Me! Me! Me!

"Some respond better when taught in smaller groups"

You think? How many times has this been said? I think it would be fair to say that smaller classes solve pretty much every educational problem that exists.

As for 'hands up' or picking it depends completly on the question if you're asking a throwaway question it's simply quicker to pick someone who is on the same wavelength instead of having the lesson jarred by someone who you have to coax the answer out of.

What the article doesn't metion is that a child who is 'invisible' in one subject can be completly confident in another subject and I love the idea that some homework is too difficult for the parents to help them with begging the question "Why are you teaching them stuff that is obviously nowhere near essential to life in the outside world.?"

I think schools, especially primary schools, teach a lot of useless knowledge and then elevate this knowledge to magestic heights through the use of tests. It becomes a simple pavlovian mechanism where the examiner asks a question in a certain way and the child is expected to answer in a certain way. To give an example, when I did my SATs there was a question that had to be answered in this way

"As A increases B also increases and as A decreases B also decreases"

It was a two mark question and the only way to get both marks was to state the connection between the two and then state the negative of the connection you had just made, this isn't educational in any way and it is one example where a parent wouldn't be able to help a child if they were revising if the child asked "Mommy, how do I get the two marks here?" and the parents weren't 'in the know', as it were, then there's no obvious reason why the question was being given two marks.

I think it is a good idea to teach primary school children mainly pragmatic things. And the extra maths, art and science that you teach them on top of this shouldn't be so complicated, or at least, so obfuscated, that even the parents don't understand it. Secondary school is the place for purely academic exercises which actually tend to be more boring and less inspiring then learning things that can bew applied.

As for my reason for posting here and not on the BBC website. I have to give the rather suck uppy answer that
you seem to be on the same wavelength as me and I like discussing things with you.