Wales, no whales

French House, sorry for being the cruft on the blog, it’s a habit… (although seriously y’all should blog too… (saying that’s also a habit…))

I’ve been in the UK over a week now. My mom flew in with me, and we spent a few days in the Cotswolds, which is a lovely bit of England full of villages with names like “Stow-on-the-Wold” and “Bourton-on-the-Water” and “Mourton-in-Marsh”, sheep, and clotted cream. We had some hearty long walks through fields with cheese picnics, a few gin-and-tonic permutations, and an exciting day trip to Oxford - the museums are beautiful buildings with seriously impressive collections.

Now I’ve been in Wales for four days. I haven’t seen much of the countryside yet, unfortunately, and the small parts of Cardiff that I’ve seen haven’t been that extraordinary except for the giant castle in park. My mom did spend a day walking around Cardiff before she left and said that it’s a completely crazy city, but apparently in such an unexplainable way that I still have no idea what she meant. I’m staying in a suburb with my school’s math department head, who’s been very welcoming in a hands-off sort of way.

Mostly I’ve been occupied with the school I’m at, and that’s been quite a fascinating experience. It's an urban school with a diverse, largely Muslim, relatively poor student body. My first impression wasn’t great; the building is covered in peeling paint and smells like bleach, and I was seeing it at 6:55 AM, which probably didn’t add any charity to my viewpoint. I’ve learned since that the per-student budget is very low, less than $6,000. And yet all the adults I’ve spoken to - principal, program organizer, the Welsh Education Director that I sat next to at a dinner - after throwing around the words “challenging population”, have talked about the renown that the school has achieved for a remarkable transformation in the last few years. 

This made me suspicious. I’ve been thinking a lot about score inflation since my educational statistics class last semester, and the story of achieving fame for a rapid transformation with an underprivileged population sounds very similar to a lot of the American cheating scandals. In an interesting difference from American educational testing, where schools care most about standardized tests and students care most about SATs and grades, the targets here are more or less aligned: maximize students’ grades, which are determined by a government-mandated combination of standardized exams and projects. So there are very strong incentives for gaming the system, and I haven’t been surprised to see some evidence of sketchy behavior. The computer science teacher keeps doing a shifty-eyed dance of “Well, I’m not technically supposed to help them with their projects, but I figure as long as I don’t touch their keyboard it’s all right”. The music teacher hires her hairdresser to pretend to be an examiner to give the kids some pressure to perform. The school very intensively targets support to students just below a cut-off that the government uses to determine effectiveness, exactly as happens in many American schools. Many lessons are centered on working through practice exams, teaching concepts as they come up. Students take time out of classes to sit mandatory full-length mock exams. And the teachers often assign their students' grades for the government-mandated final projects; with so much at stake, for both the school and the students’ university admissions, I imagine it’s hard to stay objective.

The school also claims to be heavily data-focused, and that seems to be quite true. Students are sorted by math ability into seven or eight different levels. Kids take formal reading assessments frequently; those with difficulties are placed in special support programs, and the number of library books they check out is tracked and discussed at staff meetings. There are charts everywhere showing students’ photos along with their exam performance or other metrics, even in student-accessible spaces - I feel pretty bad for the kids who are in the “High effort, low progress” box in the hallway. I’ve met several staff members whose main job is data analysis. Bizarrely, you pay for the canteen by scanning your thumbprint. It all feels a little invasive, but I have to say that is seems effect in not letting kids drop through the cracks and get forgotten, as I’ve seen happen at my Cambridge school. Every teacher and administrator knows which students are particularly struggling or succeeding.

And I’ve actually been really impressed with most of the teaching and learning I’ve observed. The kids are majorly loud and burst out chatting as soon as a teacher turns around, though a “three… two… one…” usually buys a few seconds of peace. Yet much of the time, what they’re talking about is the material they’re covering. They’re curious and invested in learning, and the math material in particular seems fairly advanced - for example, I observed a class the other day where fourteen-year-olds were studying sampling techniques, which I didn’t encounter until AP Stats. I was particularly amused by a science class in which the thirteen-year-olds were trying to figure out how to set up the scales in their graphs. They were having a hilarious amount of difficulty in choosing the gradations, but they were really thinking about it rather than giving up. My favorite class that I’ve sat in on has been a group of thirteen-year-olds that were learning about symmetry. The teacher convinced them that she’d been a traveling magician on a motorbike with a caravan who charged fifty pounds for her famous paper-folding show; they were like 70% sold… “Miss, did you have a stage name?”. The most depressing class has been a group of fourteen-year-olds with severe disabilities or behavioral problems. It was so clear that the teacher - who was wonderful with the top-level group I’d seen earlier, and who ran the “crowd control” quite well even here - didn’t have the resources or specialized training to teach effectively to that group, that the kids had completely different challenges and levels of understanding, and that many of them were getting nothing whatsoever out of the class.

Lunchtime in the math staff room (closet/“cupboard”, actually) is a riot. In the first three days, I learned my colleagues’ preferred methods for murdering a classroom of children, breakup-by-Whatsapp drama, childbirth vaginal tearing experiences, and quite detailed sexual preferences. The Minister of Education remarked that the Welsh are congenitally nosy, and that seems rather born out. I’m expanding my vocabulary, too - why don’t we have “lush” and “brill” in the U.S.?

Generally I’m quite enjoying it here, and I feel like I’m getting opportunities to see all corners of a school in a pretty unique sort of way; it’s really making me want to take that education policy class at Harvard next semester. The lessons I’ve taught so far seem to have gone over decently, I have a bunch of exciting ones coming up, and I think I’m of sufficient interest to the kids (“Miss, do you know Donald Trump?”) that I might have a real impact. The education ministry is sending in people with cameras to make a mini-documentary about me and the other GTL instructors, which I am not happy about, but que sera...