guardian | Many bullying experts rightly focus on the plight of vulnerable
children targeted by bullies but, before now, I wonder how many of us
considered being intelligent or talented a vulnerability? More than 90%
of the 1,000 11-16 year-olds we recently surveyed said they had been
bullied or seen someone bullied for being too intelligent or talented.
Worryingly, this means our children and young people are shying away
from academic achievement for fear of victimisation.
Almost half
of children and young people (49.5%) have played down a talent for fear
of being bullied, rising to 53% among girls. One in 10 (12%) said they
had played down their ability in science and almost one in five girls
(18.8%) and more than one in 10 boys (11.4%) are deliberately
underachieving in maths – to evade bullying.
The government has
recently pledged funding to develop a new maths course for sixth-formers
based on the assumption that current maths courses are inaccessible to
youngsters who can't see the relevance of the subject to their lives.
What our findings are telling us though, is that there is more at play
here. And we want government to take note.
What used to be left in
the playground is now following children home, through social media.
And what may have been historically viewed as a short-term problem,
which many of us endured during our school days – but not necessarily
beyond – can have a dramatic impact on our young people's futures. Fist tap Dale.
4 comments:
Too many teachers behave as though a student is supposed to learn things to please the teacher or prove to the teacher that they are smart rather than learn things to satisfy their own curiosity. Math is usually too disconnected from reality. Reading science fiction in grade school helped me connect it with things I did not see in the hood.
But these tablet computers could help with this problem because kids could work independently and other students would not need to know how well they are doing.
How much does teacher behavior encourage bullying? Kids don't like being shown up by other kids.
The tablets WILL BE a huge benefit if they support a well developed collection of eTexts, eTextbooks, textual interactivity, supplementary curriculum and study aids, and synchronous and asynchronous distance learning. (classes streamed live and online study systems for subjects)
The portability, ease of use, and backlit amoled, means that the kids can connect and consume wherever/whenever, including in bed and in the bathroom, where to the best of my recollection, ALL the critical reading takes place anyway....,
Bottomline, caught between self-interested teachers schlepping that 19th century model of pedagogy, whilst every single kid in the developed world is a fully immersed digital native, and, caught between knuckleheads receiving no parental investment at home, kids who want to do well are seriously surrounded on all sides in school settings that are not closely managed to perform as if you had your own kids enrolled and dependent upon those settings.
FFT: Leveraging Technology to Enhance Teaching for the 21st Century
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