It is far easier to tick a box containing a word that you recognise, than to actually explain something in your own words. But it does make it so much easier to mark. 6. Finally, I have to agree that as teachers we do often have this deep seated belief in the importance of examinations becauce we were so successful when we took them. They made us feel good about ourselves (though possibly rather embarrassed and it certainly causes problems socially if your friends did not perform so well), they got us where we are today. However, we forget that there are huge swathes of society for whom exams are a complete nightmare and that even though they are really nice people with great social skills and common sense who have the capacity to go far in life, they will still feel stupid when they get only 50%. And its the 50% that counts because how many students actually bother to check back through their exams to see what they did and did not understand? Testing is a useful learning tool, but take away the grades, the percentages, the letters or they become more important than the knowledge itself. I do believe that we are here not only to support a future generation fo Einsteins, but also a future generation of caring and compassionate human beings, of all abilities, who aren't obsessed with who 'did better than' who.

[....errrrr, when taking French tests and the driving theory exam! It sounds like you are saying that your life is not real!!!!????] Well, bearing in mind I've been out of formal education for 5 years and these are the first tests I've taken I'd say that they were pretty 'abnormal' in the general scheme of things. I don't take mulptiple choice tests to get a bank account, physically drive my car, get a mortgage, socialise, apply for jobs, perform internet research or compile databases (my current job), teach, the list is endless. In fact the only times I have taken tests seem to have been an exercise in trying to look official. I had the misfortune of having to take combined science GCSE at school during which we were tested once every 6 weeks. Standardised government testing. I passed every test with close to 100% and yet when i started to study science 'A' levels I realised that I could remember very little and understood next to nothing. Maybe I'm a strange isolated case but I doubt it. The chunking and checking approach to teaching science does produce excellent exam results and lots of data but I don't think it produces 'scientists'. Learn, test, forget, learn, test, forget etc, etc And thanks for the language testing references. It'lll be interesting to see how well I perform. Hopefully as badly as I deserve to...although on a BBC site I tried out recently I was told I was 'A' level standard...this as the result of , you've guess it, a multiple choice test!

I know this isn't science but I think this supports my views on testing. In the past week I have passed two exams. The first was a French vocabulary test. The second was a driving theory test. I passed both with flying colours - so hurrah to that! However, In my french class I am one of the weakest students. My spoken French is attrocious and my listening even worse. The two 'strongest' students both flunked a test of spelling and short term factual recall but can have a reasonable conversation. My short term recall is excellent and as a teacher I put into practise all the methods I could think of for cramming for this test. they worked. However a week later I have forgotten most of it. My driving theory test was multiple choice and matching signs. Both had obviously been devised for ease of marking - an important consideration. Neither actually tested my abilities as a driver. The multiple choice test tested my ability to spot silly answers and ignore them and to guess well. The Matching exercise was a joke. There wasn't a single thng in it that could in any way catch me out or test my genuine understanding of what the signs meant. In mean, what is a Ú'turn? What shouldn't I do one? Where would you find one? What should you do if there is a moose right in front of your car and how should you avoid getting a broken neck? It was guess work and good exam technique that got me through both not the ability to drive well or to speak or write french. I saw the same thing happening in Science exams every day and realistically, when do we in real ife need good exam technique?!? R

I've already made comment on this (in the section on international schools) but John seems to think my views might provoke debate so here goes I spent 3 1/2 years working in Rwanda as a Chemistry teacher before returning to complete a Science PGCE in Oxford. In short I was horrified to discover that I had so many misconceptions of science teaching and students in the UK. In fact I wrote and appologised to my exstudents for suggesting that students in the UK were in any way harder working or better scientists than they were. In fact, in general, I found the situation in Britain to be worse. In Rwanda the teachers were largely unqualified and inexperienced. Their English was often not exactly top notch either. The facilities were limited (understatement of the century) and the students were used to either copying down notes from the black board or from the teacher dictating from a book. I inevitably had to do a fair bit of that myself just to ensure that they had the material to learn from, but I dedicated a large part of my time to teaching practical work, thinking skills and self teaching exercises. They hated this of course because it was relatively strenuous and I was far more likely to notice a student sleeping if I was facilitating a practical than scribbling on a board. They slowly came round though and although I felt that i spent an inordinate amount of time just giving them facts they came away from the classes a little more able to think for themselves. A skill particularly useful in a country where hundreds of thousands of people were co-erced to commit genocide simply becasue no-one ever questioned authority. I came back to England expecting students to be free thinking lively individuals who appreciated their fine teachers and great facilities. I found GCSE students who would rather copy from a text book than perform a practical because a) text book work required less effort and b ) practicals always gave the 'wrong' results. In a test centred society you need to acquire knowledge in the most energy effective way possible and it is far easier to gain the information from a book or a teacher than it is to contemplate a 'failed'experiment. I would argue that the failure of an experiment would teach them for more about the nature of science than any number of successful ones but they aren't interested in anything that doesn't bear a direct relationship to the marks they get from their multiple choice tests...and frankly who would blame them. 12 years ago I felt the same way and since then nothing has changed. I was inclined to blame their apparent lethargy on the fact that they are teenagers, but take the same group of teenagers and place them into an English or Geography class and suddenly you've got a group of active interested individuals. Yes, my teaching could well have been to blame, particularly beraing in mind that I was less than enthusiastic about the prospect of teaching the blast furnace and extraction of Aluminium from Bauxite. However having observed many other classes the teachers who were popular were not the ones who waxed lyrical about scientific discoveries and the history of science, but the ones who made learning the facts required to pass the tests easy. I ran a series of KS3 lessons on the periodic table where we made predictions based on trends, modelled and experimented. At theend of the two weeks a group of girls approached me about the fact thet I wasn't teaching them properly becasue I wasn't telling them the answers. When I suggested that there weren't any 'answers' one of them nearly burst into tears. This was a top set class. So the point of all of this waffle is that I believe that we should pretty much scrap science teaching as it stands up til ages 15 and teach them thinking skills, philosophy and the history of science. And ban bloody multiple choice tests! Right now I don't think that we are actually teaching them science in science classes, just factual recal that happens to relate to science. I learnt more about cause and effect, predictions, planning and learning from experience from studying GCSE history than I did from GCSE science and the curriculum has not undergone an amazing transformation since then. There are of course teachers out there who aginst the odds are managing to teach some genuine science in between all the waffle and the cramming but this should be rule and not the exception. If we are genuinely trying to train the scinetists of the future then lets teach the kids some science, or even better lets facilitate their own learning of it. However, if we just want to fill in some time 3 days a week lets carry on the way we are but lets call it SIC (scientific information cramming). Scientists are by nature people who have thoughts which are contrary to norm and yet we are teaching kids to expect the world to follow simple rules and indeed not to question them. This is hardly going to nurture a generation of Einsteins! I'll end there before you fall asleep Rowena

From China to Sweden and now Rwanda..... Well, where to begin? I worked in Rwanda as a Chemistry 'A' level teacher (ages 16 to 18) for nearly 4 years under the auspices of VSO (voluntary service overseas). In this context 'voluntary' doesn't mean that we worked for free but that we were paid a salary camparable to that of a local teacher, or if that was not considered enough to live on, we had an additional suppliment. In Rwanda we were paid 200 pounds a month in local currency (it is worth less now due to devaluation of the Rwandan Franc) which I considered to me more than enough when you have your rent and electricity bills paid for you, you don't pay taxes and don't possess a telephone or car. Living in a tiny village 200 pounds can buy you an awful lot of rice and beans! I wont bother to state the obvious. It isn't easy working as a Chemistry teacher in a school with intermittent water, no gas and virtually no chemicals but its even less easy working in a country where every waking moment you are called 'Muzungo' (foreigner) from the day you arrive to the day you leave and no ammount of insisting that in fact you are called Rowena changes that. Rwanda, post Genocide, is still a tremendously racist country by our standards. Try explaining to a Rwandese student that you can actually be arrested for calling a black person black in England and the response will be hysterical laughter. I was white so they felt the need to point it out, EVERY DAY, just in case I'd forgotten, which without the presence of a mirror in my home I occassionally did! Actually it wasn't so bad, the students stopped saying it to my face fairly quickly as did my 'friends' in town, but I knew that the minute my back was turned that changed and it still hurt when people I considered to be good freinds introduced me to their friends as 'Muzungo'. When you are living in a country so very different to you own its hard to cling onto a sense of self and when they try to take your name away from you it is just too much. However, there was a certain positive side to the 'racism'. I was white and therefore even though I was female I was given a certain status that allowed me to walk into businesses and government offices and be given audience with the boss. Crazy really seeing as when I arrived I was only 23! Once you accept that you are different and that they will always consider you to be different you have a choice of either going crazy or making the most of the positive aspects and this I did. The result was work experience for the kids, equipment exchange schemes between schools, conferences and an invitation to join the national exam board because as a white person I was clearly 'serious'! None of these things could have been acheived by a Rwandan teacher due to social barriers, and certainly not a female one. You may think I'm making a bit of a deal of this one but speak to any current or returned VSO Rwanda volunteer and the Muzungo issue will be a key one. It was however probably the most amazing experience of my life. In difficult circumstances I was still able to acheive things which I could never have done in England due to our own stratification. If I got frustrated with the state of the library I could go in there and demand that the librarian and whichever poor students were in there helped me to tidy it. If I didn't have the chemicals I needed in the lab I could apply for a grant or fundraise and order them in from Uganda. I trained a lab technician who worked almost entirely for me simply because the other teachers didn't believe that it was necessary to do practical work. Imagine the shock of going back to England to complete a PGCE and being bottom of the social pile again. I completed my PGCE at Oxford where I had the most amazing tutors and worked in reasonable comprehensive schools, but I still found the lack of control almost too much to bear.... and of course the kids were shocking by comparison. Not because of thier relative lack of 'discipline' but becasue of their utter lethargy. Its difficult having worked in a country where the students are desperate to get a decent secondary education to move to a country where all children are offered one for free and they don't care! Had I remained in the UK I may well have completed my NQT year but I would much have prefered to work in an alternative school. That is why since moving to Canada I have tried to involve myself as much as possible in alternative education. I strongly believe that there are some amazing teachers out there who can inspire students despite outdated curriculae and impossible time contraints, but I'm not one of them. When a students asks me what the point of studying the extraction of Aluminium from Bauxite is, I can't give them an answer becasue I too feel that its utterly pointless. Science should be about teaching students how to think like scientists but its become so test centred that its simply about cramming facts into their already overburndened brains and if a fact is useless then frankly what is the point?! In Rwanda there was a cuture of cramming and repetition to gain knowledge. I did my best to break my students of that habit with some measure of success, sadly the system of science teaching in England is becomming no better than that of Rwanda and is in fact worse becasue we should know better. We've lost track of the fact that its about people and not statistics. Rowena Hopkins

This all sounds very interesting, though I don't think I'm getting completely to grips with the concept due to the language issue. I have a few more questions which I would really appreciate your answering. Firstly, as part of the students education do they learn about moral/ social issues. The kind of things that might normally be discussed in a social studies class. Would they need to specifically ask about this in order to 'study'it. Secondly, Is the plan to keep the students in same age classes or to mix the ages groups? Thridly is the goal to help students become more able to cope with the work place or are you aiming to make your students generally more well rounded human beings. What is the ethos behind your college? Thanks, I look forward to reading your replies, Rowena Hopkins

I'm not trying to ask you to answer the question, though feel free if you feel the need, . I'm actually helping to build a database for potential speakers and atendees at a conference to be held in Lucknow, India in November of this year. The goal of the conference is "to completely review and revise the goals of education in the 21st century as distinct from its 19th century goals, and to discuss ways to make education more meaningful for our children and youth. The fundamental questions, "what education is for," will be discussed during the event." I have been asked to find Specialists in teaching (all kinds of subjects) Specialists in Minority Education Specialists in Curriculum Development Specialists in Pshychology/Education Specialists in Education Policy Specialists in Economics, International Politics Governmental Educational Organizations Educational Non-profit organizations Educational NGOs International Educational Organizations Which of course makes it a very long list, so I'm looking for people/organisations who are into more alternative/holistic/Values/ Global/Peace/Environmental education or even common old citizenship and who can also be classified somewhere above. Any suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated especially people from (Non UK) Europe as I've just lost my European researcher. Speakers at the conference will get free bed and board but do need to get themselves there. other guests will need to make a smal contribution to the cost of food and accomodation . If you also want to put yourself on the list then I'll happily add you, thought I'd like to get a bit of information about you first! Thanks for your help:) Rowena

Hi! My name is Rowena Hopkins, I'm a British Science techer but I'm living in Canada right now and I've spent most of my teaching career working for VSO in Rwanda. International enough for you?!? I am currently working voluntarily as the co-ordinator of an education climate change monitoring program called PlantWatch. National and local URLs below. http://www.naturewatch.ca/english/plantwatch/ http://ca.geocities.com/nbwilderness/index.htm Rowena