Saturday, April 05, 2008

Superb ...

The Dumb One rounds up the annual NUT Conference.

On the proposed abolition of private schools :

"Next up, we had the incoming union president claiming the best way to unscrew state education was to nobble private schools - presumably the same way you can improve your cooking by shooting Jamie Oliver."


On the anti-military, pro-sex-ed campaigners :

"Apparently, it's no to 'Saving Private Ryan', but yes to 'Shaving Ryan's Privates'"



Read the whole thing.

I took a quick look to see if there were any blogging NUT activists.

Classroom Teacher found the president's address "inspiring with its emphasis on the class basis of British society" and noted proudly that "The WSTA delegation had a gender balance of 7:2 which reflects the gender balance of the union."

Tragically they failed to mention the delegation's varied sexualities, disabilities and ethnicities - but Rome wasn't built in a day. And if it was, it was only because of a complete disregard for the European Working Time Directive and the relevant Health and Safety laws.


(You may find a suspicious similarity between the blogs of Classroom Teacher, West Sussex Teachers Association and Socialist Teachers.)

Patrick Nash "is Chief Executive of Teacher Support Network", which "now has around 100,000 interactions with teachers every year". (According to Extreme Tracking, this blog has over 300,000 'interactions' with readers every year).

Mr Nash has made a remarkable discovery.

"I am strongly of the opinion one of the biggest mistakes of Labour’s education policy over the last ten years has been the obsession with testing. Not only does this discriminate against many children who are not academically inclined ... "

Yay ! He broke the code ! Mr Nash, ten years or more of teaching, has realised that tests discriminate ! I just hope it doesn't take him another ten years to work out that's what tests are supposed to do.

Let's turn to the blog of the NUT fraction (yes, really) of the Alliance For Worker's Liberty.

"Comprehensive Education, despite its overwhelming popularity amongst voters ..." Next !

My mother taught reception for forty years. I'm a school governor. I'm not wired to despise the profession. In fact, blogs by individual teachers, like Shuggy or To Miss With Love, are invariably fascinating reads by recognisably human beings. Why does every blog claiming to speak for more than one teacher sound like it was written by Howard Kirk ?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Laban blogs the NUT conference and Steve Sinnott keels over with a heart attack! Spooky!
Was old Steve online at the time? Did his outrage meter go off the scale?
In the words of Laban "Superb..."

Pip pip

Anonymous said...

If Britain is to have any kind of future, and I pray to God it is not too late - it is a matter of the utmost urgency that the education of our children is taken out of the hands of these nutcases.

Ross said...

"Laban blogs the NUT conference and Steve Sinnott keels over with a heart attack! Spooky!"

Perhaps he should blog about Ken Livingstone, Gillian McKeith and Piers Morgan soon, just to see whether he does have new found powers.

Or maybe one of Laban's followers didn't realise that we are only supposed to burn down the buildings of the targets he highlights not fake cardiac arrests.

DJ said...

But didn't we all enjoy Classroom Teacher comparing the NUT president to Stalin - and meaning it as a compliment.

Truly, you cannot make it up.

Anonymous said...

"Not only does this discriminate against many children who are not academically inclined ... "

Funny enough I was sharing my opinion on a related matter on CIF earlier:

http://tinyurl.com/5c5vjo

Does anyone care to comment on my eeevil suggestions?